Jung acknowledged his own debt to his patients most of them women.
In Barbara Hannah’s biographical memoir of Jung she said, One of Jung’s most striking characteristics was the fact that he never asked anything of people that he had not first asked of himself, and he told me once, when he was nearly sixty, that he could say his whole life had been spent in eliminating his own childishness.
He added ruefully, with that uncompromising honesty that was so convincing, that he was afraid there was still quite a bit left.
Jung has publicly acknowledged his own debt to his patients most of them women.
From my encounters with patients and with the psychic phenomena which they have paraded before me in an endless stream of images,
I have learned an enormous amount – not just knowledge, but above all insight into my own nature.
And not the least of what I have learned has come from my errors and defeats.
I have had mainly women patients, who often entered into the work with extraordinary conscientiousness understanding, and intelligence.\
It was essentially because of them that I was able to strike out on new paths in therapy.
Former patient Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant has left this account of a consultation:
Doctor Jung’s patients must take a little steamboat at a landing haunted by gulls and wild ducks, and then walk a good ten minutes to a yellow country house standing well within walls and gardens. . . . They must pull a shining brass bell and. . . meet the inspection of a group of skirmishing dogs.
Yoggi, the Doctor’s special intimate, always manages to slide into the upstairs study behind the visitor. . . . I noticed at my first interview that lung’s hand – the sensitive, strong hand, with the Gnostic ring – reached down now and then to the shaggy back. And it came to me that this touch with an instinctive hairy being was somehow the riposte to the psychologist’s uncanny intuition, his probing mind, his acute awareness a reassurance to the visitor and to himself. For what is one to think of a doctor who, in a hunch of the shoulders, a half-glance, a witty phrase casually spoken “You are like an egg without a shell” – can say enough to keep one guessing for a week?
It was comfortable too, that as he discussed intimate problems, his face now very sober and concerned, Jung tramped the floor, fed the fire, lighted a meditative pipe: common clay and spirit were all one.
When he sat stiffly in his chair for a moment and gulped down his tea, he suddenly turned into a German professor. But when his eyes began to twinkle merrily behind their gold-rimmed spectacles when he moved about again, his driving energy strongly held in leash, I thought of Theodore Roosevelt.
“You look more like a stockbroker than a prophet,” exclaimed a startled American who had expected to find the “mystic” of Freudian report.
The actual lung, solid and vital in his middle fifties, humorous and skeptical, refuses to stand on a pedestal or to take on any white-bearded Old Testament air.
“Yes,” he agrees with a young lady, “all men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit in that chair and lie till they get tired of lying. Then they begin to tell the truth.”
One leaves lung’s presence feeling enricheda nd appeased, as by contact with a pine tree in the forest, a life as much below ground as above.
And from Jane Wheelwright again:
I had come to Zurich, stuck in a kind of modern hopelessness and isolation and two-dimensional ordinariness that
seemed inevitable. Then, suddenly in Zurich, at last, therewas life – even though at times it was expressed in strange,
sometimes weird ways. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 77-80
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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