C.G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld
By 1909, at the age of 33, Jung was becoming as well known in Zürich as Freud in Vienna—largely due to his efforts on Freud’s behalf.
Unfortunately, he lacked the peace of mind to enjoy his increasing celebrity.
Writing, lecturing, treating patients and organizing a Freudian circle—in the previous year he had organized the first Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg —were taking a toll on his optimism.
The nature of the marital problems is not quite clear, but they were probably due to Jung’s susceptibility to the opposite sex. Women found him highly attractive, and a number of female patients fell in love with him.
This would probably not have bothered Emma if she could have been sure that Jung remained uninterested in them. But on a trip to Italy in 1907 he had become violently infatuated with an attractive Jewess—an experience he seems to have confided to Freud.
Another patient, a twenty-year-old Russian girl named Sabina Spielrein, wanted Jung to become the father of her child, and he seems to have been tempted by the idea. Fortunately, he ‘denied himself the pleasure’—as he put it in a letter to Freud—for the girl proved to be violently possessive.
Jung was treating her for an obsession with excreta, which led to excessive masturbation and an inability to have a normal sexual relationship; so it is possible that Jung’s inclination to make love to her may have been a disinterested desire to effect a cure.
At all events, he had reason to be glad he had resisted the temptation, for she went around Zürich claiming he was her lover; he was able to assure Sabina’s mother that he had never had sexual intercourse with her, and to ask her for help in putting an end to the gossip.
Jung was frank enough to admit to Freud that it was not entirely his patient’s fault, and that he was partly to blame.
In March 1909, Jung and Emma visited Freud in Vienna, and there occurred the famous incident of the ‘poltergeist in the bookcase’, Where ‘occult’ phenomena were concerned, Freud was a total sceptic.
By 1909, it had become apparent to serious students of psychical research that poltergeists—spirits that throw things—are usually associated with disturbed adolescents, and this had given rise to the theory that the poltergeist activities were somehow caused by the unconscious mind of the adolescent—a kind of ‘exteriorization’, so to speak, of fierce inner conflicts.
Jung believed in this theory, and called poltergeist activity ‘exteriorization phenomena’. As Freud and Jung were arguing about the reality of the paranormal, there was suddenly a loud explosion from the bookcase, which made both of them jump. ‘There!’, said Jung, ‘That is an
example of the exteriorization phenomenon.’ ‘Bosh!’ said Freud. ‘It is not’, said Jung, ‘And to prove my point, I now predict that in a moment there will be another.’ As he said this, there was a second explosion in the bookcase.
From a letter he subsequently wrote to Jung, it seems that Freud was more than half convinced. But afterwards, he heard such sounds several times, and concluded that there was some natural cause.
Jung was convinced that he caused it because he felt his diaphragm growing hot as he and Freud argued. Freudian commentators have always insisted that the noises were merely due to the wood of the bookcase drying out.
At this date is is impossible to know what really happened.
Jung’s professional life in Zürich was not going as smoothly as he might have wished. Although Bleuler now accepted most of Freud’s theories, he seems to have had quiet reservations about Jung, and twice passed him over when it came to an appointment to a teaching post. But there was compensation for the disappointment when Jung was invited to lecture at Clark University in America.
Jung’s phrasing in his autobiography has a touch of his ingenuousness: ‘I had been invited to lecture on the association experiment at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Independently,
Freud had also received an invitation … ’ In fact, Freud was asked first, and Jung was almost certainly asked because he was known as a Freudian, not for his independent researches.
In Bremen there occurred the event already referred to—Freud’s fainting fit as Jung discussed the peat bog corpses.
Freud’s suggestion that Jung had a ‘death wish’ towards him was always indignantly denied by Jung, who pointed out that he had exposed himself to ridicule and anger from his colleagues by openly supporting Freud. Yet it impossible to read Jung’s account of their relationship without feeling that Freud was not entirely mistaken.
He had come to represent for Jung a shallow positivism and materialism that was profoundly antipathetic to Jung’s temperament, so it would have been surprising if Jung had not harboured a deep-down conviction that the world would be a better place without Freud.
This journey to America was to be a watershed in their relationship, and corresponded with Jung’s discovery of his true independence—that is, of the foundations of his own depth psychology.
It began with a dream. Jung found himself in a strange house, whose upper storey was furnished in rococo style. He went down to the ground floor, and discovered that it was much older, with medieval furnishings and red brick floors. He found a heavy door that led into the cellar.
There he found himself in a vaulted room that dated from Roman times. In a stone slab in the floor, he discovered a ring; when he pulled on it, the slab rose, revealing narrow stairs. discovered a ring; when he pulled on it, the slab rose, revealing narrow stairs.
Descending these, Jung found himself in a low cave cut in the rock.
The floor was covered with dust, bones, and broken pottery; there were two ancient human skulls. At this point, he woke up.
Freud and Jung were passing the time on the boat analyzing one another’s dreams.
Freud was intrigued by the two skulls which, he insisted, indicated that Jung wanted two people dead. Jung felt this was nonsense, but finally, to satisfy Freud, he said that he thought the skulls were those of his wife and sister-in-law.
The fact that Jung decided he had to lie to Freud indicated a profound change in his attitude. It meant that he had decided that Freud was a fool whose stupidity had to be humoured.
This change, according to Jung, came about shortly before the dream episode, when Freud was relating one of his own dreams to Jung.
Jung asked for further personal details to enable him to interpret it. Freud gave him an odd look and replied: ‘But I cannot risk my authority.’ ‘At that moment’, says Jung, ‘he lost it altogether.’
For Jung, the interpretation of his own dream had nothing to do with a death wish. He saw it as a ‘structural diagram of the human psyche’. ‘It postulated something of an impersonal nature underlying the psyche.’
Now if we reconsider the dream, we can see that this interpretation was hardly justified. The simple and obvious interpretation is that it represented Jung’s own central aim in life—to penetrate deeper and deeper into the mind.
Some highly ambitious people have dreams of climbing—mountains or skyscrapers.
Jung was a typical romantic; he wanted to descend into some deep underworld of the spirit, away from the trivialities and confusions of the surface. (Alice’s dream of falling down a rabbit hole seems to symbolize the same thing.)
But why should a basement full of pottery and bones symbolize ‘an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche’? Why is a basement more impersonal than a Roman cellar or a rococo drawing-room? It is not. But it was important to Jung to believe that it was, for his deepest need was to escape this Freudian trap into which he had fallen.
He had become a disciple of Freud because Freud’s psychology struck him as deeper than that of Bleuler or Janet. Now he, in turn, needed to go deeper than Freud.
Dreams were always of immense importance to Jung. It had been the memory of a childhood dream that had played a central part in his conversion to Freudianism.
At the age of four, Jung had dreamed of being in a meadow and discovering a stone-lined hole in the ground. He had descended a stone stairway, pushed aside a curtain, and found himself in a room with flagstones and a golden throne in the centre.
On this throne was a huge object which he first thought to be a tree trunk, fifteen feet high. But it was covered with skin, and at the top was a rounded head, with a single eye gazing upward. He woke in a panic. It was a rounded head, with a single eye gazing upward. He woke in a panic. It was years later, he claims, that he realized it was a huge penis.
And now again, another dream of descending into the depths seemed to contain a different message: that the ultimate ‘basement’ of the human mind had some connection with man’s remote past.
This, says Jung, was his first inkling of the ‘collective a priori beneath the personal psyche’—what he later called the collective unconscious.
But this concept would not begin to develop until the following year.
And this was basically Jung’s problem in 1909. He was becoming increasingly irritable about Freud. He wanted to make it clear that he was his own man, not merely another Freud hanger-on—like Sandor Ferenczi, who began his lecture in Worcester with a tribute to the Master.
In his own lectures on word association tests Jung made no reference to Freud. Yet he had nothing to say that differed profoundly from Freud.
It was an irritating and unsatisfying situation, and it can hardly have improved things to see Freud ‘in a seventh heaven’, revelling in the acclaim.
Jung admitted to his wife that his own ‘libido’ was ‘gulping it down in vast enjoyment’. He and Freud, were, he said, the ‘men of the hour’. But it was not true; Freud was the man of the hour. Jung was just—in the eyes of his hosts—merely Freud’s chief acolyte.
Jung’s friend Ernest Jones—whom he had been responsible for introducing to Freud—was disconcerted when Jung told him that he preferred not to probe too deeply into the sex lives of his patients because he might meet them later at the
dinner table. For Jones, this was an admission that Jung was more interested in social life than in pursuing the truth. For Jung, it was an expression of his increasing disgust with Freud’s single-minded preoccupation with sex.
Back in Zürich after a two month absence, Jung found that he had time on his hands. The number of his patients had diminished—possibly because of the Sabina Spielrein affair.
Jung was not greatly concerned—he had no need to be when his wife was a member of a wealthy family. In fact, he resigned his post at the Burgholzli, and moved into a house he had built in Kusnacht, by Lake Zürich. He seems to have been glad of a chance to relax. The dream of the house had apparently revived his interest in archaeology and history.
In November, he apologized to Freud for a three week silence, explaining that he had been reading Herodotus and a book on the worship of Priapus, the god of procreation.
He had
also discovered a four-volume work that afforded him endless delight: Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbols and Mythology of Ancient Peoples.
In his reply, Freud said: ‘I was delighted to learn that you are going into mythology … I can’t wait to hear of your discoveries.’ Freud, naturally, assumed that Jung was studying ancient myths in order to unveil their sexual content.
‘I hope you will soon come to agree with me that in all likelihood mythology centres on the same nuclear complex as the neuroses.’
What Freud failed to grasp was that all this reading of mythology was not merely psychological research; it was an escape into a realm that Jung found far more emotionally satisfying than the study of sexual neurosis.
Jung’s mind needed to be allowed to range freely over literature and over history; he felt cramped as a mere physician. Eight years of clinical work at the Burgholzli had given him his fill of ‘reality’; now he hungered for poetry, for myth, for the ‘horns of elfland’.
In this next letter, Jung again had to apologize for keeping Freud waiting so long. After brief preliminaries, he goes on: ‘Now to better things—mythology.
For me there is no longer any doubt what the oldest and most natural myths are trying to say. They speak quite naturally of the nuclear “sexual” complex of neurosis.’
He goes on to tell Freud about the legend of the god Ares committing incest with his mother. Freud replied ‘Your letters delight me because they suggest a frenzy of satisfying work.’
If Freud had guessed what was emerging from this frenzy of reading he would have been less delighted.
In fact, he might have taken warning from a paragraph in Jung’s previous letter in which Jung speaks of a legendary race of miners called the Dactyls, and adds that they are ‘not primarily phallic, but elemental.
Only the great, that is to say the epic, gods seem to be phallic.’ ~Colin Wilson, C.G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld, Page 44-48
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
