III. The Interactional Process Between Jung and Helly: The Vicissitudes of Their Communication

We can now go back and look at the specific sequence of events between Jung and Helly in the first four séances described by him in order to delineate what interactional influences, responses, or cause-and-effect occurrences actually took place.

The First Séance: The Emergence of the Paternal Grandfather

In the first séance, Helly suddenly announced the arrival of a sub-personality other than grandfather Preiswerk who was none other than Jung’s paternal grandfather. By following Jung’s mental processes and trains of thought in the intellectual organisation of his reflections in his dissertation, we have seen that this event profoundly threatened Jung both intellectually and emotionally. After Helly’s announcement, Jung comments:

‘Someone remarked jokingly: “Evidently the two spirits don’t get on very well together”‘ (Ibid. p. 26).

According to the Zumstein-Preiswerk account, it was most likely Jung himself who said this, or something similar to it in the first or second session and possibly both. It is the sort of reactive and implicitly negative response which might be expected from someone who experienced some discomfort and threat at Helly’s new revelation.

The emergence of Jung’s paternal grandfather was really the first unfolding of Helly’s imaginary life beyond grandfather Preiswerk and a first attempt by her to build a bridge to Jung which would carry genuine communications about their true personal and interpersonal realities. An open, accepting and querying approach to the issue of the two grandfathers would have led straight to an exploration of their relationship.

An abrupt and ‘joking’ response by Jung such as this would have clearly indicated to Helly that he would have none of it; it would have implicitly but firmly signalled to her that he would refuse and reject a relationship to any images or figures in her free associations which would allude to the living actualities and potentialities of their relationship in a fairly direct way or a barely disguised one.

As we have seen in analysing his dissertation, so can we surmise that in the actual interaction of the session this was a conflict-laden moment for Jung. This sort of actual behaviour would be consistent with the same internal avoidance which he revealed in the thought processes of his writing. Immediately following the ‘joking’ response:

Suddenly S. W. [Helly] became very agitated, jumped up nervously, fell on her knees, and cried: ‘There, there, don’t you see that light, that star there?’ She grew more and more excited, and called for a lamp in terror. She was pale, wept, said she felt queer, did not know what was the matter with her. When a lamp was brought she quieted down. The experiments were suspended (Ibid. p. 26).

The erotic and emotional reality came closer to consciousness for Helly in the darkness of this first séance. She imaginatively represented Jung’s paternal grandfather in an attempt to move closer toward portraying her unconscious perception and awareness of the intense and close interpersonal reality between herself and Jung. She then experienced an abrupt and powerful assault on her communicative attempt and was thrown into severe agitation.

Her outburst which followed carried the poignant and symbolic message: ‘Don’t you see the light, can’t you be conscious of what is obvious. There is something to see in this darkness, like a glimmer, like when we see a star in the night, far off, but there.’ The bringing of an actual light helped her to reconstitute and join in the mutual denial and sealing off of their interpersonal reality.

The Second Séance: Emotional Paralysis and Defensive Withdrawal

In the second séance, after grandfather Preiswerk again appeared and briefly spoke, Helly went immediately into the state of massive withdrawal which Jung called ’emotional paralysis’. Looking at this in terms of a cause-and-effect interaction taking place between her and Jung, we might reasonably conclude that Helly was indeed emotionally paralysed because there was an implicit implication from the previous séance that she was not to bring up any images or associations that might point in any way to the real relationship between herself and Jung.

She could not allow herself to associate freely, even though ostensibly she was being invited to. She had no choice other than to undergo a massive withdrawal and seal herself off in order to protect herself. This was a transient and ineffective defence, and she would ultimately have to find acceptable ways to build a bridge of communication to Jung which he could tolerate. But she had not found one yet.

It is in the midst of such interactional contradictions and unspoken pressures that massive repressions and splits begin to take place in the psyche. Large related conglomerates of communicatively important but unacceptable thoughts and feelings are walled off and separated decisively from the more benign and acceptable ones. Yet the former continue to press for some expression and find it indirectly through the displacing, condensing, symbolic and secondary elaborative activities of the imaginative primary process. Thus, in this repressed atmosphere, particularly with a person with an hysterical character, the stage is set for the formation of sub-personalities who either embody themselves or else communicate in symbolical imagery and narrative that cannot be spoken directly.

After coming out of her withdrawal Helly was confused and embarrassed; she stated that she had seen some things but refused to talk. Only when rigorously pressured did she reveal that:

‘…she had seen her grandfather arm-in-arm with my grandfather. Then they suddenly drove past sitting side by side in an open carriage’ (Ibid. p. 26).

This phantasy may easily be seen as Helly’s unconscious attempt to negotiate by imagery representation the repression and denial barriers which she and Jung shared in order to bring up again in this second séance the interactional truths and her unconscious perceptions of them in the only way she could. Again, any open, querying approach to this phantasy by Jung would have led unavoidably to their personal reality.

The image of an intimate relationship between the two—the two men, the two families, Helly and Jung—is drawn in even clearer representation, for they have their arms about each other and are riding in the ‘open carriage’. Their intimacy and closeness is publicly visible. This is certainly a cogent commentary on Jung and Helly’s special relationship within the séance group.

Yet no forthright querying approach to this phantasy was undertaken by Jung. Instead, in the Zumstein-Preiswerk account, Jung is said to have replied at this point:

‘I thought the two spirits got along quite badly while they were alive and hardly knew each other’ (EBON I, p. 44).

Certainly this would be another implicit and forceful rejection of Helly’s spontaneous imagery by Jung, particularly after she was pressured to reveal it. This could easily have been the final blow to her attempts at open and spontaneous communication with him, for meaningful communication had broken down completely by the third séance.

The Third and Fourth Séances: The Breakdown of Spontaneous Imagery

By the third séance:

…there was a similar attack of more than half an hour’s duration. S.W. [Helly] afterwards told of many white transfigured forms who each gave her a flower of special symbolic significance. Most of them were dead relatives. Concerning the details of their talk she maintained an obstinate silence (JUNG 3, p. 26).

In the light of the intense realities of Helly’s and Jung’s actual but mostly unconscious relationship at this time, this sequence of events signals a severe walling off and repression of any significant communication. There is simply this thin, pallid and almost insipid imagery which reveals nothing and Helly’s massive withdrawal or emotional paralysis.

Ironically, the imagery itself is not far removed from Jung’s abrupt and defensive flight in his text to the pale image of the girl sitting beside the brook in the beautiful meadow plucking flowers. It represents a mutually shared defensive flight from the complexities of their reality and meaningful communication about it, into simplistic and vapid, but safe, phantasy.

The fourth séance was similar to the second except that Helly, speaking of herself in the third person, quite appropriately and honestly announced:

‘She is not here, she has gone away’ (Ibid. p. 27).

Finding a Way Out: The Clairvoyante of Prevorst

Following this session, probably because he sensed significant communication had broken down, Jung gave Helly the book, The Clairvoyante of Prevorst, and Helly’s phantasies and dramas began to organise themselves into themes and constellations which were similar to those of the medium described in that book.

Certainly as much unconsciously as consciously, Jung showed Helly a way out of the communicative breakdown, and Helly could begin to speak again using the mode of communication of the clairvoyante of Prevorst which Jung had indicated was permissible and tolerable for himself. Jung states that subsequently:

… ‘spirits’ appeared by the dozen… but the differences between the various personalities were exhausted very quickly, and it became apparent that they could all be classified under two types, the serio-religious and the gay-hilarious. It was really only a question of two different subconscious personalities appearing under various names… (Ibid. pp. 72-73).

It seems clear that this development emerged within a setting and background of massive defensiveness, denial and repression. Helly needed to find a compromise to the situation’s and Jung’s limited tolerances for meaningful communication. His special requirements at the time seemed to be a preference for images which were abstract and distantly removed from any potential representation of interactional truths or personal emotions.

In such a situation as this, speech and its imagery are used to provide the participants with the needed illusion of meaningful communication, while at the same time precisely avoiding such communication and the intolerable realities to which it might lead. Communication becomes characterised by clichés and stereotyped images and themes, which offer nothing new, spontaneous, revealing or of personal value or discovery. Living contact with the speaking person is lost.

It is not surprising then that Jung begins to note that Helly seems markedly isolated from the external world and himself in the sessions. He says that to relate to her is like talking to a dreamer who is talking in her sleep or is identical to the situation when a hypnotist loses rapport with a patient and:

‘…becomes a mere figure with whom the somnambulistic personality engages autonomously’ (Ibid. p. 75).

Also, it is not surprising that the two superficial and cliché-ridden sub-personalities of the ‘serio-religious’ grandfather Preiswerk and the ‘gay-hilarious’ von Gerbenstein are the dominating sub-personalities at this time. They are the precise embodiment and the tragic representatives of the shallowness and superficiality of the allowable communicative field between Jung and Helly.

They also protect Jung and Helly and everyone involved from her spontaneous free-associative productions and yet maintain some suitable semblance of ‘communication’ in order to satisfy her needs and desires to be present with Jung, to have his attention, and to satisfy his desires to explore the paranormal and find a transpersonal unconscious. Helly had been given the difficult task of producing clairvoyant-like manifestations without in any way representing or symbolising too directly the possibility of any significant personal, emotional or erotic relationship with Jung. ~William B. Goodheart C. G. Jung’s first ‘patient’, pp. 24–26