Jung’s Heart Attack and His Dream of His Great-Grandmother

Jung’s Heart Attack and His Dream of His Great-Grandmother

A Strange and Devilishly Difficult Time

In the spring of 1943, events developed in rapid succession. Only three days after sending Hedy Wyss his letter on love—on March 28/29, 1943—Jung suffered a life-threatening nighttime heart attack in Geneva. Reporting this attack to Hedy Wyss within a week in two long letters, he describes the dramatic events of that night to her, convinced that in some way she was involved, or, as he put it, that she was “an instrument of fate to him.” But what had happened?

He was dining alone somewhere in Geneva when he suffered severe cardiac arrhythmias that continued even after he had returned to his hotel and gone to bed. In his distress, he began to recite the first part of Goethe’s Faust in Basel German, but this did not calm his heart.

His pulse became more irregular; no medicine seemed to help. Finally, he fell asleep, but awoke at 1 a.m. from a shattering dream—the dream of his ancestress (great-grandmother)—that filled him with rage. Jung later understood that this dream solved the mystery of his “great-grandmother and Herr von Goethe” that had been weighing on him for a long time. “I feel like it had to do with a birth,” he writes to Hedy Wyss, that he “might equally as well have died from. It seems that some insights can be quite life-threatening.”

“I have been going through a strange and devilishly difficult time in which death’s bolt of lightning has been striking to my left and to my right,” he continues. First Heinrich Zimmer had died, then his old friend from his student days Rudolf Staehelin, and finally, in Basel, an old woman had collapsed in front of him on the Wettsteinbrücke and had been carried dead from the square. Jung’s choice of words here is significant.

What he really meant by “death’s bolt of lightning” can be observed in his work “A Study in the Process of Individuation,” a revised version of a lecture Jung gave at the Eranos conference in 1933. After a lengthy discussion on the symbol of lightning in Jacob Böhme’s work, Jung continues, “Lightning signifies a sudden, unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic condition.” This is what seems to have happened to him that night in Geneva.

A well-known example of such an overwhelming and sudden realignment of life by death’s bolt of lightning is precisely what caused Martin Luther’s conversion to monastic life. During a thunderstorm, he was dashed to the ground by a bolt of lightning. Terror-stricken, he vowed to St. Anne he would become a monk if he were to survive. A few days later, he abandoned his promising career as a lawyer and, to the bitter disappointment of his father in Erfurt, joined the mendicant order of the Augustinian Hermits.

The day before his short visit to Geneva Jung had apparently been in Basel, where he saw the old woman collapse in front of him on the Wettsteinbrücke. Why Jung was in Basel on Saturday, March 27, 1943, and in Geneva from Sunday to Monday, March 28/29, 1943, can no longer be determined with any certainty. He was almost certainly not in Geneva to give a lecture, for he dined alone there, as he vividly described to Hedy Wyss: “In Geneva, after an extremely sad, puritanical rainy-weather twilight of the Calvinist institutiones and with the Servetian smell of fire,

I had a good dinner on my own that included three dl of Aigle, [a local white wine], which did not have the desired effect, but produced instead strange heart symptoms, arrhythmia and similar gallopings.”

The “Servetian smell of fire”—another one of death’s bolts of lightning!—is an allusion to the Protestant Michael Servetus who, at Calvin’s instigation, was burned as a heretic in Geneva in 1553 at the age of 44! This murder had always deeply outraged Jung, which is why he returns to it repeatedly in his work. His recollection of this scandal—in reality it was a crime—seems to have contributed significantly to his “wild rage” and his proximity to the dead, described in his letter.

C.G. Jung’s Participation in the Resistance Movement

One possible hypothesis for his travels—though it cannot be verified—is that Jung traveled from Bollingen to Basel and Geneva to ask two friends, Albert Oeri in Basel and Carl Jacob Burckhardt in Geneva, their advice on an important and highly secret matter. Albert Oeri was a friend from his student days. He later became editor-in-chief of the Basler Nachrichten and a member of federal parliament.

He was one of the most important exponents of the Intellectual National Defense and co-founder of the group “Aktion nationaler Widerstand” (National Resistance Campaign), which opposed the National Socialists. It seems Jung met Prof. Dr. Carl Jacob Burckhardt in Geneva. At the time, Burckhardt was a university lecturer at the Geneva Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales. In 1935 and 1936, he visited concentration camps in Germany as a member of the Red Cross. In 1944, he was elected president of the Red Cross. What, then, were Jung’s visits about?

During the war, Jung was involved in two completely independent projects in the fight against the Nazi regime in Germany. One group had set itself the goal of ending the war, in defiance of the dictator, by orchestrating a peace treaty with the Allies. Since some of these people knew about Jung’s good relations with England, they asked him for his help. Apparently, neither his wife Emma nor Toni Wolff were informed of these plans. Only Barbara Hannah was privy to them, for, as an Englishwoman, it was decided that it would make most sense for her to covertly hand-deliver a message to England.

However, a dream Barbara Hannah had a year before the nighttime events in Geneva made it clear that there was little chance the plan could succeed. She dreamed that Jung’s son—in the dream still a very young man—was running the project. A voice in the dream told her that nothing could come of it. It went on to say that Jung should not be reproached for this, for “he was motivated by the very purest love of humanity.”

Jung was alarmed when he heard Barbara Hannah’s dream and, because it was his own son who was “still a very young man” in the dream, he wondered if he had been too naive. Finally, however—and this seems to be typical of Jung’s prudent, assessing attitude—he decided to “wait and see what happens, before making a decision of any sort.”

In spring 1943, through the agency of Mary Bancroft, a member of the Psychology Club Zurich from 1946–1952, C.G. Jung was contacted by Allen W. Dulles, who later became the influential head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dulles arrived in Switzerland in November 1942. His secret mission was to support members of the German resistance with important information.

He was soon in active communications with Jung. Jung’s task was to create psychological profiles of political and military leaders, including Hitler, in order to improve resistance plans. Jung, for his part, received his information mainly from the aforementioned German psychiatrist and analytical psychologist Wilhelm Bitter, as well as from other Swiss conspirators. It seems that Jung’s assessments were very helpful. Dulles highly valued Jung’s observations and repeatedly expressed his gratitude for Jung’s cooperation. When the war was over, Dulles remarked in a conversation with William Kennedy, “nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung did for the Allied cause during the war…”

The year of 1943 was a “devilishly difficult time” for Jung. The war and its related tasks must have been a heavy burden for him to bear. But in light of the dream he had about his ancestress (C.G. Jung’s great-grandmother) on that eventful night in Geneva, the question now arises if the suffering engendered by the war raging in Europe and Jung’s commitment to peace are connected in some way to his great-grandmother fantasy.

Jung’s comment that the knowledge he gained that night “had to do with a birth that he might equally as well have died from” indicates the deep suffering this well-kept family secret caused him. But why was this particular dream, which will be explored shortly, able to solve the mystery that had so long weighed upon him down?

We may wonder why Jung says that his previous letter from Bollingen, with those poetic statements on love, “was already overshadowed by the dark doom that [had] been weighing on [his] soul up to now.” It is as if his reflections on the paradoxes of love were the trigger of this dark doom—as if these very thoughts had finally awakened in him the desire to get to the bottom of it. This doom that has to do with Faustian hubris, i.e., with the complicity of the Faustian man in crimes of war, will be discussed at length below.

What, then, was the message from Jung’s great-grandmother that disturbed him so much?

Jung’s Dream in Geneva

In his first letter to Hedy Wyss from Küsnacht, only two days after his heart attack in Geneva, Jung only hints at his dream of his great-grandmother, saying he will share the whole dream with her when they next meet. This meeting took place in May 1943. Soon afterwards, on April 6, 1943, he writes her another long letter in which he once again mentions

the strange heart symptoms and arrhythmia that he experienced in Geneva, and the 149-year-old curse that he had yet to solve. It was a karma which weighed on him and that he had never understood. Quite the contrary: “Like a blind pig, he had to root around in the darkness,” he wrote to Hedy Wyss in the same letter. He then refers to the dream of his great-grandmother that shook him so deeply:

“Now comes the dream that ended with anger. Oh God, it is too long. For the time being, I will only mention the basic story: In 1794, my ancestor [Jung’s great-grandmother] conceived a son by Goethe. She appeared in the dream and was crazy, thinking I was the redeemer. I understood only afterwards that I am her redeemer.

Enough for today! Hail to the swan! Your ever devoted, Eckehart”

Jung did not see Hedy Wyss again until May 7, 1943, a month after his eventful night in Geneva. Once again, he referred to this dream. Hedy Wyss carefully recorded this encounter in Lohengrin’s Black Swan. It is from this source that we can glean some important details of Jung’s dream. With few exceptions, the facts and details she recounts that I was able to verify proved to be accurate. We may assume, therefore, that her account of the dream corresponds to what Jung disclosed to her. His dream was as follows:

Together with some other women, his great-grandmother [Sophie Jung-Ziegler] came out of the water of Lake Zurich into his garden in Küsnacht. Jung was very annoyed. There were also intruders in the house itself, people laughing stupidly and impudently. Jung grew angry. The old woman [Jung’s great-grandmother] held a book in front of her which she was reading. It was the Apocalypse, and she pointed her finger at him, fuming, and said, “You are the redeemer.” Jung got so angry, yelled at her, and woke up with a heart attack.

This report reveals several elements that were quite central to Jung’s life, which Hedy Wyss could not have known about. This confirms not only the authenticity of her rendition of the dream, but also the great importance that this dream must have had for Jung. First, there is the motif of his great-grandmother who came out of the lake. In the “Protocols,” published in part only recently in German, Jung recounts his struggle to maintain a relationship with Toni Wolff, after their brief analytical work together had been concluded. All passages concerning

Toni Wolff are missing in Aniela Jaffé’s official biography. In the Protocols, however, Jung mentioned that he had had several dreams about her at that time. Yet, he hesitated to get involved with her until the following happened: One day he was swimming far out in the lake when he got a terrible leg cramp. He vowed that if he survived, he would surrender to his feelings for Toni Wolff. He did survive and that was the evening Jung assented to the relationship.

Toni Wolff became Jung’s most important companion during the difficult years of his descent into the unconscious. He shared his active imaginations with her—which we can now read in both The Red Book and The Black Books. Her support proved essential to Jung’s survival in those strenuous years of his immersion into the world of the unconscious. In the dream, however, it is not he who emerges from the lake, but an “old woman” whom Jung recognizes as his great-grandmother. Be that as it may, it is out of the lake, or rather the unconscious, that his fate emerges.

The people laughing stupidly or impudently is the second motif. This brings to mind the dead who filled his house at Seestrasse 228 in Küsnacht, in January, 1916, forcing him to answer their unresolved questions. As mentioned earlier, it was from this experience that the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos emerged. Both his experience in 1916 and his dream about his great-grandmother deal with the redemption of the dead.

The old woman in Jung’s dream who is reading the Apocalypse and pointing her finger at him is the third motif. Quite a few years were to pass before Jung gave his full attention to the Book of Revelation, in his paper “Answer to Job,” published in 1952. All three motifs, therefore, point to events in Jung’s life that were of the utmost importance: his relationship to Toni Wolff, the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, and Jung’s confrontation with the ambivalent image of God as described in his “Answer to Job.”

The Ancestress: “You Are the Redeemer”

In his initial and brief description of the dream, Jung addressed none of these three motifs. And yet, it is precisely these details that offer significant hints of its tremendous importance. Perhaps they explain why the family legend of being descendants of Goethe irritated Jung so very much, and why up until this dream he had refused to deal with it. Jung was now 69 years old.

“You are the redeemer” the old woman [Jung’s great-grandmother] says to him. This enrages Jung. He calms down by thinking that he is her redeemer, in other words, that he has redeemed his ancestress from the family curse of infidelity, or as he called it, from the curse of the House of Atreus.

This seems to be what he relayed to Hedy Wyss, as she recorded in her manuscript: “At last, the curse of the House of Atreus that lay heavily upon him was resolved. Now he understood that he was not the Redeemer, as his ancestress clearly had wanted to persuade him he was, but rather that he had redeemed her, whereby her restless soul could now be at peace.” In my view, however, this does not get to the heart of the matter, which a glance at Jung’s encounter with the anima in The Red Book would appear to confirm.

Salome: “You Are Christ”

The comment of his ancestress “You are the redeemer” brings to mind the remark of blind Salome, who, in Jung’s imagination, said to him in The Red Book: “You are Christ.” Salome’s words deeply shocked Jung at the time, probably no less than his great-grandmother’s claim in his dream that he was the redeemer. His encounter with Salome, with his anima, had taken place thirty years earlier, but Jung was still indignant about the audacity of her remark!

In The Red Book, in which Jung recorded his active imaginations, Salome is not just any figure from the unconscious. Along with her father, the prophet Elijah, who later transforms into the figure of Philemon, she is one of the most important inner figures Jung encounters during his immersion into the depths of the unconscious.

According to his own statements, the dream of his ancestress freed Jung from a dark doom that had never ceased to weigh upon his soul. It did nothing short of “reversing this fate, [and that] is a bitter and difficult task.” Salome’s redemption from her blindness, as described in The Red Book, was no less agonizing. The scene is preceded by long dialogues with Elijah, the old wise man, and Salome, his daughter. That Salome is said to be the prophet’s daughter deeply shocked Jung.

His dismay was even greater when she asked him if he loved her. How could he ever love the woman who has the blood of the saint (John the Baptist) on her hands, he asks himself. After long and painful arguments, there is a breakthrough. Here is a summary of the scene that begins with the touching image of the divine child:

Jung sees a child; it is the divine child with a white serpent in his right hand, and a black serpent in his left hand. Then he sees the cross of Christ on the green mountain. A stream of blood flows from the summit of the mountain. Again he sees the cross and Christ in his final hour and agony.

Now Salome comes to him and says, “You are Christ.” He stands with outstretched arms like someone crucified, his body horribly entwined by the serpent. “You, Salome, say that I am Christ?” he asks her. Blood streams from his body, spilling down the mountainside. Salome bends down to his feet wrapping her black hair around them. Then she cries, “I see light!” At that moment the serpent falls from his body. He kneels at the feet of the prophet Elijah, the Old, who says, “Your work is fulfilled here. Other things will come. Seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see.”

Jung’s encounters with Elijah and Salome, which he calls the “Mystery Play,” are some of the most impressive scenes in the entire Red Book. His imaginations, as recorded in the “Mystery Play,” contain the essence of Jung’s later remarks on God’s incarnation in every human being and its stages of transformation in our time. Unlike in Christian dogma, the focus here is not on the work of redemption done by Christ, but rather on the redemptive work of the human being. This is the work of redemption both Salome and his great-grandmother were referring to.

In his 1940 lecture on the dogma of the Trinity, given at both Eranos and the Psychology Club, Jung speaks of the drama of redemption “…whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity.”

Thus, Jung continues, the Christian definition of God as the summum bonum, which excludes evil and the devil from being a part of God, can no longer be understood. In his work Aion, published ten years later in 1951, Jung expounds upon the one-sidedness of the Christian image of God.

The tendency to deny any reality of evil within the image of God is the origin of the often-quoted axiom of the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian (2nd century AD): “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine”—All good comes from God, all evil from man. This view, shared by many of the Church Fathers, excludes from the outset the participation of man (who tends toward evil) in the redemptive work of God (who is only good).

Marie-Louise von Franz was particularly succinct in formulating how the image of God is changing today. Almost at the end of her extensive commentary on the Aurora consurgens of Thomas Aquinas in a passage that could be seen as the quintessence of her entire commentary, she says with regard to the mystery of the continuing incarnation of God:

“In [the Aurora] the mediator who unties the pair in place of the Holy Spirit is the spirit Mercurius, who […] manifests himself in many individuals. This means that God becomes manifest in the individual man. […] Man becomes God’s redeemer, uniting in him his two aspects as man and woman.”

“Man becomes God’s redeemer,” says Marie-Louise von Franz; “You are the redeemer,” Jung’s ancestress tells him. Both indicate that the empirical human being is definitively involved in the divine drama, sharing co-responsibility with God. This could explain Jung’s suffering in the “Mystery Play” when Salome calls him Christ. But it might also explain Jung’s violent rage and the heart attacks he suffered in connection with the dream of his ancestress.

Every effort to unite the opposites—every step of carrying the cross—is fraught with deep suffering. Without this suffering, Salome’s blindness could not have been healed. The tremendous terror and rage that overtook Jung that night in Geneva show just how aware Jung was from the beginning of the difficulty of the task before him. While writing down his thoughts on the dogma of the Trinity—and probably also with a mind to his encounter with Salome in The Red Book—Jung describes what he means by “carrying the cross”:

“If, however, God is born as a man and wants to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality. This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross. The whole world is God’s suffering, and every individual man who wants to get anywhere near his own wholeness knows that this is the way of the cross.”

Salome’s “You are Christ” and his ancestress’ “You are the redeemer” could be readily misunderstood, as if Jung were about to replace Christ, as if he alone were the long-awaited Messiah and Redeemer. That would be an egregious misunderstanding. Just how much Jung feared this is revealed in his active imaginations recorded in The Black Books. Here Jung vehemently opposes the anima, who conjures up the danger of adulation or, to put it psychologically, of inflation and hubris.

This becomes particularly apparent in one of his active imaginations in October 1916. His soul asks him seductively, “Weren’t you covered just now by a shimmering light? What was that golden glow? … I saw it around you, the golden shimmering flowing just now around you. Never have I have seen the like…” And later she even says, “The gold shone from you!” To which Jung answers, “Sick with pain, petrified from suffering—and you speak of shining gold?”

The anima, however, insists that she has seen him in a divinely shimmering light. Now Jung is seized by an almost panicky fear of, as he put it, the “worst and most diabolical of all temptresses.” He harshly rejects her and warns her, “Don’t seduce me into the madness of holiness, into stupid and unjust arrogance…”

This fear of the hubristic Promethean misunderstanding of holiness and of the gold shining through was probably what led Jung to conceal from Hedy Wyss, and perhaps from himself as well, the true meaning of the message of the ancestress, namely, the incarnation of God in each human being. The time was not yet ripe for him to acknowledge this. It was only in later years that Jung addressed the theme of God’s incarnation more frequently.

In the same way he pointed out in The Black Books when conversing with the soul, Jung repeatedly emphasized how important it was for each and every individual who strives for wholeness to take upon themselves the cross of uniting the opposites. Only through bearing the cross can one become the redeemer, can one become “Christ.” In a similar way, Marie-Louise von Franz speaks of the alchemical spirit of Mercurius which manifests in many individual people. This means that each person can become “Christ,” the redeemer; each person can make his or her contribution, however small, to healing the painful and dangerous divisions of this world.

Goethe’s Faust

As mentioned above, the dark doom that descended on Jung around the issue of possibly being a descendant of Goethe’s also has to do with a Faustian hubris and complicity in the crimes of never-ending wars. Only a few months before his fateful dream in Geneva, Jung completed his work Psychology and Alchemy. In its “Epilogue” and in reference to Nietzsche’s Superman, he examines Faustian hubris at length, that is, the hubris of modern humankind in relation to nature. This hubris stands in complete contradiction to the alchemists’ spirit of humility.

Against this background, it is remarkable that on that fateful night when he was stricken with menacing cardiac arrhythmia, Jung attempted to rewrite in Basel German Faust’s monologue in Part One, beginning at the end, “as if it were the beginning,” and ending with the “monologue in which Faust finally decides to study medicine” after all. What a strange idea, to reverse Goethe’s Faust! And yet, there seems to be a kernel of truth in it as well.

Jung had always been fascinated by Goethe’s Faust. It really was as if he had to “reverse” Faust in order to find the very medicine that the alchemists had been seeking for centuries. In Mercurius, they found the medicina catholica and the alexipharmakon—the “preserver [servator] of the world.” It was this medieval-alchemical spirit, or at least its echoes, that so fascinated Jung in Goethe’s opus magnum. With Faust, he stated, alchemy had reached its “historical turning-point.” This is expressed, for example, in the tragedy of the Paris-Helena-scene in Faust, Part Two, at the end of Act I. On this passage Jung writes: