EXCERPTS FROM SELECTED LETTERS C. G. JUNG

From a Father to a Little Daughter

London, July 1st 1919

Dear Marianne,

It was sweet of you to write me a letter. It has made me so happy that I am writing you a letter too. If you can’t read it, Mama will read it to you. I have bought a doll here. It is carved from brown wood and comes from India. But it is for Mama. I shall bring it in my trunk.

I am staying here in a big house. About fifty thousand cars go by every day. Every morning at half past ten the Guardsmen ride by in golden breastplates with red plumes in their helmets and black cloaks. They are going to the King’s palace and guard the King and the Princes and Princesses. The King has his golden throne and his golden sceptre in another castle, in a high tower. It has windows with thick bars and iron doors. By day the crown is in the tower on top and you can see it, in the evening it sinks down with the sceptre into a deep cellar which is shut with iron plates. So no one can steal it. In the crown are precious stones as big as pigeon’s eggs. Round the castle are three walls and moats and soldiers stand at the gates.

London lies on a big river where the seaships go. Every day the river flows downwards for 6 hours and then upwards for 6 hours. When it flows downwards the ships that are going away float out into the sea, and when it flows upwards the ships that have waited outside come into the city.

Just think, more than twice as many people live in London as in the whole of Switzerland. Chinamen live here too.

Many loving greetings to you and Lilli,

from your Papa

To a Solicitous Colleague

Nov. 6th 1926

My dear Mrs. […],

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble. So I say again: Don’t worry about me. I am on my road and I carry my burden just as well as I can. You got worries enough — more than enough. Thus, inasmuch as it is not for your own sake, don’t worry about the things I have to deal with. There is no difficulty in my life that is not entirely myself. Nobody shall carry me as long as I can walk on my own feet.

If you are troubled about me, ask yourself what is in you that troubles you, but don’t assume that I trouble you. I am doing my best to be up to myself. Nobody can do it for me.

Yours cordially,

C. G. Jung

An Early Letter to Freud

Burghölzli-Zürich

5. X. 1906

Dear Professor Freud,

Please accept my sincerest thanks for the present kindly sent me. This collection of your various short papers should be most welcome to anyone who wishes to familiarize himself quickly and thoroughly with your mode of thought. It is to be hoped that your scientific following will continue to increase in the future in spite of the attacks which Aschaffenburg, amid the plaudits of the pundits, has made on your theory — one might almost say on you personally.

The distressing thing about these attacks is that in my opinion Aschaffenburg fastens on externals, whereas the merits of your theory are to be found in the psychological realm of which modern psychiatrists and psychologists have somewhat too scanty a grasp. Recently I conducted a lively correspondence with Aschaffenburg about your theory and espoused this standpoint, with which you, Professor, may not be entirely in agreement.

What I can appreciate, and what has helped us here in our psychopathological work, are your psychological views, while I am still pretty far from understanding the therapy and the genesis of hysteria because our material on hysteria is rather meagre. That is to say your therapy seems to me to depend not merely on the affects released by abreaction but also on certain personal rapports, and it seems to me that though the genesis of hysteria is predominantly sexual it is not exclusively so. I take the same view of your sexual theory.

Harping exclusively on these delicate theoretical questions, Aschaffenburg forgets the essential thing, your psychology, from which psychiatry will one day be sure to draw inexhaustible gains. I hope to send you soon a little book of mine, in which I approach Dementia Praecox and its psychology from your standpoint. In it I have also published the first case where I drew Bleuler’s attention to the existence of your principles, though at that time still with vigorous resistance on his part. But as you know, Bleuler is now completely converted.

Respectfully and gratefully yours,

C. G. Jung

Recollections of the First Visit to the United States

July 23rd, 1949

Dear Miss Payne,

I do remember the Clark Conference of 1909. It was my first visit to the United States and for this reason my recollections are particularly vivid, although I must say that the details of the Conference itself have largely disappeared. But I do remember some incidences.

I travelled on the same boat with Professor Freud who was also invited and I remember vividly our discussion of his theories. We chiefly analysed our dreams during the trip and also during our stay in America and on the way back. Professor William Stern from Breslau was on the same boat, but Freud didn’t feel particularly enthusiastic about the presence of an academic psychologist. No wonder, because his position of pioneer in Europe was not particularly enviable. I still sympathize entirely with his negative feelings, since I enjoyed the same fate for over 30 years.

Two personalities I met at Clark Conference made a profound and lasting impression on me. One was Stanley Hall, the President, and the other was William James whom I met for the first time then. I remember particularly an evening at President Hall’s house. After dinner William James appeared and I was particularly interested in the personal relation between Stanley Hall and William James, since I gathered from some remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper and her extra-sensory perceptions.

Stanley Hall had prepared us that he had asked James to discuss some of his results with Mrs. Piper and to bring some of his material. So when James came (there was Stanley Hall, Professor Freud, one or two other men and myself) he said to Hall: “I’ve brought some papers in which you might be interested.” And he put his hand to his breastpocket and drew out a parcel which to our delight proved to be a wad of Dollar bills. Considering Stanley Hall’s great services for the increase and the welfare of Clark University and his rather critical remarks as to James’ pursuits, it looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder. James excused himself profusely. Then he produced the real papers from the pocket.

I spent two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices. Stanley Hall was an equally clear-headed man, but decidedly of an academic brand.

The conference was noteworthy on account of the fact that it was the first time that Professor Freud had an immediate contact with America. It was the first official recognition of the existence of psychoanalysis and it meant a great deal to him, because recognition in Europe for him was regrettably scarce. I was a young man then. I lectured about Association-tests and a case of child-psychology. I was also interested in parapsychology and my discussions with William James were chiefly about the psychology of religious experience.

As far as I remember we didn’t make many contacts with psychologists or psychiatrists, with the exception of old Dr. Putnam who curiously enough was an adept of Hegel’s philosophy. Apart from that he was an unprejudiced, very human personality whom I liked and admired.

Since it was our first stay in America we thought it all very strange and we felt we didn’t speak the same mental language as our American surroundings. I had many discussions with Professor Freud about the peculiar psychology which, to myself at least, was more or less enigmatical. I only got the gist of it when I came back in 1912. Then only did I begin to understand the main and distinctive features of American over against European psychology.

We spent a very interesting week in Dr. Putnam’s camp in the Adirondacks and continued to be bewildered by the peculiar ways and ideas of the many native guests at that camp. It was a very large party of about 40 people.

I cannot remember much of the papers presented at the Conference, nor of other discussions that took place, but we felt very much that our point of view was very different and that there hardly existed a bridge between the then prevailing American views and our peculiar European standpoint.

It is not for me to judge the effect on psychiatry in general, since this is a specifically American development which I haven’t followed up. The influence of psychology on psychiatry is still very small for obvious reasons. In any great institution there is no time at all for individual investigation — at least it is so in Europe, and the number of alienists I have taught is quite small.

Hoping to have been able to give you at least an idea of my recollections of Clark Conference.

I remain, yours sincerely,

C. G. Jung

On Einstein and Synchronicity

25 February 1953

Dear Dr. Selig,

I got to know Albert Einstein through one of his pupils, a Dr. Hopf if I remember correctly. Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner, when, as you have heard, Adolf Keller was present on one of them and on others Professor Eugen Bleuler, a psychiatrist and my former chief. These were very early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity. He tried to instil into us the elements of it, more or less successfully. As non-mathematicians, we psychiatrists had difficulty in following his argument.

Even so, I understood enough to form a powerful impression of him. It was above all the simplicity and directness of his genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work. It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than 30 years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.

With Einstein’s departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me. One can scarcely imagine a greater contrast than that between the mathematical and the psychological mentality. The one is extremely quantitative and the other just as extremely qualitative.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

C. G. Jung

On Mescalin

Febr. 15, 1955

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your kind invitation to contribute to your mescalin scheme. Although I have never taken the drug myself nor given it to another individual, I have at least devoted 40 years of my life to the study of that psychic sphere which is disclosed with the said drug, that is the sphere of numinous experiences. Thirty years ago, I became acquainted with Dr. Prinzhorn’s mescalin experiments, and thus I had ample opportunity to learn about the effects of the drug as well as about the nature of the psychic material involved in the experiment.

I cannot help agreeing with you that the said experiment is of the highest psychological interest in a theoretical way. But when it comes to the practical and more or less general application of mescalin, I have certain doubts and hesitations. The analytical method of psychotherapy (e.g. “active imagination”) yields very similar results, viz. full realization of complexes and numinous dreams and visions. These phenomena occur at their proper time and place in the course of the treatment. Mescalin, however, uncovers such psychic facts at any time and place when and where it is by no means certain that the individual is mature enough to integrate them.

Mescalin is a drug insofar similar to hashish and opium that it is a poison paralyzing the normal function of apperception and thus giving free rein to the psychic factors underlying sense perception. These aesthetic factors account for colours, sounds, forms, associations and emotions attributed by the unconscious psyche to the mere stimulus provided by the object. These are comparable in Hindoo philosophy to the concept of the “thinker” of the thought, the “feeler” of feeling, the “sounder” of sound, etc. It is just as if mescalin were taking away the top layer of apperception, which produces the “accurate” picture of the object as it looks to us.

If this layer is removed, we immediately discover the variants of conscious perception and apperception, viz. a rich display of contingent colours, forms, associations, etc., from which under normal conditions the process of apperception selects the correct quality. Perception and apperception result from a complicated process which transforms the physical and physiological stimulus into a psychic image. In this way, the unconscious psyche adds colours, sounds, associations, meaning, etc. out of the treasure of its subliminal possibilities.

These additions, if unchecked, would dissolve into or cover up the objective image by an infinite variety, a real “fantasia” or symphony of shades and nuances both of qualities as well as meanings. But the normal process of conscious perception and apperception aims at the production of a “correct” representation of the object excluding all subliminal perceptional variants. Could we uncover the unconscious layer next to consciousness during the process of apperception, we would be confronted with an infinitely moving world riotous with colours, sounds, forms, emotions, meanings, etc. But out of all this emerges a relatively drab and banal picture devoid of emotion and poor in meaning.

In psychotherapy and psychopathology we have discovered the same variants (usually, however, in a less gorgeous array) through amplification of certain conscious images. Mescalin brusquely removes the veil of the selective process and reveals the underlying layer of perceptional variants, apparently a world of infinite wealth. Thus the individual gains an insight and a full view of psychic possibilities which he otherwise (f.i. through “active imagination”) would reach only by assiduous work and relatively long and difficult training. But if he reaches and experiences them this way, he has not only acquired them by legitimate endeavour, but he has also arrived at the same time in a mental position where he can integrate the meaning of his experience. Mescalin is a shortcut and therefore yields as a result only a perhaps awe-inspiring aesthetic impression, which remains an insulated, unintegrated experience contributing very little to the development of human personality. […]

The idea that mescalin could produce a transcendental experience is shocking. The drug merely uncovers the normally unconscious functional layer of perceptional and emotional variants, which are only psychologically transcendent but by no means “transcendental”, i.e. metaphysical. Such an experiment may be in practice good for people having a desire to convince themselves of the real existence of an unconscious psyche. It could give them a fair idea of its reality.

But I never could accept mescalin as a means to convince people of the possibility of spiritual experience over against their materialism. It is on the contrary an excellent demonstration for Marxist Materialism: mescalin is the drug by which you can manipulate the brain so that it produces even so-called “spiritual” experiences. That is the ideal case for bolshevic philosophy and its “brave new world”. If that is all the occident has to offer in the way of “transcendental” experience, we would but confirm the marxist aspirations to prove that the “spiritual” experience can be just as well produced by chemical means. […]

There is finally a question which I am unable to answer, as I have no corresponding experience: it concerns the possibility that a drug opening the door to the unconscious could also release a latent, potential psychosis. As far as my experience goes, such latent dispositions are considerably more frequent than actual psychoses, and thus there exists a fair chance of hitting upon such a case during mescalin experiments. It would be a highly interesting though equally disagreeable experience, such cases being the bogey of Psychotherapy.

Hoping you are not offended by the frankness of my critical opinion,

I remain, dear Sir, yours very truly,

C. G. Jung

On the Shadow and Protestantism

9. November 1955

Dear Colleague,

Very belatedly I am at last thanking you for your kind letter of congratulation on my 80th birthday. I was most surprised that you thought of me at all and even took the trouble to remember with goodwill the existence of my shadow. You may shake your head incredulously when I tell you that I would hardly have been able to form the concept of the shadow had not its existence become one of my greatest experiences, not just with regard to other people but with regard to myself.

So I can gladly accept your allusions to Houdon’s Voltaire and to Job, though it is rather like carrying coals to Newcastle. I like to look at the mocking visage of the old cynic, who reminds me of the futility of my idealistic aspirations, the dubiousness of my morals, the baseness of my motives, of the human — alas! — all too human. That is why Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire still stands in the waiting room, lest my patients let themselves be deceived by the amiable doctor.

My shadow is indeed so huge that I could not possibly overlook it in the plan of my life, in fact I had to see it as an essential part of my personality, accept the consequences of this realization and take responsibility for them. Many bitter experiences have forced me to see that though the sin one has committed or is can be regretted, it is not cancelled out. I don’t believe in the tiger who was finally converted to vegetarianism and ate only apples. My solace was always Paul, who did not deem it beneath his dignity to admit that he bore a thorn in the flesh.

My sin has become for me my most precious task. I would never leave it to anybody else in order to appear a saint in my own eyes, always knowing what is good for others. The criticism and ‘understanding’ I have had to endure at the hands of theologians (long before Job!) give me no cause to treat their theological concepts any more gently than they treated mine. The same is true of the Freudians. […]

Protestantism is faced with questions which one day will have to be spoken out loud. For instance, the horrid sophism of the privatio boni, which even Protestant theologians are willing to endorse. Or the question between the Old and New Testament God which I have submitted to four academic scholars. Two of them didn’t answer at all. The third admitted that there was no talk of God any more in the Protestant literature of the last twenty years. The fourth found the question easy to answer: the God of the Old Testament is a somewhat archaic idea as compared with that of the New, without seeing that with this answer he is committing the very psychologism the theologians accuse me of!

When it suits them God is just an anthropomorphic idea, or they pretend they can conjure up God himself by naming him. But when I regard an anthropomorphic God-image as open to criticism, then it is ‘psychologism’ or — worse still — ‘blasphemy’! Laymen today are no longer bamboozled by this kind of humbug, and Protestantism would do well to notice that someone is knocking on the door. I have knocked long and loud in order to rouse Protestant theology from its untimely slumbers, for I feel myself responsible as a ‘Protestant’. I have delivered my message as clearly as I could, together with the relevant proofs. […]

Protestantism has long ceased to live its ‘protest’. It draws its vitality from its encounter with the spirit of the age, of which psychology is now a part. If it fails in this task, it dries up. Actually the theologians should be grateful to me for the intense interest I take in them, and as a matter of fact a few of them are.

The length of my answer will be enough to show you that your educative efforts have fallen on thankful ground. I therefore allow myself to hope that you will raise this question of the shadow among your friends and cronies, the theologians and the Freudians.

With collegial regards, yours sincerely,

C. G. Jung

To a Colleague on Suicide

July 25th 1946

Dear […],

It is really a question whether a person affected by such a terrible illness should or could end her life. It is my attitude in such cases not to interfere. I would let things happen if they were so, because I’m convinced that if anybody has it in himself to commit suicide, then practically the whole of his being is going that way. I have seen cases where it would have been something short of criminal to hinder the people because according to all rules it was in accordance with the tendency of their unconscious and thus the basic thing. So I think nothing is really gained by interfering with such an issue. It is presumably to be left to the free choice of the individual.

Anything that seems to be wrong to us can be right under certain circumstances over which we have no control and the end of which we do not understand. If [X.Y.] had committed suicide under the stress of unbearable pain, I should have thought that this was the right thing. As it was not the case, I think it was in her stars to undergo such a cruel agony for reasons that escape our understanding. Our life is not made entirely by ourselves. The main bulk of it is brought into existence out of sources that are hidden to us. Even complexes can start a century or more before a man is born. There is something like karma.

X.’s experience you mention is truly of a transcendent nature. If it were the effect of morphine it would occur regularly, but it doesn’t. On the other hand it bears all the characteristics of an ecstasis. Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, then one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death.

It is of course a most aggravating experience for the environment, as much as a person whose personality is so well known seems to lose it completely and shows nothing more than demoralisation or the disagreeable symptoms of a drug-addict. But it is the lower man that keeps on living with the body and who is nothing else but the life of the body. With old people or persons seriously ill, it often happens that they have peculiar states of withdrawal or absent-mindedness, which they themselves cannot explain, but which are presumably conditions in which the detachment takes place. It is sometimes a process that lasts very long.

What is happening in such conditions one rarely has a chance to explore, but it seems to me that it is as if such conditions had an inner consciousness which is so remote from our matter-of-fact consciousness that it is almost impossible to retranslate its contents into the terms of our actual consciousness. I must say that I have had some experiences along that line. They have given me a very different idea about what death means.

I hope you will forgive me that I’m so late in answering your previous letters. As I said, there has been so much in between that I needed a peaceful time when I could risk entering into the contents of your letter.

My best wishes!

Yours sincerely,

C. G. Jung

On Suicide

19. Novb. 1955

Anon.

I am glad that you do understand the difficulty of your request. How can anybody be expected to be competent enough to give such advice? I feel utterly incompetent — yet I cannot deny the justification of your wish and I have no heart to refuse it. If your case were my own, I don’t know what could happen to me, but I am rather certain that I would not plan a suicide ahead. I should rather hang on until I can stand my fate or until sheer despair forces my hand.

The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story. It has been long before I was, and it will most probably continue after the conscious interval in a three-dimensional existence. I shall therefore hang on as long as it is humanly possible and I try to avoid all foregone conclusions, considering seriously the hints I got as to the post mortem events.

Therefore I cannot advise you to commit suicide for so-called reasonable considerations. It is murder and a corpse is left behind, no matter who has killed whom. Rightly the English Common Law punishes the perpetrator of the deed. Be sure first, whether it is really the will of God to kill yourself or merely your reason. The latter is positively not good enough. If it should be the act of sheer despair, it will not count against you, but a wilfully planned act might weigh heavily against you.

This is my incompetent opinion. I have learned caution with the “perverse”. I do not underestimate your truly terrible ordeal.

In deepest sympathy, yours cordially,

C. G. Jung

In Old Age

August 10th 1960

Dear Lord Sandwich,

It has been a great pleasure to receive your kind letter and congratulations to my 85th birthday.

It is indeed quite a number of years since our interview in 1938, when I received an Honorary Degree at Oxford while lecturing there at a Congress of Psychotherapists. It was on the eve of war and I remember the air filled with forebodings and anxious anticipations. I remember vividly looking at the delightful buildings and lawns of the Universitas Oxoniensis as if seeing them for the first and last time. Although Oxford has been spared of barbarous destruction I had seen it for the first and last time. I have not been there again although I always dreamt and hoped to delve more deeply into the treasures of alchemistic manuscripts at the Bodleian. Fate has decreed otherwise.

I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom. Since man’s nature is temperamentally set against wisdom, it is incumbent upon us to pay its price by what seems foolish to us.

Old age is only half as funny as one is inclined to think. It is at all events the gradual breaking down of the bodily machine, with which foolishness identifies ourselves. It is indeed a major effort — the magnum opus in fact — to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part. In spite of the enormity of our scientific cognition we are yet hardly at the bottom of the ladder, but we are at least so far that we are able to recognize the smallness of our knowledge.

The older I grow the more am I impressed with the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding and all the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience, so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums.

There are two sciences in our days which are at immediate grips with the basic problems: nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious. There things begin to look really tough, as those who have an inkling of understanding of the one thing are singularly incapable of grasping the other thing; and here, so it looks, the great confusion of languages begins, which once already has destroyed a tower of Babel.

I am trying to hold those two worlds together as long as my machinery allows the effort, but it seems to be a condition which is desperately similar  to that of the political world, the solution of which nobody yet can foresee. It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, i.e. not from outside, but from inside.