A Life Fuelled with Intensity of Spirit and Rare Depth of Soul Nomi Kluger-Nash.
Rivkah Schärf Kluger (1907–1987)
A Life Fuelled with Intensity of Spirit and Rare Depth of Soul Nomi Kluger-Nash.
Rivkah Schärf Kluger was a Swiss analyst who worked with Carl Gustav Jung beginning in the 1930’s, first as a student, then as an analysand, becoming a collaborator in his writing and, eventually, an admired teacher and author in her own right.
(FIGURES 8–13)
She and Jung continued a friendship and shared ideas until his death, he remaining her guiding light in life, and she continuing as a dear friend and associate, as well as a point of reference in the subjects of Judaism and Kabbalah due to her living connection in, and knowledge of, that field.
She was the first Swiss analyst to be invited to speak to the Los Angeles group[1] in 1950 and in 1955 returned there to live with her husband, Dr. Yehezkel Kluger (1911–1995), to teach and to practice.
She thereafter delivered lectures in other cities over the years.
In 1969 the couple moved to live in Haifa, Israel, where they continued to practice and teach at the Israel Society of Jungian Analysts for the remainder of their lives—always keeping up the trips to beloved Zurich and Küsnacht.
Rivkah Schärf came into this world in Bern, Switzerland, on February 11, 1907, the firstborn daughter of Sara Ettel Wiesel and Meschulem Leib Schärf from Bukovina, Austria (now in Rumania).
The family moved from Bern to Zurich when little ‘Rosa’ was four years old. In this traditional Jewish family with Hassidic roots, she was early on dubbed the ‘spiritual’ one.[2]
She was an exceptional student from the start, while being always a private person and basically shy—but in matters concerning the world of ideas and principles, her spirit came out in shooting flames of well articulated fire.
Jung was later to admonish her, ‘Stop sounding like an Old Testament prophet!’
She would sometimes recount this incident with a wry smile and sad nod of her head.
The Wiesel-Schärf family was far from well off so that in her student years she worked as a secretary (thus her ability at shorthand) in social services, earning high praise from employers in two Jewish Community and Cultural centres, including work in aiding refugees, as well as being the secretary for an association of
psychology.[3]
Her university studies were at the University of Zurich in Philosophy and Psychology, including a semester of philosophy at the prestigious University of Berlin in 1929.[4]
Some years afterwards, in her analysis with Jung, she was to change her studies to Semitic languages and religious history,[5] graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1946 for her doctoral thesis, Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament (The Image of Satan in the Old Testament)—which work so impressed Jung that he had it published together with his book, Symbolik des Geistes (Symbolism of the Spirit).[6]
She had come to Jung by happy chance during a sad period in her life when she was mourning the death of her fiancé, a handsome Russian student named Dodya who had succumbed to tuberculosis.
One day in this bleak period she went to a library to read more in the field of psychology by way of understanding herself.
In her words:
I was a young student. I never heard of Jung and I was quite an introverted person and felt the need to understand myself and didn’t know how to go about it, so one day I decided to go to the library and look up books of psychology.
I must say, Freud I had read earlier when I was still in gymnasium but
he didn’t appeal to me at all.
I remember very well [how] I got somewhat depressed reading him and I thought, ‘If that’s all you can die just right now!’ …
[In this library] I took one book out after another and amongst those was a book from C.G. Jung, whose name I never heard of, though I lived in Zurich.
At the university you didn’t hear about him at that time.
And what fell into my hands in this searching, which I made for my very personal own need, was Jung’s The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.[7]
And I got—I don’t feel it an exaggeration to say—I got electrified!
And I felt, ‘Gee, that man would understand me. That man would understand
me![8]
Again by happy chance, she saw, in the ensuing days, an advertisement for a lecture Jung was to give at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich.
She eagerly went to hear him.
It was a lecture on a series of mandalas in patients’ dreams, but what impressed
her mainly was his ‘just-so’ very natural manner, not being identified at all with the persona of the ‘Important Professor.’
She was caught, and continued to attend lectures.
Thereafter she meticulously recorded, verbatim, all his lectures and seminars at the ETH, the Psychology Club, and the gatherings at Eranos.
Apart from the trove of her own writings, we have her to thank for these many hundreds of pages in short-hand notes, some of which have only recently been rediscovered—such as this impromptu paper on the solar myths and Opicinus
de Canistris—and all of which are in the process of being transcribed, including her personal diary and journal of ‘active imagination,’ for the archives at the ETH.
The shorthand notes of which this book is partly composed are those she took at Jung’s impromptu Eranos lecture in 1943.
They reveal a basic principle of Jung’s thought which greatly informed her work, i.e., the value of consciousness as having an ethical and moral import, as well as
being an intrinsic force that continually unfolds in the life of an individual and in the life of humanity—which consciousness is composed of light and shadow, unfolding according to a principle of inclusiveness, which is to say, of opposites whose aim is a coniunctio, a conjoining of the opposites that culminates in forming a forever new and renewing, vibrant totality.
We have a brief example in this paper of how Jung looked toward myth and culture as illustrative of this dynamic meaning of consciousness.
It is from this point of view from which Rivkah Schärf wrote her works, as may be evident from a brief sampling of some of the titles:
The Figure of Satan, in which she explores the light giving aspect of the dark Lucifer, examining the problem of evil; The Image of Marriage in the Prophets, in
which she brings up the troublesome issues of integrating love, or not, within the feminine and masculine principles;[9]
The Feminine Principle in Kabbalah, in which she speaks of the opposites, viewed as masculine and feminine (the feminine sometimes viewed as light and Moon) as forming the ongoing act of creation in the interplay of loving unions, or conversely, as the danger of destruction in their splitting apart.[10]
Then there is her ongoing work on The Epic of Gilgamesh (which work was
instigated by the urging of Jung) as a myth of a burgeoning Sun consciousness (replacing the Moon’s supremacy) in its archetypal form of the hero—a hero belonging to the third millennium B.C.E. as well as to modern man.
All of this, as Jung exemplifies in this brief Opicinus talk, is neither dogmatic nor merely academic, but with a pointed reference to our current lives and culture. ~Riccardo Bernardini, Gian Piero Quaglino & Augusto Romano, Carl Gustav Jung’s Eranos Seminar on The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris, Page 306-315
spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit
