Yesterday morning I shook the dust of America from my feet,
Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse: North German Lloyd; BREMEN September 22, 1909
. . . Yesterday morning I shook the dust o America from my feet, with a light heart and an aching head, for the Y/s plied us with wonderful champagne. . . . As far as abstinence goes, I’ve arrived on very shaky ground indeed, in point of principle, so that I am honorably withdrawing from my various teetotal societies. I confess myself an
honest sinner and only hope that I can endure the sight of a glass of wine without emotion an undrunk glass, of course.
That is always so; only the forbidden attracts. I think I must not forbid myself too much. . . .
Well, then, at ten o’clock yesterday morning we sailed, to our left the towering whitish and reddish heaven-storming towers of New
York City, to our right the smoking chimneys, docks, etc., of Hoboken.
The morning was misty; New York soon disappeared, and before long the big swells of the ocean began.
At the fire ship we dropped the American pilot and then sailed on out “into the mournful wasteland of the sea.”
It is, as always, of cosmic grandeur and simplicity, compelling silence; for what has man to say here, especially at night when the ocean is alone with the starry sky?
One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance, and many old sayings and images scurry through the mind; a low voice says something about the ageoldness and infinitude of the “far-swelling, murmurous sea,” of “the waves of the sea and of love,” of Leukothea, the lovely goddess who appears in the foam of the seething waves to travel-weary gives him the pearly veil which saves him from Poseidon’s storm.
The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.
The beauty and grandeur of the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful bottomlands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create ourselves in the animation of the “mournful wasteland of the sea.”
Now we are still worn out from the “torment of these last days.”
We brood over the past few months, and the unconscious has a lot of work to do, putting in order all the things America has churned up within us. … ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 369.
Carl Jung on Drugs and America
C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Bollingen Series XCVII
Dr. Evans: Have you actually seen any patients or had any contact with individuals who have been taking these particular drugs, these
tranquilizers?
Dr. Jung: I can’t say. You see, with us there are very few. In America there are all the little powders and the tablets.
Happily enough, we are not yet so far.
You see, American life is in a subtle way so one-sided and so uprooted that you must have something with which to compensate the real nature of man.
You have to pacify your unconscious all along the line because it is in absolute uproar; so at the slightest provocation you have a big moral rebellion in America.
Look at the rebellion of modern youth in America, the sexual rebellion, and all that.
These rebellions occur because the real, natural man is just in open rebellion against the utterly inhuman form of American life.
Americans are absolutely divorced from nature in a way, and that accounts for that drug abuse. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
Carl Jung Report on America
Lecturer described a number of impressions he had gained on two journeys in North America.
The psychological peculiarities of the Americans exhibit features that would be accessible to psychoanalysis, since they point to intense sexual repression.
The reasons for repression are to be sought in the specifically American complex, namely, living together with lower races, more particularly the Negroes.
Living together with barbarous races has a suggestive effect on the laboriously subjugated instincts of the white race and drags it down.
Hence strongly developed defensive measures are necessary, which manifest themselves in the particular aspects of American culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 551
