Jane R. Prétat: Coming to Age : The Croning Years and Late-life
Jung’s Late-Life Transition
In 1932, when he was fifty-seven, Carl Gustav Jung published an essay, “The Development of Personality.”
In it he wrote: Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing… . At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what the spring has engendered.
Jung had entered his own autumn years. His work had brought him considerable fame. People came from all over the world to consult with him. Some stayed to become his colleagues and helpers. Others, trained in his approach to the psyche, went on to practice and each his depth psychology in other countries. Those who worked with Jung or with his students soon understood what he meant by the price one must pay for individuation:
Clearly, no one develops his personality because somebody tells him that it would he useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never yet been taken in by wellmeaning advice… .
… The development of personality is a favour that must he paid for dearly … .… It also means fidelity to the law of one’s own being.
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many and they all take refuge in convention.
It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God… .vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape.
He also wrote:
Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered.
These words could almost be taken as premonitory, since Jung was plagued repeatedly in the years ahead. During his sixties and early seventies, he had to cope not only with the stress of a heavy practice and worldwide fame but also with the strain of Nazism beginning to encroach on his native Switzerland.
The pressures on him in the late 1930s were similar to those he had experienced at midlife, starting with his visions in 1913, but now he was older and his life had changed
considerably. The terrifying dreams and visions he had had in the years leading up to the First World War had plunged him into a time of disorientation and despair.
The outcome of Jung’s struggles during those years was a great change of conscious attitude that brought transformation and creativity to his life and work, a midlife metanoia. Yet despite the psychological balance he had achieved, Jung was again intensely challenged and tested in his sixties, as his letters from 1935 to 1945 show. The stresses he suffered had a different effect this time but certainly were no easier to bear.
In Jung’s midlife dreams and visions Europe ran with blood and old war-loving gods rode to battle in the skies. At the time Jung felt jeopardized by warring factions in his own psyche. Only later was he able to see the synchronicity linking his experiences and what was about to happen in the outer world. It seems apparent that in 1913 he hadn’t yet come to terms with the mystic in himself.
The paintings he did during this time reveal the almost overwhelming power that unconscious forces had in his life as he underwent midlife change.27
During Jung’s sixties, pressures of work and war took their toll in a different way. New crises arose, but this time the struggle seems to have been more with his body and its reaction to the upheaval in his outer life. Some of his somatizing may have been a response to the stresses of another war. Some was the struggle to cope with aging and with losses. It is not unusual for a late-liminal crisis to take physical form, forcing us to pay attention to our bodies in new ways while at the same time the changes in our bodies force us to pay new attention to our psyche.
It seems to be a necessary task of individuation to come to terms with one’s own physical being. Sometimes this takes t e form of a serious illness. Joan Halifax’s work with elder healers among the rain forest people has convinced her that shamen usually undergo severe physical trials in their training as part of a deconstruction phase preceding new integration.
In the years between his thirties and his sixties Jung had worked productively, writing, analyzing patients, building the first sections of the tower at Bollingen that he realized mirrored his own psychic growth. His five children had grown and he had seven grandchildren. He had become president of the International Society for Psychotherapy, traveled widely and had won many honors throughout the world. Peasants and scholars alike identified him as a great man.
But there were many pressures on the great man. Analysands came to expect an almost miraculous facilitation of their individuation process. Those who had analyzed with him and moved on expected him to respond to their letters. Brilliant minds began to identify him as a worthy colleague. His work and his correspondence grew, with enormous demands on his time and energy.
On the whole Jung coped without serious difficulty. However an illness that followed a trip to India in 1937 forced him to limit some of his activities. He was sixtytwo when he experienced great distress from dysentery. In March of that year, he wrote
that this illness and the inordinate pressure of work prevented him from corresponding with others.
A year later he wrote to his doctor that he was doing much better, walking for three to six hours at a time, climbing mountains, working in his garden, writing “a longish paper in English” and “bursting with energy.”30
The crisis of ill health seemed to be past. Despite inner and outer pressures, Jung was once again able to give form to the creative forces that were so strong in him. Only a year went by, however, before he wrote of “a little collapse … on account of overworking.”
By that time another war was an immediate danger; Hitler was “reaching his climax and with him the German psychosis.”32
Jung wrote to M. Esther Harding in New York of “living provisionally, expecting all sorts of possibilities,”33 hoping Switzerland would not be involved in the war.
By the spring of 1940 the threat of invasion was strong enough that Jung took the women and children of his family to refuge in the Swiss Alps near Saanen. The younger men of the family were off in the army guarding the borders of their country, now surrounded by fascist forces. Left as the only adult male in a household of women and children, transplanted from the familiarity of home and practice, Jung wrote to a friend that it felt “as if one were sitting on a box full of dynamite that might go off in the next moment. Yet one is quiet, because it is a great fatality.”34
The stresses of exile, awaiting a war in which both his country and his loved ones might suffer, added to a feeling of impending doom. Like many who had experienced the physical and psychological devastation of the First World War, Jung had a good idea what the fatality” of the conflict might be. Jung also felt himself under attack. Rumors that he was a Nazi caused him to rite to a colleague:
I don’t think that I have paranoic delusions about persecution. The difficulty is very real. Whatever I touch and wherever I go I meet with this prejudice that I’m a Nazi and that I’m in close affiliation with the German government.
Allegations such as these left Jung’s reputation scarred. In his role as president of the International Society for Psychotherapy, he was determined to keep the lines of
communication open with its German members. He had also published an article comparing Jewish and Aryan psychologies, an article that some still interpret today as anti-Semitic.36 While Jung did get caught in certain of the cultural stereotypes of his Victorian era, he was not anti-Semitic.
He took on many Jewish analysands, some of whom became his star pupils; he also helped many Jews escape from Nazism, and encouraged one of his students to use her ties with Nazi leaders to spy for the Allies. Nevertheless, he could not seem to escape the accusation that he was pro-Nazi. That this scar remains is a reminder of how extremely difficult it is to walk the narrow line between confronting unconscious forces, within the psyche or in the outer world, and the misguided perception that one is in collaboration with those forces.
When the threat of invasion ended, Jung was able to return his family to Zürich and to spend time at Bollingen. Nevertheless, he called 1941 the anno miseriae, the year of misery. He felt ”old and rotten,” too busy with lectures, meetings and patients to write, and “very tired and deeply depressed by the senselessness of this war.”37
He was beginning to feel his age and reported, “Whenever I get a bit too tired I also also feel my heart and that is decidedly disagreeable and makes me cross with the whole world.”38
Jung was then sixty-six. The misery of war intensified. Jung described the first four days after Pearl Harbor as “a period of black depression.” ~Jane R. Prétat: Coming to Age: The Croning Years and Late-life, Page 26-30
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