Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Toni Wolff: The End of an Intimate Friendship

C. G. Jung and Toni Wolff entered their elder years1 the estrangement between them. only grew. Joseph Henderson certifies: “It is true that
in later years Toni Wolff and Jung saw less of each other.

This must have been a lonely time for her.”1 Just three months before: she died1 Toni nostalgically wrote to Helen Henley1 “Everything must come to an end1 and good things above all.”

But she continued to call upon Carl1 even though he. treated her with disdain, ignoring her at tea, and reading a detective novel rather than talking with her.

Ruth Bailey, who was present at these occasions, recalls:

She used to come to tea on Wednesdays when I was there …. She used to come to tea one day a week with him …. I was told not to go.
I would say, “Well, I will leave you now.” I would see their tea was there. “No, you stay and pour for us, Ruth,” he would say. Then he
would come and get his little book out of his pocket and read and leave me to talk to Toni. I used to feel terribly sorry for them. That
was a terrible situation.

Ruth felt great empathy for Toni, who even in her sixties, arrived outfitted
in her loveliest couturier gowns:

“She always looked marvelous and dressed beautifully. She would be so beautifully turned, and I used to feel so sorry for her. I would feel sorry for anybody when this came to an end.”4 Ruth wondered why Toni even bothered to visit: “I used to think, ‘Why do you ever come? I wouldn’t come if I were you.“‘

But Toni continued to call on Carl, never abandoning the hope that one day their love might revive, that the feelings of closeness between them. might

return as in their early days, yet she accepted whatever C. G. would give her. uch a woman,

Cara Barker concludes, “has learned to settle for scraps [and] with these she tries to fill the crevices of loneliness.”

Rather than grieving the end of the relationship, Toni Wolff attempted to hold onto even its barest threads.

Verena Kast, a Jungian analyst who has written on the experience of personal loss, observes: Many deal “with loss by anxiously clinging to what is already lost. But in so doing, one dries up emotionally; life becomes empty and meaningless .”

Toni Wolff had committed herself to a relationship with Carl whatever the cost, and she experienced the painful truth that Jung had written years earlier:

“Love is always a problem. Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from
heaven to hell.”

DISAPPOINTMENT TURNS TO BITTERNESS

As a result of her disappointment, extreme disillusionment overtook Toni. She turned acidic, bitter, and closed in spirit. She began to atrophy, as a heart stricken by ill-fortune and left unredeemed will eventually use itself up and bleed dry.

Jane Wheelwright recalls: “She was cold as ice.”

Wolff had expressed, at the beginning of her relationship with Jung, that the loss of love will “eventually collapse” a woman’s feeling nature.

Thirty years before, in his book on the psychological types, Jung had similarly warned that, of all the psychological types, the introverted-thinkin

g individual-the orientation that best described Toni-runs the risk of becoming “poisoned by a kind of sediment of bitterness.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes issues the same warning:

A woman who places herself in an untenable emotional box will grow “bitter to the end of [her] days.”

At last, Toni scorned love itself as a maudlin sentimentality, little more than an uninformed infatuation.

David Hart witnessed a piercing moment during one of her seminars at the C. G. Jung Institute in which her grim sentiment
became apparent:

We were concentrating on the nature and meaning of analytic work, and one of the Swiss members, a man, asked her, “Is not the great
therapeutic agent in analysis-love?”

Her response was surprising, even shocking. “Love! What is love!”

She laughed him to scorn …. Miss Wolff found it ridiculously sentimental … the notion that love had anything to do with psychological healing.

Most telling of all, she thereby revealed this absurd sentimentality was, in her opinion, what love was all about.

I could not comprehend the full import of her outburst at the time. Only later, once aware of the course of her relationship with Jung, did I connect it with the disappointment and disillusionment she probably suffered in her later years.

Indeed, Marie-Louise von Franz remarks1 “Such people write off love as this or that land in the process even write off themselves.”

Toni Wolff now turned increasingly to alcohol and cigarettes to alleviate her pain.

But even in this hardened place in the psyche1 in the abyss lying beyond sadness and disappointment-in utter emptiness-a wisdom can still penetrate, but only if the human quality of feeling intercedes.

Salt, an ageless symbol for bitterness1 points also to wisdom.

The Catholic Church traditionally employs salt1 along with a priest’s blessing1 to transform ordinary water into holy water.

Alchemically, it is the same: Salt plays a major role in the process of transformation1 but only when the vehicle of water-in psychological terms the feeling nature-is introduced as a catalyst.

Then1 the natural bitterness of salt is converted into holiness. Jung explains in Mysterium Coniunctionis:

Apart from its lunar wetness and its terrestrial nature, the most outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom … so bitterness
and wisdom would form a pair of opposites with a third thing between.

The factor common to both, however incommensurable the two ideas may seem, is, psychologically, the Junction of feeling.

Out of the depths of hell1 Marie-Louise von Franz confirms, a renewing water can flow, the “water of life,” the element that bathes away the sorrows of life and softens the curse of “rigidity and hardening.”

This attribute is the psychological quality of feeling.

But Toni Wolff failed to drink from this sacred well-psychologically to feel-and more importantly to grieve-the kind of mourning that meets, in the words of Cara Barker, a “wounding so deep that even the woman who suffers it doesn’t know its full depths.” ~Nan Savage Healy, C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collaboration, Pages 287-289

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The Meaning Factor in Synchronicity by Nora Mindell

Lecture held in Guarda, Switzerland, on February 24, 1994 (this transcript incorporates Marie-Louise von Franz’s corrections from June 13, 1994).

Mindell: C. G. Jung and M.-L. von Franz emphasize the fact that synchronistic events are characterized not only by an equivalence (and relative simultaneity) between inner and outer events which cannot be explained causally, but also by the factor of meaning.

This occurs when an “observer is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize the tertium comparationis,” to quote Jung.

Von Franz even goes so far as to state that it is essential to interpret the meaning of a synchronistic event correctly.

Therefore, I have begun to study the meaning factor more carefully and would like to summarize some of its general aspects this evening.

Tomorrow night, I will attempt to amplify the meaning factor within the context of my own personal experience of synchronicity.

It is evident when one reads Jung’s works that meaning plays a key role in his general philosophical outlook and approach to the study of the unconscious.

When he tackled the problem of synchronicity, he focused on the issue of meaning by distinguishing between two aspects relevant to understanding it better—namely, the nature of acausal orderedness, in which latent meaning exists, and synchronicity, in which the observer plays a key role by perceiving the meaning that manifests.

In Psyche and Matter, von Franz clarifies this distinction when she points out that acausal orderedness and meaning represent two aspects of the archetypes. Page 135-147

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synchronistic synchronicity — 208 synchronicity

Edward F. Edinger: The Syzygy — Anima and Animus

Jung’s chapter on the syzygy begins with paragraph 20.

Let us first examine the term itself.

It means pair or couple.

The pairs of aions that the Gnostic god emanated were called syzygies, but the original meaning of the word was “to yoke together.”

It is derived from two different stems: “syn” meaning with, and “zygon” meaning yoke or the cross-bar of a harness.

The longitudinal bar of the harness is connected to the wagon as illustrated opposite in figure 4, and the cross bar is called the zygon.

The necks of the horses slip into the two loops of the zygon.

The zygon or the syzygy literally means the pair of horses that are yoked together in a single harness.

As Jung uses this term, it refers to the masculine and feminine principles that are yoked together in the human psyche.

Figure 5 (page 31) can be thought of as an abstract representation of the psyche.

It is also a representation of this book, Aion.

Working our way down from above, we start with the ego at the top.

Next comes the shadow, drawn in a way to indicate that the shadow is cast because of the light of the ego, so to speak.

It could also be drawn as just another layer.

As one goes deeper there is the syzygy, the masculine and feminine principles represented by the anima in the man and animus in the woman.

Deeper still comes the Self, first in its personal manifestations, then in its more collective ones as history, world, and then as the total space-time continuum.

All these levels will be explored exhaustively later.

Figure 5 also illustrates how the masculine and feminine egos approach the Self through their contrasexual components.

In the middle of the diagram there is a kind of neutral ego that sneaks right between the masculine and feminine principles, which is an ideal situation that does not really exist.

On the left hand side is the feminine ego which, in order to get to the Self, must go through the animus.

Contrariwise, the masculine ego has to go through the anima.

Jung tells us that the anima and animus in the psyche are composed of three factors: the contrasexual qualities of the individual, the archetypal image, and the person’s life experience of the opposite sex. (par. 41, note 5)

The first two factors are innate.

The third, one’s life experience of the opposite sex, is acquired, and of course in actual living experience those innate and acquired factors are not neatly discriminated, but are overlapping and intermixing.

In the third factor, the experience of the mother and father is overwhelmingly important, but the parents are not the only ones to contribute the acquired characteristics.

The major contributors to the anima experience in the man, in addition to the mother, are the sister, the daughter, the lover, the wife and companion.

Those are all on the acquired level.

Behind those personal experiences will be archetypal factors which will be met as divine guide and source of inspiration, or evil seductress, or a personification of fate or destiny or life itself, and finally the principle of eros.

In the woman’s animus experience there will be similar factors: first of all the father, then brother, son, lover, husband and companion, all on the personal, acquired level.

At the archetypal level may be found the divine guide and source of inspiration, or the evil rapist, or the personification of spiritual meaning, and finally the principle of Logos.

Also important in this context are the different states of the ego’s relation to anima or animus, which is of some importance in evaluating analytic patients.

I distinguish four different states: the infantile state, the projected state, the possessed state, and the conscious state.

The infantile state is the original one of symbolic mother-son or father-daughter incest.

Jung describes this condition in a man in a lengthy passage which is profoundly relevant to daily analytic work.

This is the man’s infantile relation to the anima:

His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured.

He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him.

No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!

. . . Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.

You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.

. . . There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world.

But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift from the mother.

The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force.

It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales.

For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life. (pars. 2022)

Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in Jung’s Aion, Page 28-30

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079 crazy — Syzygy Syzygy Syzygy Syzygy Syzygy Syzygy

1. Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11)

Hildegarde von Bingen, a significant personality quite apart from her mysticism, expresses herself about her central vision in a quite similar way.

“Since my childhood,” she says, “I always see a light in my soul, but not with the outer eyes, nor through the thoughts of my heart; neither do the five outer senses take part in this vision. . . . The light I perceive is not of a local kind, but is much brighter than the cloud which bears the sun. I cannot distinguish in it height, breadth, or length. . . . What I see or learn in such a vision stays long in my memory.

I see, hear, and know at the same time, and learn what I know in the same moment. … I cannot recognize any sort of form in this light, although I sometimes see in it another light that is known to me as the living light. . . . While I am enjoying the spectacle of this light, all sadness and sorrow disappear from my memory …”

I know a few individuals who are familiar with this phenomenon from personal experience.

As far as I have ever been able to understand it, the phenomenon seems to have to do with an acute condition of consciousness as intensive as it is abstract, a ” detached ” consciousness (see below), which, as Hildegarde pertinently remarks, brings up to consciousness regions of psychic events ordinarily covered with darkness.

The fact that, in connection with this, the general bodily sensations disappear, shows that their specific energy has been withdrawn from them, and has apparently gone toward heightening the clearness of consciousness.

As a rule, the phenomenon is spontaneous, coming and going at its own initiative.

Its effect is astonishing in that it almost always brings about a solution of psychic complications, and thereby frees the inner personality from emotional and imaginary entanglements, creating thus a unity of being, which is universally felt as a ” release
.
The achievement of such a symbolic unity is beyond the power of the conscious will because, in this case, the conscious is partisan.

Its opponent is the collective unconscious which does not understand the language of the conscious.

Therefore it is necessary to have the “magically” effective symbol which contains those primitive analogies that speak to the unconscious.

The unconscious can only be reached and expressed by the symbol, which is the reason why the process of individuation can never do without the symbol.

The symbol is, on the one hand, the primitive expression of the unconscious, while, on the other hand, it is an idea corresponding to the highest intuition produced by consciousness.

The oldest mandala known to me, is a Paleolithic so-called ” sun-wheel recently discovered in Rhodesia.

It is likewise founded on the principle of four.

Things reaching so far back in human history naturally touch upon the deepest layers of the unconscious and make it possible to grasp the latter where conscious speech shows itself to be quite impotent.

Such things cannot be thought out but must grow again from the forgotten depths, if they are to express the supreme presentiments of consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit.

Coming from these depths they can unite the uniqueness of present-day consciousness with the age-old past of life. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower.

Image: St. Hildegard of Bingen

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