Jung’s own shadow

He sent the association studies to Vienna, and the correspondence with Freud began in 1906.25 They met on 3 March 1907 and, by Jung’s account, talked for about thirteen hours with barely a break.9 Freud was fifty, Jung thirty-one, and each had something the other badly wanted. Jung got a father with a doctrine that worked, which his own father had not had. Freud got a Swiss Protestant with a hospital appointment, and said so in private: his young colleague was what kept psychoanalysis from being dismissed as a Jewish national affair.25 In 1910 Jung was made the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, over older and more loyal men. The word people used was crown prince.

Crown princes wait. Jung was bad at waiting and worse at admitting he minded. The break was conducted on theoretical ground: his book on the transformations and symbols of the libido, published in two parts in 1911 and 1912, redefined libido as psychic energy in general rather than sexual energy, and he knew as he wrote the second half that it would cost him Freud. The rest was not theory. A slight over a visit to Kreuzlingen, a congress at which Freud fainted in front of him, a correspondence that curdled. In December 1912 Jung wrote the letter that finished it, telling Freud he kept his followers in the position of sons, and that a man who analyses his pupils’ errors from above ends up with slaves or brats.25 In January 1913 Freud proposed they give up their personal relations entirely. Jung resigned the yearbook’s editorship that year and the presidency in 1914.

Read that with Jung’s own tool and it is the Throne, barely disguised. He wanted to lead, and could not say so, because the persona of the story was the honest scientist following the material wherever it went. So the wanting went outward, to be fought where it could be fought cleanly: in Freud, who did want to lead, said so, and was insufferable about it. A year later Jung dreamed that he shot the hero Siegfried dead on a mountain road, and woke certain he had to understand the dream at once or kill himself.9 The charge is the tell. Nobody has that dream, or writes that letter, about a disagreement over libido.

In August 1904 an eighteen-year-old Russian-Jewish woman, Sabina Spielrein, was admitted to the Burghölzli in violent distress. Jung, twenty-nine, treated her by the new method, as his first psychoanalytic case. It worked. She recovered, read medicine at Zurich, qualified in 1911 and became an analyst herself; her 1912 paper on destruction as a cause of coming into being anticipated ground Freud would later take.27 Somewhere between 1908 and 1910 the relationship stopped being treatment. How far it went physically is still argued over: the evidence is her diary and the letters, found in Geneva in 1977, and it establishes an entanglement rather than a ledger of acts.28

What is not in doubt is how he handled it. In the spring of 1909 he wrote to Freud about a former patient kicking up a scandal, presenting himself as the target of her designs. Spielrein then wrote to Freud herself. In June, Jung wrote again, admitted he had not told the truth and had behaved badly, and asked for the earlier version to be withdrawn.25 He comes out of that worse than almost anywhere in his papers, and in the most ordinary way: caught, he lied about a woman first and confessed second.

Toni Wolff came to him as a patient in 1910, at twenty-two, after her father’s death. By 1913 she was his collaborator and his lover, and she stayed both for the best part of thirty years. He was married to Emma Rauschenbach, whom he had wed in 1903 and with whom he had five children, and he did not leave. Wolff came to Küsnacht for Sunday lunch. Emma, who had money, intelligence and a practice of her own, accepted an arrangement she had not chosen and by most accounts never stopped minding.24

This is the Feral and the Hungry One, lived out rather than owned. The distinction matters: from outside, appetite acted on looks a lot like appetite integrated, and it isn’t. Jung never denied that he wanted; he declined to call the wanting by its own name. It was the work that required it. It was the anima. It was the daemon that overpowered him and made him ruthless, a sentence he wrote about himself in old age and left standing with no apology attached.9 A disowned quality does not have to be hidden. It only has to be given a nobler name than the one it answers to.

In June 1933 Jung became president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a mainly German professional body, after Ernst Kretschmer resigned it as the new regime moved in. He took the editorship of its journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, at the same time. His defence, then and for the rest of his life, was structural: in 1934 he reorganised the society as an international one with national sections, so that German Jewish doctors expelled from the German section could hold individual membership and go on practising. That is true, and it was not nothing to the people it covered.24

The rest is also true. The December 1933 Zentralblatt carried an editorial by Jung on the differences between Germanic and Jewish psychology alongside a manifesto by M. H. Göring, a cousin of Hermann Göring, requiring members to take Mein Kampf as a scientific basis. Jung said afterwards that Göring’s statement had been printed without his knowledge; the claim has been disputed ever since and the record does not settle it.32 Then, in 1934, came ‘The State of Psychotherapy Today’, which argued that Freud’s and Adler’s psychologies were fitted to Jewish experience and should not be applied wholesale to what he called Germanic and Slavic Christendom. It contains this sentence: ‘The Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism.’29 It is his sentence, he published it, and the fact that it was meant as a double-edged compliment to the barbarians is not a defence.

He was Swiss and never a party member. His 1936 essay ‘Wotan’ read Germany as a civilised nation possessed by an old god of storm and frenzy, a sharper diagnosis than most of Europe managed that year, and still a diagnosis of them.30 By 1940 his books were unwelcome in Germany, and during the war he passed readings of the Nazi leadership to Allen Dulles of American intelligence in Bern.24 None of that is cancelled by the 1934 essay. None of it cancels the 1934 essay.

In 1945 he published ‘After the Catastrophe’, on collective guilt. It argues that psychic epidemics are contagious, that the wickedness of a neighbour kindles the same thing in the onlooker, and that no European stood outside the German catastrophe looking in.31 He included himself in the general way the essay is written, and not in the specific way that would have meant naming what he had published eleven years earlier. The nearest thing to a plain admission is second-hand: Gershom Scholem wrote in 1963 that Leo Baeck, who had survived Theresienstadt, told him in Jerusalem in 1947 that he went to see Jung after the war, refused at first, then talked with him for two hours, and that Jung said he had slipped up. Scholem was recording a sixteen-year-old conversation, Baeck was dead before it was printed, and Jung never confirmed it.33

Read as shadow, the 1930s are the Throne and the Saint arriving together. The Throne is the wanting: a chair was offered to a man who had spent thirty years insisting he only followed the material, and he took it, and then found reasons. The Saint is the shape the defence takes: I stayed in order to protect people, look who I helped. Both can be sincere. Neither is the same as saying plainly that ambition made him useful to a regime and that he wrote something he should not have written. The man who defined the shadow as a moral problem nobody meets without considerable moral effort3 found the effort hardest when the shadow was his own.

Between about 1913 and 1917, alone and frightened, Jung did the thing the rest of his psychology is a report on. He lowered his attention deliberately, let the images come, wrote down what he saw and then, crucially, spoke to it. The raw record went into a set of small black-bound notebooks, the Black Books, which he kept adding to for twenty years.35 The best of it he transcribed into a red leather folio in careful calligraphy, with painted illuminations, as Liber Novus. He worked on it until about 1930 and never published it. It appeared in 2009, edited by Sonu Shamdasani.34

What turns up in it is not edifying. A desert, a murdered child, Elijah and a blind Salome who wants him to heal her. And Philemon: an old man with the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher, who walked with him and told him his thoughts were not his own possession. They were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and a man who supposes he produces them is mistaken. Jung said afterwards that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche as something that is not you.9 That is the hinge of the method. You cannot negotiate with a part of yourself you believe you are inventing.

In 1922 he bought land at Bollingen on the upper lake of Zurich, and in 1923, the year his mother died, began building a round stone tower there with his own hands. He added to it in stages for thirty years and kept it without electricity or running water.9 It was where personality No. 2 was let out of the attic. And the private business of those years became public technique: active imagination, sketched in theory in 1916 and named and taught in the 1930s.36 Sit down with the figure. Let it say its piece. Answer it as you would answer a person, and hold your ground while you do.

Jung did not get rid of his shadow. The ambition kept the costume of service to the end, the appetite kept the vocabulary of fate, and the worst year of his public life came twenty years after he had written down, better than anyone before him, what it costs to look at your own dark side. What he did instead was sit in a room with the thing, night after night, ask it questions, write down the answers, and work them up into something other people could use. That is the whole offer, and it is smaller and harder than it sounds. The eight figures are names for what tends to turn up when you try it. The reflection is one way of finding out which of them has been doing the talking for you.