Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (19xx)

:9 113219 MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS by C. G.Jung RECORDED AND EDITED BY Aniela Jaffe TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY Richard and Clara Winston REVISED EDITION VINTAGE BOOKS A Division ofRandom House, Inc. NEW YORK VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1989 Copyright 1961, 1962, 1963 by Random House, Inc. under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., All rights reserved New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books, a division Random House, of Inc., in 1963. Final revised edition in hardcover published by Pantheon Books, February 1973. under the title "Erinnerungen Traume Gedanken." Originally published Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data G. C. Jung, (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961. [Erinnerungen, Traume, Gedanken. English] Memories, dreams, reflections /by C.G. Jung; recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe; translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. p. Rev. ed. cm. Originally published under title: Erinnerungen Iraume Gedanken. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-679-72395-1 i. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1856-1939. I. Switzerland-Biography. JafF<, Aniela. 2.. Psychoanalysts II. Title. 1989 88-37040 [B] CIP Manufactured 10 9 in the 8 United States of America Introduction He looked at his own Soul with a Telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed be beautiful and he added to the Consciousness hidden to Constellations; worlds within worlds. COLERIDGE, Notebooks THIS BOOK had its inception during the Eranos Conference held in Ascona in the summer of 1956. There the publisher Kurt Wolff, in conversation with friends from Zurich, spoke of his wish to have Pantheon Books of New York publish a biography of Carl Gustav Jung. Dr. Jolande Jacobi, one of C. G. Jung's associates, proposed that the office of biographer be entrusted to me. were well aware that the task would by no means be an easy one. Jung's distaste for exposing his personal life to the public eye was well known. Indeed, he gave his consent only after a long period of doubt and hesitation. But once he had done so, he allotted to me an entire afternoon once a week for All of us our work together. Considering the press of his regular program and how easily he tired for even then he was past of work, eighty We that was a great deal of time, began in the spring of 1957. It had been proposed that Introduction the book be written not as a "biography/' but in the form of an This plan "autobiography," with Jung himself as the narrator. determined the form of the book, and my first task consisted Alsolely in asking questions and noting down Jung's replies. warmed soon he the he reticent was rather at beginning, though He began telling about himself, his development, dreams, and his thoughts with growing interest. By the end of the year Jung's affirmative attitude toward our of inner turbujoint efforts led to a decisive step. After a period lence, long-submerged images out of his childhood rose to the to the work. his surface of his mind. He sensed their connection with ideas in the works he had written in his old age, but could not grasp it that he wanted to set clearly. One morning he informed me down his recollections of his childhood directly. By this time he had already told me a good many of his earliest memories, but there were still great gaps in the story. This decision was as gratifying as it was unexpected, for I great a strain writing was for Jung. At his advanced knew how age he would not undertake anything of the sort unless he felt it was a "task" imposed on him from within. Here was evidence that the "autobiography" was justified in terms of Jung's own inner life. development, I noted down a reis always a matter of fate. There is the process of writing, and I about something unpredictable cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course. Thus this 'autobiography' is now taking a direction quite different from what I had imagined at the beginning. It has become a Some time mark of his: after this "A book of new mine necessity for me to write down early memories. If I neglect to do so for a single day, unpleasant physical symptoms imfollow. As soon as I set to work vanish and mediately they my my head feels perfectly clear." In April 1958 Jung finished the three chapters on his childhood, school days, and years at the university. At first he called them, "On the Early Events of My Life." These chapters ended with the completion of his medical studies in 1900. This, however, was not the sole direct contribution that Jung Introduction made to the book. In January 1959 he in Bollingen. He devoted every chapters of our book, which had was at his country house morning to reading chosen meanwhile been hammered he returned the chapter, "On Life after Death/' he said to me, "Something within me has been touched. A gradient has formed, and I must write/' Such was the origin of "Late Thoughts," in which he voiced his deepest and perhaps his most convictions. far-reaching In the summer of that same year of 1959, likewise in Bollingen, Jung wrote the chapter on Kenya and Uganda. The section on the Pueblo Indians is taken from an unpublished and unfinished manuscript that deals with general questions of the into shape. When psychology of primitives. In order to complete the chapters "Sigmund Freud" and "Confrontation with the Unconscious/' I incorporated a number of passages from a seminar delivered in 1925, in which Jung spoke for the first time of his inner development, The chapter "Psychiatric Activities" is based on conversations between Jung and the young assistant doctors of the Zurich mental hospital of Burgholzli in 1956. At that time one of his grandsons was working as a psychiatrist there. The conversations took place in Jung's house in Kiisnacht. Jung read through the manuscript of this book and approved it. Occasionally he corrected passages or added new material. In turn, I have used the records of our conversations to supplement the chapters he wrote himself, have expanded his sometimes terse allusions, and have eliminated repetitions. The further the book progressed, the closer became the fusion between his work and mine. The genesis of the book to some extent determined its contents. casual, Conversation or spontaneous narration is inevitably and that tone has carried over to the entire "autobiog- The chapters are rapidly moving beams of light that only fleetingly illuminate the outward events of Jung's life and work. In recompense, they transmit the atmosphere of his intel- raphy." lectual world man to whom the psyche asked Jung for specific data on and the experience of a was a profound I often reality. vii Introduction outward happenings, but I asked in vain. Only the spiritual essence of his life's experience remained in his memory, alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling. Far more significant than the difficulties of and this formal organiza- were those prior obstacles, of a more personal to which kind, Jung refers in a letter to a friend of his student tion of the text of 1957, to set days. Replying to a request, in the latter part down the memories of his youth, he wrote: *. You are quite right. When we are old, we are drawn . . back, both from within and from without, to memories of youth. for Once before, an account of some how my pupils asked me conceptions of the un1 giving a seminar. During thirty years ago, I arrived at my conscious. I fulfilled this request by the last years the suggestion has come to me from various quarters that I should do something akin to an autobiography. I have been unable to conceive of my doing anything of the know autobiographies, with their self-deceptions and downright lies, and I know too much about the impossibility of self-portrayal, to want to venture on any such sort. I too many attempt. "Recently I was asked for autobiographical information, and in the course of answering some questions I discovered hidden in my memories certain objective problems which seem to call have therefore weighed the matter and come to the conclusion that I shall fend off other obligations long enough to take up the very first beginnings of my life and consider them in an objective fashion. This task has proved so for closer examination. I difficult and singular that in order to go ahead with it, I have had to promise myself that the results would not be published in my lifetime. Such a promise seemed to me essential in order to assure for myself the necessary detachment and calm. It became clear that all the memories which have remained vivid to me had to do with emotional experiences that arouse uneasiness and passion in the mind scarcely the best condition for an objective account! Your letter 'naturally' came at the very moment when I had virtually resolved to take the plunge. "Fate will have it and this has always been the case with 1 The 1925 seminar mentioned earlier. Introduction me that all Only what the 'outer* aspects of my life should be accidental. proved to have substance and a value. a As result, all memory of outer events has determining and these 'outer' experiences were never so very faded, perhaps essential anyhow, or were so only in that they coincided with of inner phases my development. An enormous part of these 'outer* manifestations of my life has vanished from my memory for the very reason, so it has seemed to me, that I participated in them with all my energies. Yet these are the very things that make up a sensible biography: persons one has met, travels, adventures, entanglements, blows of destiny, and so on. But with few exceptions all these things have become for me phantasms which I barely recollect and which my mind has no desire to reconstruct, for they no longer stir my imagination. "On is interior has the other hand, my recollection of 'inner' experiences all the more vivid and colorful. This poses a problem has grown of description which I scarcely feel able to cope with, at least for the present. Unfortunately, I cannot, for these reasons, fulfill . ." your request, greatly as I regret my inability to do so. . This letter characterizes Jung's attitude. Although he had already "resolved to take the plunge," the letter ends with a refusal. To the day of his death the conflict between affirmation rejection was never entirely settled. There always remained a residue of skepticism, a shying away from his future readers. He did not regard these memoirs as a scientific work, nor even as a book by himself. Rather, he always spoke and wrote of it as "Aniela Jaffe's project," to which he had made contributions. At his specific request it is not to be included in his Collected and Works. Jung has been particularly reticent in speaking of his encounters with people, both public figures and close friends and have spoken with many famous men of my time, the great ones in science and politics, with explorers, artists and writers, princes and financial magnates; but if I am to be honest I must say that only a few such encounters have been significant experiences for me. Our meetings were like those of ships on the high seas, when they dip their flags to one another. Usually, too, these persons had something to ask of me which I am not at relatives. "I fe Introduction Thus I have retained no memories of them, however important these persons may be in the eyes of the world. Our meetings were without portent; they soon faded away and bore no deeper consequences. But of those relationcame to me like ships which were vital to me, and which memories of far-off times, I cannot speak, for they pertain not liberty to divulge. only to my innermost life but also to that of others. me to fling ever." open to the public It is not for eye doors that are closed for- The paucity of outward events is, however, amply compenby the account of Jung's inner experiences, and by a rich sated harvest of thoughts which, as he himself says, are an integral part of his biography. This is true first and foremost of his religious ideas, for this book contains Jung's religious testament. Jung was led number to a confrontation with religious questions by a There were his childhood visions, of different routes. which brought him face to face with the reality of religious experience and remained with him to the end of his life. There was his insuppressible curiosity concerning everything that had to do with lie contents of the psyche and its manifestations the urge to know which characterized his scientific work. And, last but not least, there was his conscience as a physician. Jung regarded himself primarily as a doctor, a psychiatrist. He was well aware that the patient's religious attitude plays a crucial part in the therapy of psychic illnesses. This observation coincided with his discovery that the psyche spontaneously produces images with a religious content, that it is "by nature religious/' became apparent to him that numerous neuroses spring from a disregard for this fundamental characteristic of the psyche, especially during the second half of life. It also Jung's concept of religion differed in many respects from traditional Christianity above all in his answer to the problem of evil and his conception of a God who is not or entirely good From the viewpoint of dogmatic Christianity, Jung was an "outsider." For all his world-wide fame, this verdict distinctly was forcibly borne in upon him by the reactions to his writings. This grieved him, and here and there in this book he expresses the disappointment of an who felt that his kind. investigator religious Introduction were not properly understood. More than once he said grimly, "They would have burned me as a heretic in the Middle Ages!" Only since his death have theologians in increasing numbers begun to say that Jung was indubitably an outstanding ideas figure in the religious history of our century. Jung explicitly declared his allegiance to Christianity, most important of and the works deal with the religious problems of the Christian. He looked at these questions from the standpoint of psychology, deliberately setting a bound between it and the theological approach. In so doing he stressed the necessity of understanding and reflecting, as against the Christian demand for faith. He took this necessity for granted, as one of his the essential features of life. "I find that all my thoughts circle the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin around God like were to oppose any resistance to this force," he wrote in 1952 to a young clergyman. This book is the only place in his extensive writings in which Jung speaks of God and his personal experience of God. While if I he was writing of his youthful rebellion against the church, he "At that time I realized that God for me, at least said, was one of the most immediate experiences." In his scientific works Jung seldom speaks of God; there he is at pains to use once the term "the God-image in the human psyche." This is no. contradiction. In the one case his language is subjective, based upon inner experience; in the other it is die objective language of scientific inquiry. In the first case he is speaking as an individual, whose thoughts are influenced by passionate, powerful feelings, intuitions, and experiences of a long and unusually life; in the second, he is speaking as the scientist who consciously restricts himself to what may be demonstrated and supported by evidence. As a scientist, Jung is an empiricist. rich When Jung speaks of his religious experiences in this book, he is assuming that his readers are willing to enter into his point of view. His subjective statements will be acceptable only to those who have had similar experiences or, to put it another way, to those in whose psyche the God-image bears the same or similar features. at Introduction Although Jung was active and affirmative in the making of the toward the pros"autobiography," for a long time his attitude remained quite understandably pect of its publication dreaded the reaction of highly critical and negative. He rather candor with which he the because of one for the public, thing had revealed his religious experiences and ideas, and for another because the hostility aroused by his book, Answer to Job, was still too close, and the incomprehension or misunderstanding of the world in general too painful. "I have guarded this material all my life, and have never wanted it exposed to the world; for if it is assailed, I shall be affected even more than in the case of my other books. I do not know whether I shall be so far removed from this world that the arrows of criticism will no longer reach me and that I shall be able to bear the adverse reactions. I have suffered enough from incomprehension and from the isolation one falls into when one says things that people do not understand. If the Job book met with so much misunderstanding, my 'memoirs will have an even more unfortunate fate. The 'autobiography' is my life, viewed in the light of the knowledge I have gained from my scientific endeavors. Both are one, and therefore this book makes great demands on people who do not know or cannot understand my scientific ideas. My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around. The way I am and the way I write are a unity. All my ideas and all my endeavors are myself. Thus the 'autobiography* is merely the dot on the i." 9 which the book was taking shape a process and objectivization was also taking place in Jung. With each succeeding chapter he moved, as it were, farther away from himself, until at last he was able to see himself as well as the significance of his life and work from a distance. "If I ask the value of my life, I can only measure myself against the centuries and then I must say, Yes, it means something. Measured by the ideas of today, it means nothing." During the years in of transformation The impersonality, the feeling of historical continuity expressed in these words, emerges ever more strongly in the course of the book, as the reader will see. xii Introduction The chapter entitled "The Work," with its brief survey of the How genesis of Jung's most important writings, is fragmentary. could this be otherwise, when his collected works comprise nearly twenty volumes? Moreover, Jung never felt any disposition to offer a summary of his ideas either in conversation or in writing. When he was asked to do so, he replied in his rather drastic sort "That of thing lies characteristic, fashion, my range. I see no sense in publishing a condensation of papers in which I went to so much trouble to discuss the subject in detail. I should have to omit all my evidence and rely on a type of categorical statement which would not totally outside make my results any easier to understand. The characteristic ruminant activity of ungulate animals, which consists in the regurgitation of what has already been chewed over, is any." thing but stimulating to my appetite. . . The reader should therefore regard this chapter as a retrospective sketch written in response to a special occasion, and not expect The it to be comprehensive. which I have included short glossary at the end of the book, at the publisher's request, will, I hope, be of help to the reader who is not familiar with Jung's work and terminology. I have taken a small number of the definitions from the Worterbuch der Psychologic und ihrer Grenzgebiete, with the kind permission of its editor, Kurt von Sury, M.D. Wherever possible I have elucidated the concepts of Jungian psychology by quotations from Jung^s works, and have supplemented the dictionary'? definitions in the same way. These quotations must, however, be regarded as no more than suggestive hints. Jung was constantly defining his concepts in new and different ways, for an ultimate definition, he felt, was not possible. He thought it wise to let the inexplicable elements that always cling to psychic remain as riddles or mysteries. realities A persons have helped me with this inspiring and have shown unfailing interest during the slow growth of the book, and have furthered its progress by stimuI offer heartfelt lating suggestions and criticism. To all of them thanks. Here I shall mention by name only Helen and Kurt great many difficult task, xiii Introduction Wolff, of Locarno, who conceived the idea of the book and helped to bring that idea to fruition; Marianne and Walther who throughout the years in me by word and deed; and R. F. C. Hull, of Palma de Mallorca, who gave me advice and help with unflagging patience, Niehus-Jung, of Kusnacht-Ziirich, which it was taking shape aided ANHXA JAFFE December 1961 Contents INTRODUCTION V Prologue 3 6 I First Years School Years 24 III Student Years 84 IV Psychiatric Activities 114 Sigmund Freud 146 Confrontation with the Unconscious II V VI VII The Work 170 200 VIII The Tower 223 Travels 238 IX North Africa i. Visions 238 246 253 274 284 289 On 299 America: The Pueblo Indians it Kenya and Uganda Hi. India te>. Ravenna and Rome t). X XI XII Life after Death Late Thoughts 327 355 Retrospect APPENDIX L Letters from Freud to lung Letters to Jung from America Hi Emma Letter to Emma Jung from North Africa to. RidwrdWilhelm it. t;. Septem Sermones ad Mortuos GLOSSARY The Collected Works INDEX 361 365 371 373 378 391 of G G. Jung 403 411 MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS Prologue LIFE MY scious. a story of the self-realization of the unconEverything in the unconscious seeks outward is manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem. What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an indi- vidual life. Thus it is year, to tell now undertaken, in my eighty-third personal myth, I can only make direct statestories/' Whether or not the stories are "true" is that I have my ments, only "tell not the problem. The only question fable, is whether what I tell is my my truth. An autobiography is so difficult to write because we possess no no objective foundation, from which to judge ourThere are really no proper bases for comparison. I know standards, selves. Memories, Dreams, Reflections am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter that in many things I of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range then can a man form any definite opingreater than man's. ions about himself? are a process which we do not control, or only How We psychic final judgment partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know every- thing but at most that know how it has all only a pretense. At bottom we never about. The story of a life begins some- is come where, at some particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turn out. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be vaguely hinted at. The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, a young medical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated. Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome re- exist as mains. In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. when That is why I speak chiefly I include my dreams and of inner experiences, amongst visions. which These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized. 4 Prologue All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings. Many people have participated in the story of our times and written about it; if the reader wants an account of that, let him turn to them or get somebody to tell it to him. Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the "other" reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost im- portance by comparison. Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection. Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later on. I early arrived at the insight that when no from within to the problems and complexities of answer comes mately mean very are little. Outward circumstances life, they no ulti- substi- tute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of biography deals. my life, and with these my auto- I First Years was six months old, my parents moved from Kesswil on Lake Constance to Laufen, the castle and vicarage above the Falls of the Rhine. This was in 1875. memories begin with my second or third year. I recall the My I WHEN the laundry house, the church, the castle, vicarage, the garden, the Falls, the small castle of Worth, and the sexton's farm. These are nothing but islands of memory afloat in a sea of vagueness, each by itself, apparently with no connection between them. One memory comes up which is perhaps the earliest of my life, and is indeed only a rather hazy impression. I am lying in a pram, in the shadow of a tree. It is a fine, warm summer day, the sky blue, and golden sunlight darting through green leaves. The hood of the pram has been left up. I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day, and have a sense of indescribable well-being. I see the sun glittering through the leaves and blossoms of the bushes. Everything is wholly wonderful, colorful, and splendid. Another memory: I am sitting in our dining room, on the west side of the house, perched in a high chair and spooning up warm milk with bits of broken bread in it. The milk has a First Years pleasant taste and a characteristic smell. This was the first time I became aware of the smell of milk. It was the moment when, so to speak, I became conscious of This memory, too, smelling. goes very far back. Still another: a lovely "Now I front of summer evening. An aunt said to me, show you something." She took me out in the house, on the road to Dachsen. On the far horizon am going to the chain of the Alps lay bathed in glowing sunset reds. The Alps could be seen very clearly that evening. "Now look over there" I can hear her saying to me in Swiss dialect "the mountains are all red." For the first time I consciously saw the Alps. Then I was told that the next day the village children would be going on a school outing to the Uetliberg, near Zurich. I wanted so much to go too. To my sorrow, I was informed that children as small as I could not go along, there was nothing to be done about it. From then on the Uetliberg and Zurich became an unattainable land of dreams, near to the glowing, snowcovered mountains. From a somewhat later period comes another memory. My mother took me to the Thurgau to visit friends, who had a castle on Lake Constance. I could not be dragged away from the water. The waves from the steamer washed up to the shore, the sun glistened on the water, and the sand under the water had been curled into little ridges by the waves. The lake stretched away and away into the distance. This expanse of water was an inconceivable pleasure to me, an incomparable splendor. At that time the idea became fixed in my mind that I must live near a lake; without water, I thought, nobody could live at all. Still another memory comes up: strangers, bustle, excitement. The maid comes running and exclaims, "The fishermen have found a corpse came down the Falls they want to put it in the washhousel" My father says, "Yes, yes." I want to see the dead body at once. My mother holds me back and sternly for- bids me to go into the garden. When all the men had left, I garden to the washhouse. But the door quickly stole into the I went around the house; at the back there was an open drain running down the slope, and I saw blood and water was locked. Memories, Dreams, Reflections At that trickling out, I found this extraordinarily interesting. old. four I not was time yet years Yet another image: I am restive, feverish, unable to sleep. in his arms, father carries up and down, singing his My me paces old student songs. I particularly remember one I was especially fond of and which always used to soothe me, "Alles schweige, ." The beginning went something like that. To jeder neige this day I can remember my father's voice, singing over me in the . stillness of . the night. from general suffering, so my mother told me afterward, eczema. Dim intimations of trouble in my parents' marriage hovered around me. My illness, in 1878, must have been connected with a temporary separation of my parents. My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basel, and presumably her illness had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage. An aunt of mine, who was a spinster and some twenty years older than my mother, took care of me. I was deeply troubled by my mother's being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word "love" was spoken. The feeling I as" sociated with "woman was for a long time that of innate unI was 5 reliability. "Father," on the other hand, meant reliability and powerlessness. That is the handicap I started off with. Later, these early impressions were revised: I have trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed. While my mother was away, our maid, too, looked after me. I still remember her picking me up and laying my head against her shoulder. She had black hair and an olive complexion, and was quite different from my mother. I can see, even now, her hairline, her throat, with its darkly pigmented skin, and her ear. All this seemed to me very strange and yet strangely familiar. It was as though she belonged not to my family but only to me, as though she were connected in some way with other mysterious things I could not understand. This type of girl later became a 1 component of my anima. The feeling of strangeness which she 1 For this and other technical terms which are commonly used by Jung but may be unfamiliar to the reader or no longer fresh in his mind, see the glossary at the end of the book. 8 First Years conveyed, and yet of having known her always, was a charwhich later came to symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood. From the period of my parents' separation I have another memory image: a young, very pretty and charming girl with blue eyes and fair hair is leading me, on a blue autumn day, under golden maple and chestnut trees along the Rhine below acteristic of that figure foliage, came Worth The sun is shining through the on the ground. This girl later bemother-in-law. She admired my father. I did not see the Falls, near and yellow my castle. leaves lie her again until I was twenty-one years old. These are my outward memories. What follow now are more powerful, indeed overwhelming images, some of which I recall only dimly. There was a fall downstairs, for example, and another fall against the angle of a stove leg. I remember pain and blood, a doctor sewing a wound in my head the scar remained visible until my senior year at the Gymnasium. mother told My me, too, of the time when I was crossing the bridge over the Rhine Falls to Neuhausen. The maid caught me just in time I already had one leg under the railing and was about to slip through. These things point to an unconscious suicidal urge or, be, to a fatal resistance to life in this world. I also had vague fears at night. I would hear about in the house. The muted roar of the Rhine things walking Falls was always audible, and all around lay a danger zone. it may At that time People drowned, bodies were swept over the rocks. In the cemetery nearby, the sexton would dig a hole heaps of brown, upturned earth. Black, solemn men in long frock coats with unusually tall hats and shiny black boots would bring a black father would be there in his clerical gown, speaking in a resounding voice. Women wept. I was told that someone was being buried in this hole in the ground. Certain persons who had box. My been around previously would suddenly no longer be there. Then I would hear that they had been buried, and that Lord Jesus had taken them to himself. My mother had taught me a prayer which I had to say every evening. I gladly did so because it gave me a sense of comfort in face of the vague uncertainties of the night: 9 Memories, Dreams, Reflections Spread out thy wings, Lord Jesus mild, chick, thy child. devour would Satan it, "If And take to thee thy No harm So let shall overpower the angels sing! it," 2 Lord Jesus was comforting, a nice, benevolent gentleman like Herr Wegenstein up at the castle, rich, powerful, respected, and mindful of little children at night. Why he should be winged like a bird was a conundrum that did not worry me any further. Far more significant and thought-provoking was the fact that little children were compared to chicks which Lord Jesus evidently "took" reluctantly, like bitter medicine. This was difficult to understand. But I understood at once that Satan liked chicks and had to be prevented from eating them. So, although Lord Jesus did not like the taste, he ate them anyway, so that Satan would not get them. As far as that went, my argument was comforting. But now I was hearing that Lord Jesus "took** other people to himself as well, and that this "taking" was the same as putting them in a hole in the ground. This sinister analogy had unfortunate consequences. I began to distrust Lord Jesus. He lost the aspect of a big, comforting, benevolent bird and became associated with the gloomy black men in frock coats, top hats, and shiny black boots who busied themselves with the black box. These ruminations of mine led to my first conscious trauma. One hot summer day I was sitting alone, as usual, on the road in front of the house, playing in the sand. The road led past the house up a hill, then disappeared in the wood on the hilltop. So from the house you could see a stretch of the road. Looking up, I saw a figure in a strangely broad hat and a long black garment down from the wood. It looked like a man wearing coming women's clothes. Slowly the figure drew nearer, and I could now *Breit' aus die FliJtglein beide, O Jesu meine Freude Und nimm dein Kuchlein ein. Witt Satan es verschlfogen, Dann lass die Dies Kind Engel singen: soil unverletzet sein. 10 First ^ears see that it really reached to his was a man wearing a kind of black robe that At the sight of him I was overcome with feet. which rapidly grew fear, into deadly terror as the frightful recognition shot through my mind: "That is a Jesuit/' Shortly before, I had overheard a conversation between my father and a visiting colleague concerning the nefarious activities of the Jesuits. remarks From I the half-irritated, half-fearful tone of my father's " gathered that "J esu;ft s meant something specially dangerous, even for my father. Actually I had no idea what Jesuits were, but I was familiar with the word "Jesus" from my little prayer. The man coming down thought; that was had the road must be in disguise, I why he wore women's clothes. Probably he ran helter-skelter into the house, and hid under a beam in the darkest corner evil intentions. Terrified, I rushed up the stairs, of the attic. I don't know how long I remained time, because, when but it must ventured down fairly long to the first floor and stuck head out of the cautiously my again window, far and wide there was not a trace of the black figure to be seen. For days afterward the hellish fright clung to my limbs and kept me in the house. And even when I began to play in the road again, the wooded hilltop was still the object of my uneasy vigilance. Later I realized, of course, that the black figure was a harmless Catholic priest. At about the same time I could not say with absolute certainty whether it preceded this experience or not I had the earliest dream I can remember, a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life. I was then between three and four years have been a there, I old. The vicarage stood quite alone near Laufen castle, and there was a big meadow stretching back from the sexton s farm. In the dream I was in this meadow. Suddenly I discovered a dark, rectangular, stone-lined hole in the ground. I had never seen it before. I ran forward curiously and peered down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down. Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended. At the bottom was a doorway with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big, heavy curtain of worked stuff like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous. Curi11 Memories, Dreams, Reflections ous to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside. I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about was arched and of hewn stone. The thirty feet long. The ceiling was laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran floor On this platform stood am not certain, but perhaps from the entrance to a low platform. wonderfully rich golden throne. I a a red cushion lay on the seat. It was a magnificent throne, a real on it king's throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge But it was of a naked flesh, and there was something like a rounded head with no face hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. composition: it was made of skin and curious on top and no gazing motionlessly upward. It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no apparent source of light. Above the head, however, was an aura of brightness. The thing did not move, yet I had the it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep toward me. I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother's voice. feeling that She called out, "Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eaterl" That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death. For many nights afterward I was afraid to go to sleep, because I feared I might have another dream like that. ITiis dream haunted me for years. Only much later did I realize that what I had seen was a phallus, and it was decades before I understood that it was a ritual phallus. I could never make out whether my mother meant, "That is the man-eater," or, "That is the man-eater." In the first case she would have meant that not Lord Jesus or the Jesuit was the devourer of little children, but the phallus; in the second case that the "maneater" in general was symbolized by the phallus, so that the dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit, and the phallus were identical. The that abstract significance of the phallus it rigjit"). was enthroned by The hole in the itself, shown by the fact (Wb 9 "uprepresented a grave. "ithyphallically" meadow probably 12 is First Years The grave itself was an underground temple whose green curtain symbolized the meadow, in other words the mystery of Earth with her covering of green vegetation. The carpet was blood-red. What about the vault? Perhaps I had already been to the Mun6t, no one So it cannot be a do not know where the anatomically the citadel of Schaffhausen? This would take a three-year-old child is up not likely, since there. memory-trace. Equally, I correct phallus can have come from. The interpretation of the orificium wethrae as an eye, with the source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the word phallus ( 0aX6s, 8 shining, bright). At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subGod "not to be named," and such it remained terranean throughout my youth, reappearing whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it. The Jesuit's "disguise'' cast its shadow over the Christian doctrine I had been taught. Often it seemed to me a solemn masquerade, a kind of funeral at which the mourners put on serious or mournful faces but the next moment were secretly laughing and not really sad at all. Lord Jesus seemed to me in some ways a god of death, helpful, it is true, in that he scared away the terrors of the night, but himself uncanny, a and bloody corpse. Secretly, his love and kindness, I always heard praised, appeared doubtful to me, chiefly because the people who talked most about "dear Lord Jesus" crucified which wore black frock coats and shiny black boots which reminded me of burials. They were my father's colleagues as well as eight of my uncles all parsons. For many years they inspired fear in me not to speak of occasional Catholic priests who reminded me of the terrifying Jesuit who had irritated and even alarmed my father. In later years and until my confirmation, I made CW *Cf. Symbols of Transformation (CW 5), p. 220. Works of C. G. Jtuig, published by Princeton University works, see pp. 403-410. 13 refers to the Collected Press. For a list of these Memories, Dreams, Reflections every effort to force to Christ. But myself to take the required positive attitude never succeed in overcoming my secret I could distrust. The fear of the "black man," which is felt by every child, was not the essential thing in that experience; it was, rather, the "That is a recognition that stabbed through my childish brain: 7 its remarkable was dream in the the So important thing Jesuit/ symbolic setting and the astounding interpretation: "That is the man-eater/' Not the child's ogre of a man-eater, but the fact that this was the man-eater, and that it was sitting on a golden throne beneath the earth, For my childish imagination it was of all the king who sat on a golden throne; then, on a much more beautiful and much higher and much more golden throne far, far. away in the blue sky, sat God and Lord Jesus, with golden crowns and white robes. Yet from this same Lord Jesus came the "Jesuit;" in black women's garb, with a broad black hat, down from the wooded hill. I had to glance up there every so often to see whether another danger might not be approaching. In the dream I went down into the hole in the earth and first found something very different on a golden throne, something non-human and underworldly, which gazed fixedly upward and fed on human flesh. It was only fifty years later that a passage in a study of religious ritual burned into my eyes, concerning the motif of cannibalism that underlies the symbolism of the Mass. Only then did it become clear to me how exceedingly unchildlike, how sophisticated and oversophisticated was the thought that had begun to break through into consciousness in those two experiences. vised them? Who was it speaking in me? Whose mind had de- What kind of superior intelligence was at work? I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man/' "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. 14 First Years Who spoke to me then? Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge? Who brought the Above and Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second with stormiest Who but that alien guest my passion? who came both from above and from below? Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth. What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth, and many years were to pass before I came out again. half of Today life I know that it happened in order to bring the greatest possible amount of light into the darkness. It into the realm of darkness. intellectual conscious beginnings at that time. My was an initiation life had its un- no longer remember our move to Klein-Hiiningen, near Basel, in 1879. But I do have a memory of something that happened several years later. One evening my father took me out of bed I and carried me in his arms to our porch, which faced west. He showed me the evening sky, shimmering in the most glorious green. That was after the eruption of Krakatoa, in 1883. Another time my father took me outside and showed me a large comet on the eastern horizon. And once there was a great flood. The nver Wiese, which flowed through the village, had broken its dam, and in its upper reaches a bridge had collapsed. Fourteen people were drowned and were carried down by the yellow flood water to the Rhine. When the water retreated, some of the corpses got stuck in the sand. When I was told about it, there was no holding me. I actually found the body of a middle-aged man, in a black frock coat; apparently he had just come from church. He lay half covered by sand, his arm over his eyes. Similarly, I was fascinated to watch a pig being slaughtered. To the horror of my mother, I watched the whole procedure. She thought it terrible, but the slaughtering and the dead man were simply matters of interest to me. memories of art go back to those years at KleinHiiningen. The house where my parents lived was the room. eighteenth-century parsonage, and in it there was a dark My earliest 15 Memories, Dreams, Reflections and old paintings hung on the an Italian painting of David and walls. I particularly remember the workshop of Guido Reni; from a Goliath. It was mirror copy Here all the furniture was good, the original hangs in the Louvre. How it came into our family I do not know. There was another old painting in that room which in my son's house: a landscape of Basel dating from the early nineteenth century. Often I would steal into that dark, sequestered room and sit for hours in front of the pictures, now hangs all this beauty. It was the only beautiful thing I knew. About that time I must still have been a very little fellow, no more than six years old an aunt took me to Basel and showed me the stuffed animals in the museum. We stayed a long time, because I wanted to look at everything very carefully. At four o'clock the bell rang, a sign that the museum was about to gazing at close. My aunt nagged at me, but I could not tear myself away from the showcases. In the meantime the room had been locked, and we had to go by another way to the staircase, through the Suddenly I was standing before these Utterly overwhelmed, I opened my eyes gallery of antiquities. marvelous figures! wide, for I had never seen anything so beautiful. I could not look at them long enough. My aunt pulled me by the hand to the exit I crying out, "Disgusting trailing always a step behind her boy, shut your eyes; disgusting boy, shut your eyes!" Only then did I see that the figures were naked and wore fig leaves. I Such was my first encounter with aunt was My simmering with indignation, as she had been though dragged through a pornographic institute. When I was six years old, my parents took me on an excursion to Arlesheim. On this occasion my mother wore a dress I have never forgotten, and it is the only dress of hers that I can recall: it was of some black stuff printed all over with little green hadn't noticed the fine it at all before. arts. crescents. My earliest recollection of my mother is of a slender young woman wearing this dress. In all my other memories she is older and corpulent. We came to a church, and my mother said, ''That is a Catholic church/' My away from mingled with fear, prompted me to slip mother and peer through the open door into the curiosity, my interior. I just had time to glimpse the big candles 16 on a richly First Years adorned altar (it was around Easter) when I suddenly stumbled on a step and struck my chin on a piece of iron. I remember had a gash was bleeding badly when my parents curious: on the one hand I was ashamed because my screams were attracting the attention of the churchgoers, and on the other hand I felt that I had done that I that picked me up. My state of mind was something forbidden. "J esu*ts green curtain secret of the man-eater. ... So that is the Catholic Church which has to do with Jesuits. It is their fault that I stumbled and screamed." For years afterward I was unable to set foot inside a Catholic church without a secret fear of blood and falling and Jesuits. That was the aura or atmosphere that hung about it, but at the same time it always fascinated me. The proximity of a Catholic priest made me even more uneasy, if that were possible. Not until I was in my thirties was I able to confront Mater Ecclesia without this sense of oppression. The first time was in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Soon after I was six my father began giving me Latin lessons, and I also went to school. I did not mind school; it was easy for me, since I was always ahead of the others and had learned to read before I went there. However, I remember a time when I could not yet read, but pestered my mother to read aloud to me out of the Orbis Pictus, an old, richly illustrated children's book, which contained an account of exotic religions, especially that of the Hindus. There were illustrations of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva which I found an inexhaustible source of interest. My mother later told me that I always returned to these pictures. Whenever I did so, I had an obscure feeling of their affinity with my "original revelation" which I never spoke of to anyone. It was a secret I must never betray. Indirectly, my mother confirmed this feeling, for the faint tone of contempt with which die spoke of "heathens" did not escape me. I knew that she would reject my "revelation" witlrhorror, and I did not want to expose myself to any such injury. This unchildlike behavior was connected on the one hand with an intense sensitivity and vulnerability, on the other hand and this especially with the loneliness of my early youth. (My sister was bora nine years after me.) I played alone, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections way. Unfortunately I cannot remember what I to be disturbed. I was played; I recall only that I did not want could not endure being and in my games deeply absorbed watched or judged while I played them. My first concrete memory of games dates from my seventh or eighth year. I was and built towers which passionately fond of playing with bricks, I then rapturously destroyed by an "earthquake." Between my in my own eighth and eleventh years I drew endlessly sieges, bombardments, naval engagements. whole exercise book with ink blots them battle pictures, Then I filled a and amused myself giving reasons for liking fantastic interpretations. One of I found at last the playmates I had lacked my school was that there for so long. At school, I also discovered something else. But before I go into this I should first mention that the nocturnal atmosphere had begun were happening at and alarming. My parents were incomprehensible to thicken. All sorts of things night, things sleeping apart. I slept in my father's room. From the door to my mother's room came frightening influences. At night Mother was strange and mysterious. One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon. Immediately another head was produced and itself. This process was repeated six or seven had anxiety dreams of things that were now small, now large. For instance, I saw a tiny ball at a great distance; gradually it approached, growing steadily into a monstrous and suffocating object. Or I saw telegraph wires with birds sitting on them, and the wires grew thicker and thicker and my fear greater until the terror awoke me. Although these dreams were overtures to the physiological changes of puberty, they had in their turn a prelude which occurred about my seventh year. At that time I was sick with again detached times. I pseudo-croup, accompanied by choking fits. One night during an attack I stood at the foot of the bed, my head bent back over the bed rail, while my father held me under the arms. Above me I saw a glowing blue circle about the size of the full moon, and inside it moved golden figures which I thought were angels. This 18 First Years was repeated, and each time it allayed my fear of But the suffocation returned in the anxiety dreams. vision suffoca- tion. I see in a psychogenic factor: the atmosphere of the house was beginning to be unbreathable. I hated going to church. The one exception was Christmas The Christmas carol "This Is the Day. Day That God Has Made" pleased me enormously. And then in the evening, of course, came the Christmas tree. Christmas was the only Christian festival I could celebrate with fervor. All others left me cold. New Year's Eve alone had something of the attractiveness of Christmas, but definitely took second place; Advent had a quality about it that somehow did not fit in with the coming Christmas. It had to do with night, storms, and wind, and also with the darkness of the house. There was something whisper- this ing, something queer going on. I return now to the discovery I made in the course of as- sociating with my rustic schoolmates. I found that they alienated me from myself. When I was with them I became different from the way I was at home. I joined in their pranks, or invented ones which at home would never have occurred to me, so it seemed; although, as I knew only too well, I could hatch up of things when I was alone. It seemed to me that the in schoolfellows, myself was due to the influence of change who somehow misled me or compelled me to be different from all sorts my I thought I was. The influence of this wider world, this world which contained others besides my parents, seemed to me dubious if not altogether suspect and, in some obscure way, hostile. Though I became increasingly aware of the beauty of the bright daylight world where "golden sunlight filters through green leaves," at the same time I had a premonition of an inescapable world of shadows filled with frightening, unanswerable questions which had me at their mercy. My nightly prayer did, of course, grant me a ritual protection since it concluded the day properly and just as properly ushered in night and as if I sensed a sleep. But the new peril lurked by day. It was was threatit. inner and feared of security My, myself, splitting what ened. I also recall from this period (seven, to nine) that I was fond 19 Memories, Dreams, Reflections of playing with fire. In our garden there was an old wall built of large blocks of stone, the interstices of which made interesting caves. I used to tend a little fire in one of these caves, children helping me; a fire that had to burn forever with other and therehad to be constantly maintained by our united efforts, which consisted in gathering the necessary wood. No one but myself was allowed to tend this fire. Others could light other fires in other caves, but these fires were profane and did not concern me. My fire alone was living and had an unmistakable fore aura of sanctity. In front of this wall was a slope in which was embedded a stone that jutted out my stone. Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this stone, and then began an imaginary game that am sitting on top of this stone and But the stone also could say "I" and think: 1 am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me." The question then arose: "Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?" This question always perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now. The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness. But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me. Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married man, had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled a fire full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing whether it was I or I was it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zurich, and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and time. This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onward, moving farther and farther away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot in order went something it is like this: "I underneath.'* not to lose hold of my future. I have never forgotten that moment, for 20 it illuminated in a First 'Years my childhood. What my tenth year. My flash of lightning the quality of eternity in this meant was revealed soon afterward, in disunion with myself and uncertainty in the world at large led to an action which at the time was quite incomprehensible to me. I had in those days a yellow, varnished pencil case of the kind commonly used by primary-school pupils, with a little lock and the customary ruler. At the end of this ruler I now carved a me manikin, about two inches long, with frock coat, top hat, and shiny black boots. I colored him black with ink, sawed him off the ruler, and put him in the pencil case, where I made him a little bed. I even made a coat for him out of a bit of wool. In little the case I also placed a smooth, oblong blackish stone from the Rhine, which I had painted with water colors to look as though it were divided into an upper and lower half, and had long carried around in was a great This was his stone. All this took the case to the forbidden attic my trouser pocket. secret. Secretly I at the top of the house (forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten) and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the roof for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a soul would ever find it there. No one could discover my secret and destroy it. I felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone. In all difficult situations, whenever I had done something wrong or my feelings had been hurt, or when my father's irritability or my mother's invalidism oppressed me, I thought of my carefully bedded-down and wrapped-up manikin and his smooth, prettily colored stone. From time to time often at intervals of weeks I secretly stole up to the attic when I could be certain that no one would see me. Then I clambered up on the beam, opened the case, and looked at my manikin and his stone. Each time I did this I placed in the case a little scroll of paper on which I had previously written something during school hours in a secret language of my own invention. The addition of a new scroll always had the character of a solemn ceremonial act. Unfortunately I cannot remember what I wanted to communicate to the manikin. I only know that my "letters" constituted a kind of library for him. I fancy, though I cannot be certain, that they may have consisted of sayings that particularly pleased me. 21 Memories, Dreams, Reflections The meaning of these actions, or how I might explain them, the feeling of newly with never worried me. I contented myself to won security, and was satisfied possess something that no one knew and no one could get at. It was an inviolable secret which must never be betrayed, for the safety of my life depended on it. Why that was so I did not ask myself. It simply was so. This possession of a secret had a very powerful formative influence on my character; I consider it the essential factor of my boyhood. Similarly, I never told anyone about the dream of the phallus; and the Jesuit, too, belonged to that mysterious realm which I knew I must not talk about. The little wooden figure with the stone was a first attempt, still unconscious and childish, to give shape to the secret. I was always absorbed by it and had the feeling I ought to fathom it; and yet I did not know what it was I was trying to express. I always hoped I might be able to find something perhaps in nature that would give me the clue and show me where or what the secret was. At that time my interest in plants, animals, and stones grew. I was constantly on the lookout for something mysterious. Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation: "But it is not so certain as all thatl" or, "What about that thing under the ground?" And when religious teachings were pumped into me and I was told, "This is beautiful and this is good/' I would think to myself: "Yes, but there is some- something very secret that people don't know about." The episode with the carved manikin formed the climax and the conclusion of my childhood. It lasted about a year. Therething else, after I completely forgot the whole affair until I was thirty-five. this fragment of memory rose up again from the mists of Then childhood with pristine clarity. While I was engaged on the preliminary studies for my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido* I read about the cache of soul-stones near Arlesheim, and the Australian churingas. I suddenly discovered that I had a quite definite image of such a stone, though I had never seen any reproductions. It was oblong, blackish, and painted into an upper and lower half. This image was joined by that of the * Translated as Psychology of the Unconscious, 1917; revised edition, retitled (CW 5), 1956. Symbols of Transformation pencil box and the manikin. The manikin was a little cloaked god of the ancient world, a Telesphoros such as stands on the monuments of Asklepios and reads to him from a scroll. Along with this recollection there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that there are archaic psychic components which have entered the individual psyche without any direct line of father's library which I examined only very contained not a single book which might have transmitted any such information. Moreover, my father demon- My tradition. much later strably knew nothing about these When I was in things. England in 1920, I carved out of wood two similar figures without having the slightest recollection of that childhood experience. One of them I had reproduced on a larger scale in stone, and this figure now stands in my garden in Kiisnacht. Only while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu the "breath of life." It was a further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream, which was now revealed as the "breath of life," the creative impulse. Ultimately, the manikin was a kista, and problack stone. But the life-force, oblong these are connections which became clear to me only much later in life. When I was a child I performed the ritual just as I have kabir, wrapped in his little cloak, hidden in the vided with a supply of seen done by the natives of Africa; they act first and do not are doing. Only long afterward do they reon what they have done. it know what they flect II School Years ELEVENTH YEAR was significant for me in ansent to the Gymnasium in then was other way, taken I was Basel. Thus away from my rustic playmates, and truly entered the "great world," where powerful personages, far more powerful than my father, lived in big, splendid houses, drove about in expensive carriages drawn by magnificent horses, and talked a refined German and French. Their sons, well dressed, equipped with fine manners and plenty of pocket money, were now my classmates. With great astonishment and a horrible secret envy I heard them tell about their vacations in the Alps. They had been among those glowing snowy peaks near Zurich, had even been to the sea this last absolutely flabbergasted me. I gazed upon them as if they were beings from My as I another world, from that unattainable glory of flaming, snowcovered mountains and from the remote, unimaginable sea. time, I became aware how poor we were, that a was poor country parson and I a still poorer parson's had holes in his shoes and had to sit for six hours in Then, for the my father son who first school with wet socks. I began to see my parents with different eyes, and to understand their cares and worries. For my father in particular I felt compassion 24 less, curiously enough, for my School years mother. She always seemed to me the stronger of the two. Nevertheless I always felt on her side when my father gave vent to his moody irritability. This necessity for taking sides was not to favorable the formation of my character. In order to exactly liberate myself from these conflicts I fell into the role of the superior arbitrator who willy-nilly had to judge his parents. That caused a certain inflatedness in me; my unstable self-assurance was increased and diminished at the same time. When I was nine years old my mother had had a little girl. My father was excited and pleased. "Tonight you've been given to me,, and I was utterly surprised, for I hadn't noticed anything. I had thought nothing of my mother's a little sister/' he said bed more frequently than usual, for I considered her bed an inexcusable weakness in any case. My father me to my mother's bedside, and she held out a little brought lying in taking to her creature that looked dreadfully disappointing: a red, shrunken face like an old man's, the eyes closed, and probably as blind as a young puppy, I thought. On its back the thing had a few single long red hairs which were shown to me had it been intended for a monkey? to feel. Was this I was shocked and did not know what how newborn babies looked? They mumbled something about the stork which was supposed to have brought the baby. But then what about a litter of puppies or kittens? How many times would the stork have to fly back and forth before the litter was complete? And what about cows? I could not imagine how the stork could manage to carry a whole calf in its bill. Besides, the farmers said the cow calved, not that the stork calf. This story was obviously another humbugs which were always being imposed on me. I brought the that my mother had not to know once again done something I of those felt sure was supposed about. This sudden appearance of my sister left me with a vague sense of distrust which sharpened my curiosity and observation. Subsequent odd reactions on the part of my mother confirmed my suspicions that something regrettable was connected with this birth. Otherwise this event did not bother me very much, though probably contributed to intensifying an experience I had when I was twelve. it Memories, Dreams, Reflections mother had the unpleasant habit of calling after me all good advice when I was setting out for some place to which I had been invited. On these occasions I not only wore my best clothes and polished shoes, but felt the dignity of my purpose and of my appearance in public, so that it was a humiliation for me to have people on the street hear aU the ignominious things my mother called out after me, "And don't and wipe forget to give them regards from Papa and Mama, Have a handkerchief? have nose do you washed your you My sorts of your hands?" And so on. It struck me as definitely unfair that the inferiority feelings which accompanied my self-importance should thus be exposed to the world when I had taken every amour-propre and vanity, to present as irreproachable an appearance as possible. For these occasions meant a very great deal to me. On the way to the house to which I was care, out of invited I felt important and dignified, as I always did when I wore my Sunday clothes on a weekday. The picture changed radically, visiting. overcame me. I might I came in sight of the house I was of the grandeur and power of those people afraid of them, and in smallness wished however, as soon as Then a sense I was my sink fathoms deep into the ground. That was how I felt when I rang the bell. The tinkling sound from inside rang like the toll of doom in my ears. I felt as timid and craven as a stray dog. It was ever so much worse when my mother had prepared me properly beforehand. Then the bell would ring in my ears: "My shoes are filthy, and so are my hands; I have no handkerchief and my neck is black with dirt." Out of defiance I would then not convey my parents' regards, or I would act with un- necessary shyness and stubbornness. If things became too bad I would think of my secret treasure in the attic, and that helped me regain my poise. For in my forlorn state I remembered that also the "Other," the person who possessed that inviolable secret, the black stone and the little man in frock coat and top hat. I was cannot recall in my boyhood ever having thought of the a connection between Lord Jesus or the Jesuit in the black robe the men in frock coats and top hats standing by the grave, the gravelike hole in the meadow, the underI possibility of 26 School years ground temple of the phallus, and my little man in the pencil case. The dream of the ithyphallic god was my first great secret; the manikin was the second. It does seem to me, however, that I had a vague sense of relationship between the "soulstone" and the stone which was also myself. To this day, writing down my memories at the age of eightythree, I have never fully unwound the tangle of my earliest memories. They are like individual shoots of a single underground rhizome, like stations on a road of unconscious development. While it became increasingly impossible for me to adopt a positive attitude to Lord Jesus, I remember that from the time I was eleven the idea of God began to interest me. I took to praying to God, and this somehow satisfied me because it was a prayer without contradictions. God was not complicated by my distrust. Moreover, he was not a person in a black robe, and not Lord Jesus of the pictures, draped with brightly colored clothes, with whom people behaved so familiarly. Rather he was a unique being of whom, so I heard, it was impossible to form any correct conception. He was, to be sure, something like a very powerful old man. But to my great satisfaction there was a commandment to the effect that "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything." Therefore one could not deal with him as familiarly as with Lord Jesus, who was no "secret." A certain analogy with my secret in the attic began to dawn on me. It took up far too much time which would rather have spent drawing battles and playing with fire. Divinity classes were unspeakably dull, and I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear School came to bore me. I them, so to speak. Oddly enough, my classmates could handle these things and found them self-evident. No one could tell me 27 Memories, Dreams, Reflections what numbers were, and question. difficulty. I was unable even to formulate the To my horror I found that no one understood my The teacher, I must admit, went to great lengths me the purpose of this curious operation of transI finally grasped understandable quantities into sounds. lating that what was aimed at was a kind of system of abbreviation, with the help of which many quantities could be put in a short formula. But this did not interest me in the least. I thought the whole business was entirely arbitrary. Why should numbers to explain to be expressed by sounds? One might just as well express a by apple tree, b by box, and x by a question mark, a, b, c, x, y, z were not concrete and did not explain to me anything about the essence of numbers, any more than an apple tree did. But the thing that exasperated me most of all was the proposition: If a b and b = c, then a c, even though by definition a meant = = something other than b, and, being different, could therefore not be equated with &, let alone with c. Whenever it was a question of an equivalence, then it was said that a &, and so on. a, b = = = b seemed to me a downright This I could accept, whereas a lie or a fraud. I was equally outraged when the teacher stated in the teeth of his own definition of parallel lines that they met at This seemed to me no better than a stupid trick to catch peasants with, and I could not and would not have anything to do with it. My intellectual morality fought against infinity. these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred from understanding mathematics. Right into old age I have me had the incorrigible feeling that if, like my schoolmates, I could have accepted without a struggle the proposition that a = &, or that sun = moon, dog = cat, then mathematics might have me endlessly just how much I only began to realize at the age of eighty-four. All life it remained a puzzle to me in mathewhy it was that I never managed to get fooled my my bearings when there was no doubt whatever that I could calculate properly. Least of all did I understand my own moral doubts matics concerning mathematics. Equations I could comprehend only by inserting specific numerical values in place of the letters and verifying the meaning of the operation by actual calculation. As we went on in 28 School Years was able to get along, more or less, by copying out formulas whose meaning I did not understand, and algebraic where a particular combination of letters had by memorizing stood on the blackboard. I could no longer make headway by mathematics I substituting numbers, for from time to time the teacher would say, "Here we put the expression so-and-so," and then he would scribble a few letters on the blackboard. I had no idea where he got them and why he did it the only reason I could see was that it enabled him to bring the procedure to what he felt was a satisfactory conclusion. I was so intimidated by my incompre- hension that I did not dare to ask any questions. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. Other subjects I found easy; and as, thanks to my good visual contrived for a long while to swindle my way through I usually had good marks. But my fear of failure sense of smallness in face of the vast world around me memory, I mathematics, and my created in me not only a dislike but a kind of silent despair which completely ruined school for me. In addition, I was exempted from drawing classes on grounds of utter incapacity. This in a way was welcome to me, since it gave me more free time; but on the other hand it was a fresh defeat, since I had some facility in drawing, although I did not realize that it depended essentially on the way I was feeling. I could draw only what stirred my imagination. But I was forced to copy prints of Greek gods with sightless eyes, and when that wouldn't go properly the teacher obviously thought I needed something more naturalistic and set before me the picture of a goat's head. This assignment I failed completely, and that was the end of my drawing classes. and drawing there was now I hated gymnastics. I could the first a third: from added very not endure having others tell me how to move. I was going to school in order to learn something, not to practice useless and senseless acrobatics. Moreover, as a result of my earlier accidents, I had a certain physical timidity which I was not able to overcome until much later on. This timidity was in turn linked with a distrust of the world and its potentialities. To be sure, the world seemed to me beautiful and desirable, but it was also To my defeats in mathematics 29 Memories, Dreams, Reflections with vague and incomprehensible filled ways wanted to know Was entrusting myself. who had abandoned describe later, mitted I perhaps for several what and Therefore I al- to months? When, as I shall neurotic fainting spells began, the doctor engage in gymnastics, much to my satisfaction. was rid of that burden and had swallowed another defeat. The time thus gained was not spent solely on play. It per- forbade I my this me perils. whom I was connected with my mother, at the start to me to me to indulge somewhat more freely the absolute craving had developed into my to read every scrap of printed matter that fell hands. twelfth year was indeed a fateful one for me. One day in summer of 1887 1 was standing in the cathedral square, for a classmate who went home by the same route as waiting It was twelve o'clock, and the morning classes were myself. over. Suddenly another boy gave me a shove that knocked me My the early off my feet, I fell, striking my head against the curbstone so hard that I almost lost consciousness. For about half an hour after- I was a little dazed. At the moment I felt the blow the thought flashed through my mind: "Now you won't have to go to school any more." I was only half unconscious, but I remained lying there a few moments longer than was strictly necessary, ward avenge myself on my assailant. Then people and took me to a house nearby, where two elderly chiefly in order to picked me up spinster aunts lived. From then on I began to have fainting spells whenever I and whenever my parents set me to doing my homework. For more than six months I stayed away from school, and for me that was a picnic. I was free, could dream for hours, be anywhere I liked, in the woods or by the water, or draw. I resumed my battle pictures and furious scenes of war, of old castles that were being assaulted or burned, or drew page upon page of caricatures. Similar caricatures some- had to return to school, times appear to me before falling asleep to this day, grinning masks that constantly move and change, among them familiar faces of people Above all, I who soon afterward died. to plunge into the world of the mysteri- was able 30 School 'years To that realm belonged trees, a pool, the swamp, stones and animals, and my father's library. But I was growing more and more away from the world, and had all the while faint pangs of ous. away my time with loafing, collecting, and But I did not feel reading, playing. any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself. I forgot completely how all this had come about, but I pitied conscience. I frittered parents' worries. They consulted various doctors, who scratched their heads and packed me off to spend the holidays with relatives in Winterthur. This city had a railroad station that proved a source of endless delight to me. But when I returned my home everything was as before. One doctor thought I had were like and I inwardly epileptic at such nonsense. became more worried laughed My parents than ever. Then one day a friend called on my father. They were sitting in the garden and I hid behind a shrub, for I was possessed of an insatiable curiosity. I heard the visitor saying epilepsy. I knew what fits to my father, "And how is your son?'* "Ah, that's a sad business," my father replied. "The doctors no longer know what is wrong may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?" I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality. "Why, then, I must get to work!'* I thought suddenly. From that moment on I became a serious child. I crept away, went to my father's study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram with intense concentration. After ten minutes with him. They think it he were incurable. I if of this I had the finest of fainting fits. I almost fell off the chair, but after a few minutes I felt better and went on working. "Devil take it, I'm not going to faint," I told myself, and persisted in my purpose. This time it took about fifteen minutes before the second attack came. That, too, passed like the first. "And now you must really get to work!" I stuck it out, and after an hour came the third attack. Still I did not give up, and worked for another hour, until I had the feeling that I had overcome the attacks. Suddenly I felt better than I had in all the months before. And in fact the attacks did not ^ecur. From that day on I worked over my grammar and other schoolbooks 3* Memories, Dreams, Reflections every day. A few weeks later I returned to school, and never suffered another attack, even there. The whole bag of tricks was over and done with! That was when I learned what a neurosis is. Gradually the recollection of how it had all come about re- turned to me, and I saw clearly that whole this been I disgraceful situation. I myself had arranged why I had never That was me over. seriously angry with the schoolmate who pushed that he had been put up to it, so to speak, and that the knew was a diabolical plot on my part. I knew, too, was never going to happen to me again. I had a feeling of rage against myself, and at the same time was ashamed of myself. For I knew that I had wronged myself and made a fool of myself in my own eyes. Nobody else was to blame; I was the cursed renegade! From then on I could no longer endure my whole affair that this parents' worrying about me or speaking of me in a pitying tone. The neurosis became another of secrets, but it was a my a defeat. Nevertheless it induced in me a studied punctiliousness and an unusual diligence. Those days saw the beginnings of my conscientiousness, practiced not for the sake of appearances, so that I would amount to something, but for my own sake. Regularly I would get up at five o'clock in order to study, and sometimes I worked from three in the morn- shameful secret, seven, before going to school. led me astray during the crisis was passion for being alone, my delight in solitude. Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every ing till What had my stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and in- describably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world. I had another important experience at about this time. I was taking the long road to school from Klein-Hiiningen, where we lived, to Basel, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming impression of having knew now just emerged from a dense am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I." But at this moment I came upon myself. Previously I had existed, too, but to me. everything had cloud. I all at once: I merely happened 32 School years Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now had been willed to do this and that; now I willed. This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was "authority" in me. Curiously enough, at this time and also during the months of my fainting neurosis I had lost all memory of the treasure in the attic. Otherwise I would probably have realized even then the analogy between my feeling of authority and the feeling of value which the treasure inspired in me. But that was not so; all memory of the pencil case had vanished. Around this time I was invited to spend the holidays with friends of the family who had a house on Lake Lucerne. To my delight the house was situated right on the lake, and there was a boathouse and a rowboat. My host allowed his son and me to use the boat, although we were sternly warned not to be reck- I exist. Previously I less. Unfortunately I also knew how to steer a Waidling ( a boat of the gondola type) that is to say, standing. At home we had such a punt, in which we had tried out every imaginable trick. The first thing I did, therefore, was to take my stand on the stern seat and with one oar push off into the lake. That was too He whistled us back dressing-down. I was thoroughly crestfallen but had to admit that I had done exactly what he had said not to, and that his lecture was quite justified. At the same time much for the anxious master of the house. and gave me a first-class was seized with rage that this fat, ignorant boor should dare to ME. This ME was not only grown up, but important, an authority, a person with office and dignity, an old man, an object of respect and awe. Yet the contrast with reality was so grotesque I insult my fury I suddenly stopped myself, for the to rose my lips: "Who in the world are you, anyway? question You are reacting as though you were the devil only knows how important! And yet you know he is perfectly right. You are that in the midst of barely twelve years old, a schoolboy, and he is a father and a rich, powerful man besides, who owns two houses and several splendid horses." Then, to my actually two who intense confusion, different persons. it One me that I was them was the schoolboy occurred to of could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; 33 Memories, Dreams, Reflections the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be influential as this manufacturer. powerful and This "other" was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was trifled with, as suspended on springs and leather straps. This notion sprang from a curious experience I had had. When we were living in Klein-Huningen an ancient green carriage from the Black Forest drove past our house one day. It was truly an antique, looking exactly as if it had come straight out of the eighteenth century. When I saw it, I felt with great excitement: 'That's it! Sure enough, that comes from my times/* It was as though I had recognized it because it was die same type as the one I had driven in myself. Then came a curious sentiment 6coeurant, as though someone had stolen something from me, or as though I had been cheated cheated out of my beloved past. The carriage was a relic of those times! I cannot describe what was happening in me or what it was that affected me so strongly: a longing, a nostalgia, or a recognition that kept saying, "Yes, that's how it was! Yes, that's how it was!" I had still another experience that harked back to the eighteenth century. At die home of one of my aunts I had seen an eighteenth-century statuette, an old terra-cotta piece consisting two painted figures. One of them was old Dr. Stiickelberger, a well-known personality in the city of Basel toward the end of the eighteenth century. The other figure was a patient of his; of was depicted with closed eyes, sticking out her tongue. The went that old Stiickelberger was one day crossing the Rhine bridge when this annoying patient suddenly came up to him out of nowhere and babbled out a complaint. Old Stiiclcelberger said testily, "Yes, yes, there must be something wrong with you. Put out your tongue and shut your eyes." The woman she story did and Stiickelberger instantly ran off, and she remained there with her tongue stuck out, while the people standing This statuette of the old doctor had buckled shoes laughed. which in a strange way I recognized as my own. I was conso, vinced that these were shoes I had worn. The conviction drove wild with excitement. "Why, those must be my shoes!* I me 34 School Years on my feet, and yet I could not excrazy feeling came from. I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century. Often in those days I would write the date 1786 instead of 1886, and could still feel those shoes plain where each time this this happened I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia. After my escapade with the boat, and my well-merited punishment, I began pondering these isolated impressions, and they coalesced into a coherent picture: of myself living in two ages simultaneously, and being two different persons. I felt confused, and was full to the brim with heavy reflections. At last I reached the disappointing realization that now, at any rate, I was nothing but the little schoolboy who had deserved his punishment, and who had to behave according to his age. The other person must be sheer nonsense. I suspected that he was somehow connected with the many tales I had heard from my parents and relatives about my grandfather. Yet that was not quite right either, for he had been born in 1795 and had therefore lived in the nineteenth century; moreover he had died long before I was born. It could not be that I was identical with him. At the time these considerations were, I should say, mostly in the form of vague glimmerings and dreams. I can no longer remember whether at that time I knew anything about my legendary kinship with Goethe. I think not, however, for I know first heard this tale from strangers. I should add that there is an annoying tradition that my grandfather was a natural son of Goethe. 1 that I 1 In regard to the legend, twice alluded to in this book, that Jung was a descendant of Goethe, he related: "The wife of my great-grandfather (Franz Ignaz Jung, d. 1831), Sophie Ziegler, and her sister were associated with the Mannheim Theater and were friends of many writers. The story goes that Sophie Ziegler had an illegitimate child hy Goethe, and that this child was my grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung. This was considered virtually an established fact. My grandfather word about it in his diaries, however. He mentions only that he once saw Goethe in Weimar, and then merely from behind! Sophie Ziegler Jung was later friendly with Lotte Kestner, a niece of Goethe's "Lottchen." This Lotte frequently came to see my grandfather as, incidentally, did Franz Liszt. In later years Lotte Kestner settled in Basel, no doubt because of these close ties with the says not a Jung family." No proof of this item of family tradition has been found in the available sources, 35 Memories, Dreams, Reflections summer day that same year I came out of school at noon and went to the cathedral square. The sky was gloriously blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral One fine from the new, brightly glazed tiles. beauty of the sight, and thought: "The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on ." Here came a a golden throne and great hole in my I felt numbed, and knew sensation. a and choking thoughts, is coming, only: "Don't go on thinking now! Something terrible something I do not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most terrible sin? Murder? No, frightful of sins. What is the most it can't be that. The most terrible sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. Anyone who commits that sin is damned to hell for all eternity. That would be very sad for glittered, the sun sparkling I was overwhelmed by the . . parents, if their only son, to whom they are so attached, should be doomed to eternal damnation. I cannot do that to my parents. All I need do is not go on thinking." That was easier said than done. On my long walk home I my tried to think all sorts of other things, but I found thoughts returning again and again to the beautiful cathedral which I my loved so much, and to thoughts would fly off electric shock. I kept just don't think of state. God and then sitting on the throne if as had received a powerful again they my repeating to myself: "Don't think of it!" I reached home it, in a pretty worked-up My mother noticed that something was wrong, and asked, the archives of the Goethehaus in Frankfurt am Main and the baptismal register in the Jesuitenkirche in Mannheim. Goethe was not in Mannheim at the period in question, and there is no record of Sophie Ziegler's staying in Weimar or anywhere in Goethe's vicinity. Jung used to speak of this stubbornly persistent legend with a certain gratified amusement, for it might serve to explain one subtle aspect of his fascination with Goethe's Faust; it belonged to an inner reality, as it were. On the other hand he would also call the story "annoying." He thought it "in bad taste" and maintained that the world was already full of "too many fools who tell such tales of the 'unknown father/ " Above all, he felt that the legitimate line of descent, in particular from the learned Catholic doctor and jurist Carl Jung (d. 1645)-discussed at the end of Chapter VIII was equally significant.-A. J. School years 'What the matter with you? Has something happened at was able to assure her, without lying, that nothing had happened at school. I did have the thought that it might help me if I could confess to my mother the real reason for is school?" I But to do so I would have to do the very thing that seemed impossible: think my thought right to the end. The poor dear was utterly unsuspecting and could not possibly know that I was in terrible danger of committing the unforgivable sin and plunging myself into hell. I rejected the idea of confessing and tried to efface myself as much as possible. That night I slept badly; again and again the forbidden thought, which I did not yet know, tried to break out, and I struggled desperately to fend it off. The next two days were sheer torture, and my mother was convinced that I was ill. But I resisted the temptation to confess, aided by the thought that it would cause my parents intense sorrow. On the third night, however, the torment became so unbearable that I no longer knew what to do. I awoke from a restless my turmoil. sleep just in time to catch myself thinking again about the cathedral and God. I had almost continued the thought! I felt Sweating with fear, I sat up in bed to shake off sleep. "Now it is coming, now it's serious! I must think. It must be thought out beforehand. Why should I think something I do not know? I don't want to, by God, that's sure. But who wants me to? Who wants to force me to think something I my resistance weakening. know and don't want to know? Where does this terrible come from? And why should I be the one to be subjected to it? I was thinking praises of the Creator of this beautiful world, I was grateful to him for this immeasurable gift, so why should don't will have to think something inconceivably wicked? I don't know what it is, I really don't, for I cannot and must not come anywhere near this thought, for that would be to risk thinking it at once. I haven't done this or wanted this, it has come on me like a bad dream. Where do such things come from? This has I to me without my doing. Why? After all, I didn't create myself, I came into the world the way God made me that is, the way I was shaped by my parents. Or can it have been that good parents wanted something of this sort? But happened my my 37 like that. Nothing parents would never have had any thoughts so atrocious would ever have occurred to them." I found parents, this whom I Then thought of my grandonly from their portraits. They looked enough to repulse any idea that they idea utterly absurd. knew benevolent and dignified might possibly be to blame. I I mentally ran through the long unknown ancestors until finally I arrived at Adam and Eve. And with them came the decisive thought: Adam and Eve were the first people; they had no parents, but were created as they were. directly by God, who intentionally made them had created the God to but be no had choice way exactly They procession of them. Therefore they did not know how they could possibly They were perfect creatures of God, for He creates only perfection, and yet they committed the first sin by doing what God did not want them to do. How was that possible? They could not have done it if God had not placed in them the possibility of doing it. That was clear, too, from the serpent, whom God had created before them, obviously so that it could induce Adam and Eve to sin. God in His omniscience had arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin. Therefore it was Gods intention that they should sin. be different. This thought liberated since I now knew situation. commit At my first I it did me and had instantly from no longer thought God had landed me left my worst torment, God Himself had placed me in this not know whether He intended me to sin or not. I illumination, since willing that me of praying for in this fix without without any help. I was my certain that must search out His intention myself, and seek the way out At this point another argument began. 'What does God want? To act or not to act? I must find out what God wants with me, and I must find out right away." I was aware, of course, that according to conventional morality there was no question but that sin must be avoided. That was what I had been doing up to now, but I knew I could not go on doing it. My broken sleep and my spiritual distress had worn me out to such a point that fending off the thought was tying me into unbearable knots. This could not go on. At the same time, I could not yield before I understood what God's will was and what He intended. For I was now certain that He was I alone. the author of this desperate problem. Oddly enough, I did not think for a moment that the devil might be playing a on me. The devil played little part in my mental world at and in any case I regarded him as powerless comwith God. But from the moment I emerged from the mist pared and became conscious of myself, the unity, the greatness, and trick that time, the superhuman majesty of God began to haunt my imagination. Hence there was no question in my mind but that God Himself was arranging a decisive test for me, and that everything depended on my understanding Him correctly. I knew, beyond a doubt, that I would ultimately be compelled to break down, to give way, but I did not want it to happen without my understanding it, since the salvation of my eternal soul was at "God knows that I cannot resist much longer, and He does not help me, although I am on the point of having to commit the unforgivable sin. In His omnipotence He could easily lift this compulsion from me, but evidently He is not going to. Can it be that He wishes to test my obedience by imposing on me the unusual task of doing something against my own moral judgment and against the teachings of my religion, and even against His own commandment, something I am resisting with aU my strength because I fear eternal damnation? Is it possible that God wishes to see whether I am capable of obeying His will even though my faith and my reason raise before me the specters of death and hell? That might really be the answerl But these are merely my own thoughts. I may be mistaken. I dare not trust my own reasoning as far as that. I must think it all through once more." I thought it over again and arrived at the same conclusion. "Obviously God also desires me to show courage," I thought. 'If that is so and I go through with it, then He wfll give me His grace and illumination." I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me thte cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder. 39 an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. The wisdom and goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had yielded to His inexorable command. It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had ^never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible. He had taken the Bible's commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In His trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no So that was how itl I felt omnipotence He will see to it that comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way. God had also created Adam and Eve in such a way that they had to think what they did not at all want to think. He had done that in order to find out whether they were obedient. And He could also demand something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God's grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and matter sacred. In His nothing really evil meaninglessness. From that moment on, when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began. Why did God befoul His cathedral? That, for me, was a terrible thought. But then came dim understanding that God could be something terrible. I the had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive. The experience also had the effect of increasing my sense of 40 inferiority. I am a devil or a swine, I thought; I am infinitely depraved. But then I began searching through the New Testament and read, with a certain satisfaction, about the Pharisee and the publican, and that reprobates are the chosen ones. It made a lasting impression on me that the unjust steward was praised, and that Peter, the waverer, was appointed the rock upon which the Church was built. The greater my inferiority feelings became, the more incomprehensible did God's grace appear to me. After all, I had never been sure of myself. When my mother once said to me, "You have always been a good boy," I simply could not grasp it. I a good boy? That was quite new to me. I often thought of myself as a corrupt and inferior person, With the experience of God and the cathedral I at last had something tangible that was part of the great secret as if I had always talked of stones falling from heaven and now had one in my pocket. But actually, it was a shaming experience. I had fallen into something bad, something evil and sinister, though at the same time it was a kind of distinction. Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me. which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had similar experiences, I never succeeded in discovering as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the undergone so much was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed. never have occurred to me to speak of my experience It would nor of my dream of the phallus in the underground openly, nor of my carved manikin. As a matter of fact, I did not temple, feeling that I say anything about the phallus dream until I was sixty-five. I may have spoken about the other experiences to my wife, but only in later years. inherited from them with My my A strict taboo hung over all these matters, childhood. I could never have talked about friends. be understood in terms of this secret. an almost unendurable loneliness. My one entire youth can It iiiduced in me great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of as relationship to the world was already prefigured: today my 41 and must hint at and do not know, usually do not things which other people even want to know. In my mother's family there were six parsons, and on my father's side not only was my father a parson but two of my uncles also. Thus I heard many religious conversations, theoWhenever I listened to them logical discussions, and sermons. I had the feeling: "Yes, yes, that is all very well. But what about the secret? The secret is also the secret of grace. None of you know anything about that. You don't know that God wants to force me to do wrong, that He forces me to think abominations then I am a solitary, because I know things in order to experience His grace." Everything the others said was completely beside the point. I thought, "For Heaven's sake, there must be someone where there must be the who knows something about it; somerummaged through my father's truth/' I reading whatever I could on God, the Trinity, spirit, consciousness. I devoured the books, but came away none the wiser. I always found myself thinking, "They don't know either." library, I even searched about in my father's Luther Bible. Unfortu- nately, the conventional "edifying" interpretation of Job prevented me from taking a deeper interest in this book. I would have found consolation in it, especially in chapter 9, verses 30 ff.: yet shalt thou "Though I wash myself with snow water . . , plunge me Later my mother told me that in those days I was often depressed. It was not really that; rather, I was brooding on the secret. At such times it was strangely reassuring and calming in the mire." to sit on my stone. Somehow it would free me of all my doubts. Whenever I thought that I was the stone, the conflict ceased. "The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years," I would think, "while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out." I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone. that time, too, there arose in me profound doubts about father said. When I heard him preaching about everything At my 4* grace, I always thought of my own experience. What he said sounded stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself. I wanted to help him, but I did not know how. Moreover, I was too shy to tell him of my experience, or to meddle in his personal preit occupations. I felt myself to be on the one hand too little, and I was afraid to wield that authority which on the other hand my "second personality" inspired in me. Later, with when I was eighteen years old, I had many discussions with the secret hope of being able to let him know about the miracle of grace, and thereby help to mitigate his pangs of conscience. I was convinced that if he fulfilled the will of God everything would turn out for the best. But our discussions invariably came to an unsatisfactory end. my father, always irritated him, and saddened him. "Oh nonsense," he was in the habit of saying, "you always want to think. One ought not to think, but believe." I would think, "No, one must experi- They ence and know," but I would say, "Give me this belief/' upon he would shrug and turn resignedly away. I began making friendships, mostly with shy boys where- of simple marks in school improved. During the following years I even succeeded in reaching the top of the class. However, I observed that below me were schoolmates who envied me and tried at every opportunity to catch up with me. That spoiled my pleasure. I hated all competition, and if someone played a game too competitively I turned my back on the game. Thereafter I remained second in the class, and found this considerably more enjoyable. Schoolwork was a nuisance enough anyway without my wanting to make it harder by competitiveness. A very few teachers, whom I remember with gratitude, showed I recall with the greatest particular confidence in me. The one was a university professor teacher. Latin He pleasure was the As it fellow. and a very clever happened, I had known Latin had given me lessons in it. father since I was six, because my origins. My So, instead of making me sit in class, this teacher would often send me to the university library to fetch books for him, and I would joyfully dip into them while prolonging the walk back as much as possible. 43 of the teachers thought me stupid and crafty. Whenever whom suspicion anything went wrong in school I was the first on Most was a row somewhere, I was thought to be the In reality I was involved in such a brawl only once, rested. If there instigator. was then that I discovered that a number of my schoolmates were hostile to me. Seven of them lay in ambush for me and suddenly attacked me. I was big and strong by thenand inclined to violent rages. I it was when I was fifteen suddenly saw red, seized one of the boys by both arms, swung him around me and with his legs knocked several of the others to the ground. The teachers found out about the affair, but I only dimly remember some sort of punishment which seemed to me unjust. From then on I was let alone. No one dared to and it attack me again. To have enemies and be accused unjustly was not what I had expected, but somehow I did not find it incomprehensible. Everything I was reproached for irritated me, but I could not deny these reproaches to myself. I knew so little about myself, and the little was so contradictory that I could not with a good conscience reject any accusations. As a matter of fact I always had a guilty conscience and was aware of both actual and potenI was particularly sensitive to re-^ them more or less struck home. Although I done what I was accused of, I felt that I it. I would even draw done might have up a list of alibis in tial faults. For that reason proofs, since all of had not in reality case I should be accused of something. I felt positively rewhen I had actually done something wrong. Then at lieved knew what guilty conscience was for. I inner insecurity by Naturally compensated show of security, or to put it better the defect least I my my an outward compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent. Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up old, in skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all fact 44 living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever "God" worked directly in him. I put "God" in quotation marks here. For nature seemed, like myself, to have been set aside by God as non-divine, Him as an created by although expression of Himself. Nothing could persuade me that "in the image of God" applied only to man. In fact it seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and ab- horrent egotism with which I was only too familiar from personality No. i, the schoolboy of 1890. Besides his world there existed another realm, like a temple in which anyone who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could only marvel and admire, forgetful of himself. Here lived the "Other," who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret. Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though the human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with God. What I am here unfolding, sentence by sentence, is some- from myself, that all qualities is, thing I was then not conscious of in any articulate way, though I sensed it with an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself, true self. As soon as I was alone, I could pass that I was my over into this state. I therefore sought the peace and solitude of "Other," personality No. 2. The play and counterplay between personalities No. i and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a "split" or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life this No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious understanding he is also what they are. is not sufficient to realize that Church gradually became a place men dared to preach aloud I of torment to me. For there am tempted to say, shamelessly 45 about God, about His intentions and actions. There people were exhorted to have those feelings and to believe that secret which I knew to be the deepest, innermost certainty, a certainty not to be betrayed by a single word. I could only conclude that the parson, apparently no one knew about this secret, not even the for otherwise no one would have dared to expose mystery of God in public and to profane those inexpressible feelings with stale sentimentalities. Moreover, I was certain that this was the wrong way to reach God, for I knew, knew from experience, that this grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation. This was preached from the pulpit, but always on the assumption that revelation had made the will of God plain. To me, on the other hand, it seemed the most too, obscure and unknown thing of all. To me it seemed that one's duty was to explore daily the will of God. I did not do that, but I felt sure that I would do it as soon as an urgent reason for so doing presented itself. Personality No. i preoccupied me too much of the time. It often seemed to me that religious precepts were being put in place of the will of God which could be so unexpected and so alarming for the sole purpose of sparing people the necessity for understanding God's will. I grew more and more skeptical, and my father's sermons and those of other parsons became acutely embarrassing to me. All the people about me seemed to take the jargon for granted, and the dense obscurity that emanated from it; thoughtlessly they swallowed all the contradictions, such as that God is omniscient human history, and that he actually so that they would have to sin, and human beings nevertheless forbids them to sin and even punishes them by and therefore foresaw all created eternal damnation in hell-fire. For a long time the devil had played no part in my thinking, curiously enough. The devil appeared to me no worse than a powerful man's vicious watchdog, chained up. Nobody had any responsibility for the world except God, and, as I knew only too well, He could be terrible. My doubts and uneasiness increased whenever I heard my father in his emotional sermons speak of the "good" God, praising God's love for man and exhorting man to love God in return. "Does he really know what he is talking about?" I wondered. "Could he have me, his son, put to the knife as a human sacrifice, like Isaac, or deliver him to an unjust court which would have him crucified like Jesus? No, he could not do that. Therefore in some cases he could not do the will of God, which can be absolutely terrible, as the Bible itself shows." It became clear to me that when people are exhorted, among other things, to obey God rather than man, this is said just casually and thoughtlessly. Obviously we do not the will of God at all, for if we did we would treat this know central problem with awe, if only out of sheer fear of the over- powering God who can work His terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done to me. Could anyone who pretended to know the will of God have foreseen what He had caused me to do? In the New Testament, at any rate, there was nothing comparable. The Old Testament, and especially the Book of Job, might have opened my eyes in this respect, but at that time I was not familiar enough with it. Nor had I heard anything of the sort in the instruction for confirmation, which I was then receiving. The fear of God, which was of course mentioned, was considered antiquated, "Jewish," and long since superseded by the Christian message of God's love and goodness. The symbolism of childhood experiences and the violence of the imagery upset me terribly. I asked myself: "Who talks has the impudence to exhibit a phallus so like that? my Who Who makes me think that God deChurch in this abominable manner?" At last I asked myself whether it was not the devil's doing. For that it must have been God or the devil who spoke and acted in this way was something I never doubted. I felt absolutely sure that it was not myself who had invented these thoughts and images. These were the crucial experiences of my life. It was then that it dawned oh me: I must take the responsibility, it is up to me how my fate turns out. I had been confronted with a problem to which I had to find the answer. And who posed the problem? Nobody ever answered me that. I knew that I had to find the answer out of my deepest self, that I was alone before God, and nakedly, and in a shrine? stroys His that God alone asked me these terrible things. 47 Memories, vreams, nejiecnons the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to From life myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was and not what I enjoined upon me to do what God wanted me my own way. Often was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was "there," where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the "Other" were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other wanted. That gave I had the supreme the strength to go matters I feeling that in all decisive ecstasy. Naturally, I could not talk with anyone about these things. I knew of no one to whom I. might have communicated them mother. She seemed to think along someexcept, possibly, similar lines as myself. But I soon noticed that in conversation she was not adequate for me. Her attitude toward me was my what above all one of admiration, and that was not good for me. And so I remained alone with my thoughts. On the whole, I liked that played alone, daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone, and had a secret world of my own. My mother was a very good mother to me. She had a hearty animal warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companionable and pleasant. She was very stout, and a ready listener. She also liked to talk, and her chatter was like the gay plashing of a fountain. She had a decided literary gift, as well as taste and depth. But this quality never properly emerged; it remained hidden beneath the semblance of a kindly, fat old woman, extremely hospitable, and possessor of a great sense of humor. She held all the conventional opinions a person was obliged to have, but then her unconscious personality would suddenly put in an appearance. That personality was unexpectedly powerful: best, I a somber, imposing figure possessed of unassailable authority it. I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny. and no bones about School fears now and then, but each time it was unexpected and frightening. She would then speak as if talking to herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence. The first time I remember this happening was when I was about six years old. At that time we had neighbors who were This other emerged only fairly well off. about my own They had three children, the eldest a boy of age, and two younger sisters. They were city especially on Sundays, dressed their children in a that seemed ridiculous to me ^patent-leather shoes, white frills, little white gloves. Even on weekdays the children folk who, manner were scrubbed and combed. They had fancy manners and anxiously kept their distance from the tough, rude boy with tattered trousers, holes in his shoes, and dirty hands. My mother annoyed me no end with her comparisons and admonishments: "Now look at those nice children, so well brought up and polite, but you behave like a little lout/' Such exhortations humiliated me, and I decided to give the boy a hiding which I did. His mother was furious, hastened to mine and made a great to-do over my act of violence. My mother was properly horrified and gave me a lecture, spiced with tears, longer and more passionate than anything I had ever heard from her before. I had not been conscious of any fault; on the contrary, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, for it seemed to me that I had somehow made amends for the incongruous presence of this stranger in our village. Deeply awed by drew penitently my mother's excitement, I with- table behind our old spinet and began bricks. For some time there was silence in the to my playing with my room. My mother had taken her usual seat by the window, and was knitting. Then I heard her muttering to herself, and from occasional words that I picked up I gathered that she was thinking about the incident, but was now taking another view of it. Suddenly she said aloud, "Of course one should never have kept a litter like thatl" I realized at once that she was talking about those **dressed-up monkeys." Her favorite brother was a hunter who kept dogs and was always talking about dog breeding, mongrels, purebreds, and litters. To my relief I realized that she too regarded those odious children as inferior whelps, and 49 that her scolding therefore need not be taken at face value. But I also knew, even at that age, that I must keep perfectly and not come out triumphantly with: "You see, you think She would have repudiated the idea indignantly: **You still as I do!" how dare you pretend such a thing about your must already have had earlier experiences of a similar nature which I have forgotten. horrid boy, mother!'* I conclude from this that I I tell this story because at the time of skepticism there was another instance which my growing religious threw light on my mother's twofold nature. At table one day the talk turned on the dullness of the tunes of certain hymns. A possible revision of the hymnal was mentioned. At that my mother murmured, "O du Liebe meiner Liebe, du vertounschte* Seligkeif (O thou love of my love, thou accursed bliss ) As in the past I pretended that I had not heard and was careful not to cry out in glee, in spite of . my feeling of triumph. There was an enormous difference between my mother's two child I often had anxiety personalities. That was why as a dreams about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear's cave. Archaic and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. At such moments she was the embodiment of what I have called the "natural mind." I too have 8 this archaic nature, and in me it is linked with the not always pleasant of seeing people and things as gift are, I can let myself be deceived from here to Tipperary 1 don't want they when know to recognize something, and yet at bottom I matters really stand. In this I am like a dog quite well how he can be tricked, but he always smells it out in the end. This "insight" is based on instinct, or on a "participation mystique" with others. It is as if the "eyes of the background" do the seeing in an impersonal act of perception. 2 Slip of the tongue for erwunscht (longed for). s The is "natural mind" the "mind which says absolutely straight and ruthless things." (Seminar on Interpretation of Visions [Zurich, privately printed, 1940], V, p. iv.) "That is the sort of mind which springs from natural sources, and not from opinions taken from books; it wells up from the earth like a natural spring, and brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature." (Ibid., VI, p. 34.) 50 School Years This was something I did not realize until much later, when some very strange things happened to me. For instance, there was the time when I recounted the life story of a man without knowing him. It was at the wedding of a friend of my wife's; the bride and her family were all entirely unknown to me. During the meal I was sitting opposite a middle-aged gentleman with a long, handsome beard, who had been introduced to me as a barrister. We were having an animated conversation about criminal psychology. In order to answer a particular question of his, I made up a story to illustrate it, embellishing it with all sorts of details. While I was telling my story, I noticed that a quite different expression came over the man's face, and a silence fell on the table. Very much abashed, I stopped speaking. Thank heavens we were already at the dessert, so I soon stood up and went into the lounge of the hotel. There I withdrew into a corner, lit a cigar, and tried to think over the situation. At this moment one of the other guests who had been sitting at my table came over and asked reproachfully, "How did you ever come to commit such a frightful indiscretion?" "Indiscretion?" "Why yes, that story To my you told." "But I amazement and horror made it it all up!" turned out that I had told the story of the man opposite me, exactly and in all its details. I also discovered, at this moment, that I could no longer remember a single word of the story even to this day I have been unable to recall it. In his Selbstschau, Zschokke* describes a how once, in an inn, he was able to unmask an unknown young man as a thief, because he had seen the similar incident: theft being committed before his inner eye. has often happened to me that I my which I really could not know at all. something In the course of suddenly knew life it The knowledge came to me as though it were my own idea. It was the same with my mother. She did not know what she was which saying; it was like a voice wielding absolute authority, said exactly what fitted the situation. My mother usually assumed that I was mentally far beyond * Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke ( 1771-1848), Swiss author of historical novels and studies in Swiss and Bavarian history. Cf. Civilization in Transition (CW 10, par. 850). 51 my age, and she would talk to me as to a grown-up. It was plain that she was telling me everything she could not say to my father, for she early made me her confidant and confided her troubles to me. Thus, I was about eleven years old when she informed me of a matter that concerned my father and alarmed me brains, and at last greatly. I racked sion that I must consult a certain friend of my came my to the conclu- father's whom I knew by hearsay to be an influential person. Without saying a word to my mother, I went into town one afternoon after school and called at this man's house. The maid who opened the door told me that he was out. Depressed and disappointed, I returned home. But it was by the mercy of providence that he was not there. Soon afterward my mother again referred to this matter, and this time gave me a very different and far milder picture of the situation, so that the whole thing went up in smoke. That struck me to the quick, and I thought: "What an ass you were to believe it, and you nearly caused a disaster with your stupid seriousness/' From then on I decided to divide everything my mother said by two. My confidence in her was strictly limited, and that was what prevented me from ever telling her about my deeper preoccupations. But then came the moments when her second personality burst forth, and what she said on those occasions was so true and to the point that I trembled before it. If my mother could then have been pinned down, I would have had a wonderful interlocutor, With Jay my my father it was quite different. I would have liked him and ask him religious difficulties before to for ad- but I did not do so because it seemed to me that I knew in advance what he would be obliged to reply out of respect for his vice, office. How right I was in this assumption was demonstrated to me soon afterward. My father personally gave me my instruction for confirmation. It bored me to death. One day I was leafing through the catechism, hoping to find something besides the sentimental-sounding and usually incomprehensible as well as uninteresting expatiations on Lord Jesus. I came across the paragraph on the my Trinity. Here was interest: a oneness which was something that challenged simultaneously a threeness. School Tfears This was a problem that fascinated me because of its inner contradiction. I waited longingly for the moment when we would reach this question. But when we got that far, my father 'We now come to the Trinity, but we'll skip that, for I understand of it I admired really myself." nothing my father's on the but other I hand was honesty, profoundly disappointed and said to myself, "There we have it; they know nothing about it and don't give it a thought. Then how can I talk about my said, secret?" I made vain, tentative attempts with certain of my schoolwho struck me as reflective. I awakened no response, fellows on the contrary, a stupefaction that warned me off. In spite of the boredom, I made every effort to believe without understanding an attitude which seemed to correspond with my father's and prepared myself for Communion, on which I had set my last hopes. This was, I thought, merely a memorial meal, a kind of anniversary celebration for Lord Jesus who had died 1890 30 1860 years ago. But still, he had let fall certain hints such as, "Take, eat, this is my body," meaning that we should eat the Communion bread as if it were his body, which after all had originally been flesh. Likewise we were to drink the wine which had originally been blood. It was but, = me we were to incorporate him into seemed to me so preposterous an impossibility that I was sure some great mystery must lie behind it, and that I would participate in this mystery in the course of Communion, on which my father seemed to place so high a value. As was customary, a member of the church committee stood godfather to me. He was a nice, taciturn old man, a wheelwright in whose workshop I had often stood, watching his skill with lathe and adze. Now he came, solemnly transformed by frock coat and top hat, and took me to church, where my father in his familiar robes stood behind the altar and read prayers from clear to that in this fashion ourselves. This the liturgy. On the white cloth covering the altar lay large trays filled with small pieces of bread. I could see that the bread came from our baker, whose baked goods were generally poor and flat in taste. From a pewter jug, wine was poured into a pewter cup. My father ate a piece of the bread, took a swallow of 53 the wine I knew the tavern from which it had come and were stiff, solemn, and, passed the cup to one of the old men. All it seemed to me, uninterested. I looked on in suspense, but could not see or guess whether anything unusual was going on inside the old men. The atmosphere was the same as that of all other performances in church baptisms, funerals, and so on. I had the impression that something was being performed here in the traditionally correct manner. My father, too, seemed to be chiefly concerned with going through and was part it it all according to rule, of this rule that the appropriate words were read or spoken with emphasis. There was no mention of the fact that it was now 1860 years since Jesus had died, whereas in all other memorial services the date was stressed. I saw no sadness and no joy, and felt that the feast was meager in every respect, considering the extraordinary importance of the person whose memory was being celebrated. It did not compare at all with secular festivals. Suddenly my turn came. I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had expected. The wine, of which I took only the smallest sip, was thin and rather sour, plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer, and the people went out, neither depressed nor illumined with joy, but with faces that said, "So that's that/' I walked home with my father, intensely conscious that I was wearing a new black felt hat and a new black suit which was already beginning to turn into a frock coat. It was a kind of lengthened jacket that spread out into two little wings over the seat, and between these was a slit with a pocket into which I could tuck a handkerchief which seemed to me a grown-up, manly gesture. I felt socially elevated and by implication accepted into the society of men. That day, too, Sunday dinner was an unusually good one. I would be able to stroll about in my new suit all day. But otherwise I was empty and did not know what I was feeling. Only gradually, in the course of the following days, did it that nothing had happened. I had reached the dawn on me pinnacle of religious initiation, had expected something I knew not what to happen, and nothing at all had happened, I knew that God could do stupendous tilings to me, things of 54 School Years and unearthly light; but this ceremony contained no trace not for me, at any rate. To be sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words. Among the others I had noticed nothing of the vast despair, fire of God the overpowering elation and outpouring of grace which for me constituted the essence of God. I had observed no sign of "com" With whom? With munion/* of "union, becoming one with Yet he was a man who had died 1860 years ago. only Jesus? Why should a person become one with him? He was called the "Son of God" & demigod, therefore, like the Greek heroes: how then could an ordinary person become one with him? This was called the "Christian religion," but none of it had anything to do with God as I had experienced Him. On the other hand it was quite clear that Jesus, the man, did have to do with God; . he had despaired . Gethsemane and on the cross, after having kind and loving father. He too, then, must have seen the fearfulness of God. That I could understand, but what was the purpose of this wretched memorial service with the flat bread and the sour wine? Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal experience for me. It had proved hollow; more than that, it had proved to be a total loss. I knew that I would never again be able to participate in taught that in God was a ceremony. "Why, that is not religion at all," I thought. "It an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there, but death." I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life. He was struggling with a death whose existence he could not admit. An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no this is possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent. I could not plunge my dear and generous father, who in so many matters left me to myself and had never tyrannized over me, which were necessary for an God could do that. I had no it would be inhuman. God is not human, I thought; to; right that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He both at once and is therefore a great is kind and terrible peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself* People into that despair and sacrilege experience of divine grace. Only 55 for fear they will cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, fall victim to the tempter and destroyer, Jesus, too, had noticed that, and had therefore taught: "Lead us not into temptation/' sense of union with the Church and with the human world, so far as I knew it, was shattered. I had, so it seemed to me, suffered the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation My with the universe had disintegrated; I could no longer participate in the general faith, but found myself involved in something inexpressible, in my secret, which I could share with no one. It was terrible and this was the worst of it vulgar and ridiculous also, a diabolical mockery. I began to ponder: What must one think of invented that thought about the dream that had befallen God and me at the God? I the cathedral, A age of three. had not still less stronger mine had imposed both on me. Had nature been responsible? But nature was nothing other than the will of the Creator. Nor did it help to accuse the devil, for he too was a creature of God. God alone was real an annihilating fire and will than an indescribable grace. What about the failure of that my own failure? I Communion had prepared for to affect it me? Was in all earnestness, had hoped for an experience of grace and illumination, and nothing had happened. God had been absent. For God's sake I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father's and everybody else's faith. Insofar as they all represented the Christian religion, I was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the university. I began looking in my father's relatively modest library which seemed impressive to me for books that would tell me what was known about God. At first I found only the traditional conceptions, but not what I was seeking & writer who thought independently. At last I hit upon Biedermann's in those days Christliche Dogmatik, published in 1869. Here, apparently, was a man who thought for himself, who worked out his own a views. I learned from him that religion was a spiritual act 56 School fears consisting in man's establishing his own relationship to God." disagreed with that, for I understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. My "religion" recognized I no human relationship to God, for how could anyone relate to so little known as God? I must know more about God something in order to establish a relationship to him. In Biedermann's chapter on "The Nature of God" I found that God showed Himbe a "personality to be conceived after the analogy of self to the human ego: the unique, utterly supramundane ego who embraces the entire cosmos." As far as I knew the Bible, this definition seemed to fit. God has a personality and is the ego of the universe, just as I myself am the ego of my psychic and physical being. But here I encountered a formidable obstacle. Personality, after all, surely signifies character. that is to say, it Now, character is one thing and not another; But if God is involves certain specific attributes. everything, how can He still possess a distinguishable character? On die other hand, if He does have a character, He can only be the ego of a subjective, limited world. Moreover, what kind of of personality does He have? Everything one knows the answer one cannot character or what kind depends on that, for unless establish a relationship to Him. I felt the strongest resistances to imagining God by analogy with own ego. That seemed to me boundlessly arrogant, if not downright blasphemous. ego was, in any case, difficult for first place, I was aware that it me to In the enough grasp. my My two contradictory aspects: No. i and No. 2. Second, my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy, irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God? Eagerly I looked up the other characteristics of God, and found them all listed in the way familiar to me from my instruo consisted of in both its aspects 57 Memories, ureams, Reflections found that according to Article 172 "the most immediate expression of the supramundane nature of God is i) negative: His invisibility to men," etc., "and 2) positive: His dwelling in Heaven," etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my mind the blasphemous vision which God via the devil) had imposed on my directly or indirectly (i.e., tion for confirmation. I will. Article 183 informed me that "God's supramundane nature with regard to the moral world" consists in His "justice," which is not merely "judicial" but is also "an expression of His holy had hoped that this paragraph would say something about God's dark aspects which were giving me so much trouble: His vindictiveness, His dangerous wrathfulness, His incomprehensible conduct toward the creatures His omnipotence had being." I made, whose inadequacies He must know by virtue of that same omnipotence, and whom moreover it pleased Him to lead astray, or at least to test, even though He knew in advance the outcome of His experiments. What, indeed, was God's character? What would we say of a human personality who behaved in this manner? I did not dare to think this question out to its conclusion. And then I read that God, "although sufficient unto Himself and needing nothing outside Himself," had created the world "out of His satisfaction," and "as a natural world has filled it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fill it with His love." At first I pondered over the perplexing word "satisfaction." what or with whom? Obviously with the world, Satisfaction with for He had looked upon just this that I His work and called it good. But it was had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing much happens, "old age, disease, and death" are experienced more intensely, in greater detail, and more nakedly than elsewhere. Although I was not yet sixteen years old I had seen a man and beast, and in had heard enough of the sufferings and corruption of the world. God could at most have felt "satisfaction" with paradise, but then He Himself had taken good care great deal of the reality of the life of church and school I 58 School Vears that the glory of paradise should not last too long by planting in that poisonous serpent, the devil. Had He taken satisfaction it in that too? I felt certain that Biedermann did not mean this, but was simply babbling on in that mindless way that characterized religious instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw it, it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that God, for all that He probably did not feel any such cruel satisfaction in the unmerited sufferings of man and beast, had nevertheless intended to create a world of contradictions in which one creature devoured another and life meant simply being born to die. The "wonderful harmonies" of natural law looked to me more like a chaos tamed by fearful effort, and the "eternal" starry firmament with its predetermined orbits seemed plainly an accumulation of random bodies without order or meaning. For no one could really see the constellations people spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations. I either did not see or gravely doubted that God filled the natural world with His goodness. This, apparently, was another of those points which must not be reasoned about but must be believed. In fact, if God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? "Obviously it has been infected and thrown into confusion by the devil," I thought. But the devil, too, was a creature of God. I had to read up on the devil. He seemed to be highly important after all. I again opened Biedermann's book on Christian dogmatics and looked for the answer to this burning question. What were the reasons for suffering, imperfection, and evil? I could find nothing. That finished it for me. This weighty tome on dogmatics was nothing but fancy drivel; worse still, it was a fraud or a specimen of uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth. I was disillusioned and even indignant, and once more seized with pity for my father, who had fallen victim to this mumbo-jumbo. But somewhere and at some time there must have been people sought the truth as I was doing, who thought rationally and did not wish to deceive themselves and others and deny the sorrowful reality of the world. It was about this who 59 time that my mother, or rather, her No. 2 personality, suddenly and without preamble said, *TTou must read Goethe's Faust one of these days." We had a handsome edition of Goethe, and I a miraculous balm. picked out.Fatttf It poured into my soul like . "Here at last," I thought, "is someone who takes the devil serihim with the ously and even concludes a blood pact with adversary who has the power to frustrate God's plan to make a for to my mind he perfect world." I regretted Faust's behavior, should not have been so one-sided and so easily tricked. He should have been cleverer and also more moral. How childish he was to gamble away his soul so frivolouslyl Faust was plainly a bit of had the impression that the weight of the on the side of Mephwould not have grieved me if Faust's soul had a windbag. drama and its istopheles. It gone to hell. I significance lay chiefly He deserved it. I did not like the idea of the "cheated devil" at the end, for after all Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was contrary to logic for him to be tricked by silly little angels. Mephistopheles cheated in quite a different sense: he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that somewhat seemed to me characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through right into the Hereafter. There, admittedly, his puerility came to light, but, as I saw it, he did not deserve the initiation into the great mysteries. I would have given him a taste of purgatorial The real problem, it seemed to me, lay with fires. Mephistopheles, the deepest impression on me, and who, I vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the 5 Mothers. At any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation whose whole figure made end remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the fringes of my conscious world. At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been at the people who saw evil and its universal power, and more im- portant the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere * Faust, Part Two, trans, Books Ltd, 1959), pp. 76 by trick, Philip by a bit of jiggery-pokery. Wayne (Hannondsworth, ff. 60 For England, Penguin School J^ears me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible, and was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous. In reading the drama I had discovered that Faust had been a philosopher of sorts, and although he turned away from philosophy, he had obviously learned from it a certain receptivity to the truth. Hitherto I had heard virtually nothing of philosophy, and now a new hope dawned. Perhaps, I thought, there were philosophers who had grappled with these questions and could shed light on them for me. Since there were no philosophers in my father's library they were suspect because they thought I had to content myself I with Krug's General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences, second edition, 1832. I plunged forthwith into the article on God. To my discontent it began with the etymology of the word "God," which, it said, "incontestably" derived from "good" and signified the ens summum or perfectissimum. The existence of God could not be proved, it continued, nor the innateness of the idea of God. The latter, however, could exist a priori in man, if not in actuality at any rate potentially. In any case our "intellectual powers" must "already be developed to a certain degree before they are capable of engendering so sublime an idea/' This explanation astounded me beyond measure. What is wrong with these "philosophers"? I wondered. Evidently they God only by hearsay. The theologians are different in any rate; at least they are sure that God exists, even though they make contradictory statements about Him. This lexicographer Krug expresses himself in so involved a man- know of this respect, at easy to see he would like to assert that he is already of God's existence. Then why doesn't he convinced sufficiently so say outright? Why does he pretend as if he really thought ner that it is we "engender" the idea of God, and to do so must first have reached a certain level of development? So far as I knew, even the savages wandering naked in their jungles had such ideas. And they were certainly not "philosophers" who sat down to "engender an idea of God." I never engendered any idea of God, either. Of course God cannot be proved, for how could, say, a that clothes moth that eats Australian wool prove to other moths that Memories, ureams, Reflections depend on our proofs. about God? I was told all my certainty sorts of things about Him, yet I could believe nothing. None of it convinced me. That was not where my idea came from. In fact that is, not something thought out. It it was not an idea at all was not like imagining something and thinking it out and afterward believing it. For example, all that about Lord Jesus was always suspect to me and I never really believed it, although it was impressed upon me far more than God, who was usually only hinted at in the background. Why have I come to take God for granted? Why do these philosophers pretend that God is an idea, a kind of arbitrary assumption which they can engender or not, when it is perfectly plain that He exists, as plain as a brick that falls on your head? Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate of experiences. After all, I didn't invent that horrible image about the cathedral. On the contrary, it was forced on me and I was compelled, with the utmost cruelty, to think it, and afterward that inexpressible feeling of grace came to me. I had no control over these things. I came to the conclusion that there must be something the matter with Australia exists? God's existence does not How had I arrived at these philosophers, for they had the curious notion that God was a kind of hypothesis that could be discussed. I also found it ex- tremely unsatisfying that the philosophers offered no opinions or explanations about the dark deeds of God. These, it seemed to me, merited special attention and consideration from philosophy, since they constituted a problem which, I gathered, was rather a hard one for the theologians. All the greater was my dis- appointment to discover that the philosophers had apparently never even heard of it. I therefore passed on to the next topic that interested me, the article on the devil. If, I read, we conceived of the devil as originally evil, we would become entangled in patent contradictions, that is to say, we would fall into dualism. Therefore we would do better to assume that the devil was originally created a good being but had been corrupted by his pride. However, as the author of the article pointed outand I was glad to see this point made this hypothesis presupposed the evil it was attempting to ex- 62 School Vears namely, pride. For the rest, he continued, the origin of was "unexplained and inexplicable" which meant to me: Like the theologians, he does not vtfant to think about it. The article on evil and its origin proved equally unilluminating. plain evil The account I have given here summarizes trains of thought and developments ef ideas which, broken by long intervals, extended over several years. They went on exclusively in my No. 2 personality, and were strictly private. I used my father's library for these researches, secretly and without asking his permission. In the intervals, personality No. i openly read all the novels of Gerstacker, and German translations of the classic English novels. I also began reading German literature, concentrating on those classics which school, with its needlessly laborious explanations of the obvious, had not spoiled for me. I read vastly and planlessly, drama, poetry, history, and later natural science. Reading was not only interesting but provided a welcome and beneficial distraction from the preoccupations of personality No. z, which in increasing measure were leading me to depressions. For everywhere in the realm of religious questions I encountered only locked doors, and if ever one door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind it. Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wanted someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of contact; on the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a felt an apprehension which robbed me of speech. That, too, depressed me. I did not know what to make of it. Why has no one had experiences similar to mine? I wondered. Why is there nothing about it in scholarly books? Am I the only one who has had such experiences? Why should I be the only one? It never occurred to me that I might be crazy, for the light and darkness of God seemed to me facts that could be understood even distrust, though they oppressed my feelings. which I was being forced as somefor it meant isolation, and that seemed all the thing threatening, more unpleasant to me as I was unjustly taken for a scapegoat a good deal more often than I liked. Moreover, something had I felt the singularity into happened in school to increase my isolation. In the German class 63 Memories, uream$> Reflections was rather mediocre, for the subject matter, especially German grammar and syntax, did not interest me at all. I was lazy and bored. The subjects for composition usually seemed to me shallow or silly, and my essays turned out accordingly: either careless or labored. I slipped through with average marks, and this I me very well, as it fitted in with my general tendency not be conspicuous. On the whole I sympathized with boys from suited to poor families who, like myself, had come from nowhere, and I liking for those who were none too bright, though I tended to become excessively irritated by their stupidity and had a was that they had somecraved deeply: in their simplicity they noticed nothing unusual about me. My "unusualness" was gradually beginning to give me the disagreeable, rather uncanny feeling that I must possess repulsive traits, of which I was not aware, that caused my teachers and schoolmates to shun me. In the midst of these preoccupations the following incident burst on me like a thunderclap. We had been assigned a subject for composition which for once interested me. Consequently I set to work with a will and produced what seemed to me a care- ignorance. For the fact of the matter thing to offer which I and successful paper. I hoped to receive at least one of the highest marks for it not the highest, of course, for that would have made me conspicuous, but one close to the top, fully written Our teacher was in the habit of discussing the compositions in The first one he turned to was by the boy at the head of the class. That was all right. Then followed the comorder of merit. and I waited and waited in vain for my did not come. "It just can't be," I thought, "that so bad that it is even below these poor ones he has come positions of the others, name. mine Still it is What can be the matter?" Was I simply hors concours which would mean being isolated and attracting attention in the most dreadful way of all? to. When he said, all the essays had been "Now I have one more read, the teacher paused. composition Jung's. It is Then by far the best, and I ought to have given it first place. But unfortunately it is a fraud. Where did you copy it from? Confess the truth!" 64 Schoolfears I shot to my feet, as horrified as I was furious, and cried, "I did not copy it! I went to a lot of trouble to write a good composition^ But the teacher shouted at me, "You re lying! You could never write a composition like this. No one is going to believe Now where did you copy it from?" Vainly I swore to my innocence. The teacher clung to his that. He became threatening. "I can tell you this: if I knew where you had copied it from, you would be chucked out of the school." And he turned away. My classmates threw odd glances at me, and I realized with horror that they were thinking, "A-ha, so that's the way it is." My protestations fell on deaf ears. I felt that from now on I was branded, and that all the paths which might have led me out of unusualness had been cut off. Profoundly disheartened and dishonored, I swore vengeance on the teacher, and if I had had an opportunity something straight out of the law of the jungle would have resulted. How in the world could I possibly prove that I had not copied the essay? For days I turned this incident over in my thoughts, and again and again came to the conclusion that I was powerless, the sport of a blind and stupid fate that had marked me as a liar and a cheat. Now I realized many things I had not previously understood for example, how it was that one of the teachers could say to my father, who had inquired about my conduct in school, "Oh, he's just average, but he works commendably hard/' I was thought to be relatively stupid and superficial. That did not annoy me really. But what made me furious was that they should think me capable of cheating, and thus morally destroy me. My grief and rage threatened to get out of control. And then something happened that I had already observed in myself several times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a if a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. It was as mood of cool curiosity came over me, and I asked myself, "What is really going on here? All right, you are excited. Of course the teacher is an idiot who doesn't understand your nature that is, doesn't understand it any more than you do. Therefore he is as mistrustful as you are. You distrust yourself and others, and that theory. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is why you side with those seen through. One who gets excited are naive, simple, and easily doesn't understand when one things." In the light of these considerations sine ira et studio, I was by the analogy with that other train of ideas which had impressed itself on me so forcefully when I did not want to think the forbidden thought. Although at that time I doubtless struck saw no difference as yet between personalities No. i and No. 2, and still claimed the world of No. 2 as my own personal world, there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen. At that time, of course, I could never have expressed myself in nor am I now attributing to my state of consciousness something that was not there at the time. I am only trying to express the feelings I had then, and to shed light on that twilight world with the help of what I know now. this fashion, It was some months after the incident just described that my schoolmates hung the nickname "Father Abraham" on me. No. i could not understand why, and thought it silly and ridiculous. Yet somewhere in the background I felt that the name had hit the mark. All allusions to this background were painful to me, for the more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from I had grown up with in the country, among the view of the world and woods, among men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the map, but "God's world," so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was evident, for exrivers ample, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in the resigned 66 School Years eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of the cats who had chosen house and barn as their, residence and hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God's world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died. Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, and trust in common all the essential features of existence with the exception of speech, sharpened understanding. hunger and thirst, fear consciousness, and science. And although I admired science in the conventional way, I also saw it giving rise to alienation and aberration from God's world, as leading to a degeneration which animals were not capable of. Animals were dear and faithful, unchanging and trustworthy. People more than I now distrusted ever. Insects I did not regard as proper animals, and I took coldblooded vertebrates to be a rather lowly intermediate stage on the way down to the insects. Creatures in this category were and collection, curiosities merely, alien objects for observation and extra-human; they were manifestations of impersonal life and more akin to plants than to human beings. The earthly manifestations of "God's world" began with the realm of plants, as a kind of direct communication from it. It was as though one were peering over the shoulder of the Creator, who, thinking Himself unobserved, was making toys and decorations. Man and the proper animals, on the other hand, were bits of God that had become independent* That was why they could move about on tfyeir own and choose their abodes. Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only the beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with no intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mys- vreums, terious and seemed to hensible meaning of place where I me life. felt closest direct embodiments of the incompreFor that reason the woods were the to its deepest meaning and to its awe- inspiring workings. This impression was reinforced when I became acquainted with Gothic cathedrals. But there the infinity of the cosmos, the chaos of meaning and meaninglessness, of impersonal purpose and mechanical law, were wrapped in stone. This contained and at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit. What I dimly felt to be my kinship with stone was the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter. said, have been beyond my intuitions in any graphic and my feelings powers in for all No. 2 occurred way, they personality, while my active and comprehending ego remained passive and was absorbed At that time it would, as I have to formulate into the sphere of the "old man," who belonged to the centuries, I experienced him and his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was present, No. i personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and when the ego that became increasingly identical with No. i personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all, seemed a remote and unreal dream. Between my sixteenth and nineteenth years the fog of my dilemma slowly lifted, and my depressive states of mind improved. No. i personality emerged more and more distinctly. School and city life took up my time, and my increased knowledge gradually permeated or repressed the world of intuitive premonitions. I began systematically pursuing questions I had consciously framed. I read a brief introduction to the history of philosophy and in this way gained a bird's-eye view of everything that had been thought in this field. I found to my gratification that many of my intuitions had historical ana- logues. Above all I was attracted to the thought of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Plato, despite the'long-windedness of Socratic argumentation. Their ideas were beautiful and aca- demic, like pictures in a gallery, but somewhat remote. Only in Meister Eckhart did I feel the breath of life not that I under- 68 School Years stood him. The Schoolmen left me cold, and the Thomas appeared to me more Aristotelian than a desert. I thought, "They all want to force something to come out by tricks of logic, something they have not been granted and do not really know about. They want to prove a belief to themselves, whereas actually it is a matter of experience.'* They intellectualism of St. seemed to me like people who knew by lifeless hearsay that elephants but had never seen one, and were now trying to prove by arguments that on logical grounds such animals must exist and must be constituted as in fact they are. For obvious reasons, the critical philosophy of the eighteenth century at first did not existed, appeal to me at all. Of the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison. But the great find resulting from my researches was Schopenhauer. He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, pasall those things which the others hardly seemed to sion, evil notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe. He spoke neither of the all-good and all-wise providence of a Creator, nor of the harmony of the cosmos, but stated bluntly that a fundamental flaw underlay the sorrowful human history and the cruelty of nature: the blindness of the world-creating Will. This was confirmed not only by the early observations I had made of diseased and dying fishes, course of of mangy foxes, frozen or starved birds, of the pitiless tragedies concealed in a flowery meadow: earthworms tormented to death by ants, insects that tore each other apart piece by piece, and so on. My experiences with human beings, too, had taught me anything rather than a belief in man's original goodness and decency. I knew myself well enough to know that I was only it were, distinguishing myself from an animal. Schopenhauer's somber picture of the world had my undivided approval, but not his solution of the problem. I felt sure gradually, as 69 Memories, Dreams, Reflections by 'Will" he really meant God, the Creator, and that he was saying that God was blind. Since I knew from experience that God was not offended by any blasphemy, that on the conHe wished to evoke trary He could even encourage it because his darkness and also but side and not only man's bright positive distress me. I condid not view ungodliness, Schopenhauer's sidered it a verdict justified by the facts. But I was all the more disappointed by his theory that the intellect need only con- that its image in order to cause it to reverse could the Will see this image at all, since it was why should it, even if it could see, thereby be per- front the blind Will with How itself. blind? And image would show it precisely It was a function of not a mirror but an infinitesimal fragment of a suaded to reverse what it willed? itself, since the And what was the intellect? the human soul, mirror such as a child might hold up to the sun, expecting the sun to be dazzled by it. I was puzzled that Schopenhauer should ever have been satisfied with such an inadequate answer. Because of this I was impelled to study him more thoroughly, and I became increasingly impressed by his relation to Kant. I therefore began reading the works of this philosopher, above all his Critique of Pure Reason., which put me to some hard thinking. My efforts were rewarded, for I discovered the fundamental flaw, so I thought, in Schopenhauer's system. He had committed the deadly sin of hypostatizing a metaphysical assertion, and of endowing a mere noumenon, a Ding an sich, with special qualities. I got this from Kant's theory of knowledge, and it afforded me an even greater illumination, if that were possible, than Schopenhauer's "pessimistic" view of the world. This philosophical development extended from my seventeenth year until well into the period of my medical studies. It brought about a revolutionary alteration of my attitude to the world and to life. Whereas formerly I had been shy, timid, mistrustful, pallid, thin, and apparently unstable in health, I now began to display a tremendous appetite on all fronts. I knew what wanted and went after it. I also became noticeably more and more communicative. I discovered that poverty was no handicap and was far from being tKe principal reason I accessible for suffering; that the sons of the rich really did not enjoy 70 any School Years advantages over the poor and ill-clad boys. There were far deeper reasons for happiness and unhappiness than one's allotment of pocket money. I made more and better friends than before. I felt firmer ground under my feet and even summoned up to of ideas. But that, as I discovered all courage speak openly my too soon, was a misunderstanding which I had cause to regret. For I met not only with embarrassment or mockery, but with To my consternation and discomfiture, I found that certain people considered me a braggart, a poseur, and a humbug. The old charge of cheat was revived, even though in a hostile rejection. somewhat milder form. Once again it had to do with a subject for composition that had aroused my interest. I had worked out my paper with particular care, taking the greatest pains to polish my style. The result was crushing. "Here is an essay by Jung," said the teacher. "It lessly that it is is downright easy to see brilliant, how little but tossed serious effort off so care- went into it. I can tell you this, Jung, you won't get through life with that slapdash attitude. Life calls for earnestness and conscientiousness, work and effort. Look at D/s paper. He has none of your brilliance, but he is honest, conscientious, and hard-working. That is the way to success in Me." feelings were not as hurt as on the first occasion, for in of himself the teacher had been impressed by my essay, spite and had at least not accused me of stealing it. I protested against My but was dismissed with the comment: "The Ars poem is the one which conceals the effort of creation. But you cannot make me believe that about your essay, for it was tossed off frivolously and without any effort." There were, I knew, a few good ideas in it, but the teacher did not even bother to discuss them. I felt some bitterness over this incident, but the suspicions of my schoolmates were a far more serious matter, for they threatened to throw me back into my former isolation and depression. I racked my brains, trying to understand what I could have done his reproaches, Poetica maintains that the best to deserve their slanders. By cautious inquiries I discovered that they looked askance at me because I often made remarks, or dropped hints, about things which I could not possibly know. For instance, I pretended to know something about Kant and 7* Memories, Dreams, Reflections which Schopenhauer, or about paleontology, had in school as yet. These we had astonishing discoveries not even showed me the burning questions had nothing to do with that practically but belonged, like my ultimate secret, to "God's everyday life, all world/' which it was better not to speak of. took care not to mention these esoteric matters and among the adults of my acquaintschoolmates, among my ance I knew no one with whom I might have talked without risk Henceforth I of being thought a boaster and impostor. The most painful thing was the frustration of attempts to overcome the inner my of all split in myself, my division into events occurred which forced two worlds. Again and again me out of my ordinary, everyday existence into the boundlessness of "God's world/' This expression, "God's world," may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To "God's world" belonged everything superhuman dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. "God," for me, was everything and anything but "edifying." The older I grew, the more frequently I was asked by my parents and others what I wanted to be. I had no clear notions on that score. My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. In the sciences I was drawn principally to zoology, paleontology, and geology; in the humanities to Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and prehistoric At archaeology. that time, of course, I did not realize how very much this choice of the most varied subjects corresponded to the nature of inner dichotomy. What appealed to me in science were the con- my crete facts and their historical background, and in comparative religion the spiritual problems, into which philosophy also entered. In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very large extent, the i personality, whereas the humane or historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2. needs of No. 7* School Years Torn between these two poles, I was for a long time unable to on anything. I noticed that my uncle, the head of my mother's family, who was pastor of St. Alban's in Basel, was settle gently pushing me in the direction of theology. The unusual attentiveness with which I had followed a conversation at table, when he was all of discussing a point of religion with one of his sons, whom were theologians, had not escaped him. I wondered whether there might possibly be theologians who were in close touch with the dizzy heights of the university and therefore knew more than my father. Such conversations never gave me the impression that they were concerned with real experiences, and certainly not with experiences like mine. They dealt exclusively with doctrinal opinions on the Biblical narratives, all of which made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, because of the numerous and barely credible accounts of miracles. While I was attending the Gymnasium I was allowed to lunch at this uncle's house every Thursday. I was grateful to him not only for the lunch but for the unique opportunity of occasionally hearing at his table an adult, intelligent, and intellectual conversation. It was a marvelous experience for me to discover that anything of this sort existed at all, for in my home surroundings I had never heard anyone discussing learned topics. I did sometimes attempt to talk seriously with my father, but encountered an impatience and anxious defensiveness which puzzled me. Not until several years later did I come to understand that my poor father did not dare to think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. He could not receive it as a grace because he wanted to "win it by struggle/* forcing it to come with convulsive efforts. My uncle and my cousins could calmly discuss the dogmas and doctrines of the Church Fathers and the opinions of modern theologians. They seemed safely ensconced in a self-evident world order, in which the name of Nietzsche did not occur at all and Jakob Burckhardt was paid only a grudging compliment. Burckhardt was "liberal," "rather too much of a freethinker"; I gathered that he stood somewhat askew in the eternal order of how remote I was filings. My uncle, I knew, never suspected 73 Memories, vreams, nejiecmons from theology, and I was deeply sorry to have to disappoint him. I would never have dared to lay my problems before him, since I knew only too well how disastrously this would turn out for me. to say in my defense. On the contrary, No. i perI had nothing was sonality fast taking the lead, and my scientific knowledge, the scientific meager, was thoroughly saturated with though in check by held materialism of the time. It was only painfully Pure Kant's the evidence of history and by Reason, Critique of which apparently nobody in my environment understood. For although Kant was mentioned by my theologian uncle and still cousins in tones of praise, his principles were used only to dis- credit opposing views but were never applied to their own. About this, too, I said nothing. Consequently, I began to feel more and more uncomfortable down my uncle and his family. Given these Thursdays became black conscience, my habitually guilty days for me. In this world of social and spiritual security and ease I felt less and less at home, although I thirsted for the drops when I sat to table with of intellectual stimulation felt which occasionally trickled forth. I had to admit to myself: "Yes, you dishonest and ashamed. I you lie and deceive people who mean well by you. not their fault that they live in a world of social and intellectual certitudes, that they know nothing of poverty, that their religion is also their paid profession, that they are totally unconscious of the fact that God Himself can wrench a person out are a cheat; It's of his orderly spiritual world and condemn him to blaspheme. I have no way of explaining this to them. I must take the odium on myself and learn to bear it." Unfortunately, I had so far been singularly unsuccessful in this endeavor. As the tensions of this moral conflict increased, No. a per- sonality became more and more doubtful and distasteful to me, and I could no longer hide this fact from myself. I tried to ex- tinguish No. 2, but could not succeed in that either. At school and in the presence of my friends I could forget him, and he also disappeared when I was studying science. But as soon as I was by myself, at home or out in the country, Schopenhauer and Kant returned in full force, and with them the grandeur of "God's world." My scientific knowledge also formed a part of it, 74 School Years filled the great canvas with vivid colors and figures. Then No. i and his worries about the choice of a profession sank below the horizon, a tiny episode in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But when I returned from my expedition into the centuries, I brought with me a kind of hangover. I, or rather No. i, lived in the here and now, and sooner or later would have to form a definite idea of what profession he wished to pursue. Several times my father had a serious talk with me. I was free to study anything I liked, he said, but if I wanted his advice I should keep away from theology. "Be anything you like except a theologian," he said emphatically. By this time there was a tacit agreement between us that certain things could be said or done without comment. He had never taken me to task for cutting church as often as possible and for not going to Communion any more. The farther away I was from church, the better I felt. The only things I missed were the organ and the choral music, but certainly not the "religious community/* The phrase meant nothm<* to me at all, for the habitual churchgoers struck me as being far less of a community than the "worldly" folk. The latter may have been less virtuous, but on the other hand they were much nicer people, with natural emotions, more sociable and cheerful, warmer-hearted and more sincere. and was able to reassure my father that I had not the slightest be a theologian. But I continued to waver between science and the humanities. Both powerfully attracted me. I was beginning to realize that No. 2, had no pied-ct-terre. In him I was lifted beyond the here and now; in him I felt myself a single eye in a thousand-eyed universe, but incapable of moving so I desire to much as a pebble upon the earth. No. i rebeUed against this pas- he wanted to be up and doing, but for the present he was caught in an insoluble conflict. Obviously I had to wait and see what would happen. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be I was in the habit of replying: a philologist, by which I secretly meant Assyrian and Egyptian archaeology. In reality, however, I continued to study science and philosophy in my leisure hours, and particularly during the holidays, which I spent at home with my mother and sister. The days were long past when I ran to my mother, lamenting, *Tm bored, I don't know what to sivity; 75 jyj. &IUUTI&S, untunus, were now the best time of the year, when I could amuse myself alone. Moreover, during the summer vacations at least, my father was away, as he used regularly to spend do." Holidays his holidays in Sachseln. Only once did it happen that I too went on a vacation trip. I was fourteen when, on our doctor's orders, I was sent to Entlebuch for a cure, in the hope that my fitful appetite and my then unstable health would be improved. For the first time I was adult strangers. I was quartered in the Catholic For me this was an eerie and at the same time house. priest's I seldom got a glimpse of the priest himadventure. fascinating alone among housekeeper was scarcely an alarming person, though prone to be curt. Nothing in the least menacing happened to me. I was under the supervision of an old country doctor who ran a kind of hotel-sanatorium for convalescents of all self, and his types. It was a very mixed group: farm people, minor officials, merchants, and a few cultivated people from Basel, among them a chemist who had attained that pinnacle of glory, the doctorate. My father, too, was a Ph.D., but he was merely a philologist This chemist was a fascinating novelty to me: perhaps one of those who understood the secrets of stones. He was still a young man and taught me to and linguist. here was a scientist, play croquet, but he imparted to me none of his presumably vast learning. And I was too shy, too awkward, and far too ignorant to ask him. I revered who was of them, at least. He in the flesh him as the first person I had ever met some same initiated into the secrets of nature, or sat at the same table with me, ate the food as I did, and occasionally even exchanged a few words with me. I felt transported into the sublimer sphere of adulthood. This elevation in my status was confirmed when I was permitted to go on the outings arranged for the boarders. On one of these occasions we visited a distillery, and were invited to sample the wares. In literal fulfillment of the verse: But now there comes a This stuff, you see, I 6 found the various little is kicker, e liquor glasses so inspiring that I Wilhelm Busch, Die Jobsiade. 76 was wafted SchoolY'ears an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was no longer any inside or outside, no longer an T' and the "others,* No, i and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and flies, revolves, rises, or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a sea of blissful musings, but, because of the violent heaving of the waves, had to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid objects in order to keep my balance on the swaying streets and between the rocking houses and trees. "Marvelous/* I thought, "only unfortunately just a little too much." The experience came to a rather woeful end, but it nevertheless remained a discovery, a premonition of beauty and meaning which I had spoiled only by my stupidity. At the end of my stay my father came to fetch me, and we traveled together to Lucerne, where what happiness! we went aboard a steamship. I had never seen anything like it. I could not see enough of the action of the steam engine, and then suddenly I was told we had arrived in Vitznau. Above the village towered a high mountain, and my father now explained to me that this was the Rigi, and that a cogwheel railway ran up it. We went to a small station building, and there stood the in locomotive the world, with the boiler upright but strangest tilted at a queer angle. Even the seats in the carriage were tilted. My father pressed a ticket into my hand and said, "You can ride into peak alone. I'll stay here, it's too expensive for the two Be careful not to fall down anywhere/' I was speechless with joy. Here I was at the foot of this mighty mountain, higher than any I had ever seen, and quite close to up to the of us. the fiery peaks of my faraway childhood. I was, indeed, almost a man by now. For this trip I had bought myself a bamboo cane and an English jockey cap the proper articles of dress for a And now I was to ascend this enormous mounno longer knew which was bigger, I or the mountain. With a tremendous puffing, the wonderful locomotive shook and rattled me up to the dizzy heights where ever-new abysses and panoramas opened out before my gaze, until at last I stood on world traveler. tain! I the peak in the strange thin air, looking into unimaginable dis- 77 Memories, urearns, tiejiecuons tances. "Yes/' I thought, "this is it, world, the real world, the secret, where there are no teachers, no schools, no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to ask anythe paths, for there were tremendous thing." I kept carefully to my and I felt one had precipices all around. It was all very solemn, in God's world. Here was to be polite and silent up here, for one and most precious the best it was physically present. This was my father had ever given me. So profound was the impression this made upon me that my memories of everything that happened afterward in "God's world" were completely blotted out. But No. i also came into his own on this trip, and his impressions remained with me for the rest of my life. I still see myself, grown up and independent, wearing a stiff black hat and with an expensive cane, sitting on the terrace of one of the overwhelmingly elegant palatial hotels gift beside Lake Lucerne, or in the beautiful gardens of Vitznau, having my morning coffee at a small, white-covered table under a striped awning spangled with sunlight, eating croissants with golden butter and various kinds of jam, and considering plans for outings that would fill the whole long summer day. After the coffee I would stroll calmly, without excitement and at a deliberate pace, to a steamship, which would carry me toward the Gotthard and the foot of those giant mountains whose tops were covered with gleaming glaciers. For many decades this image rose up whenever I was wearied from overwork and sought a point of rest. In real life I have promised myself this splendor again and again, but I have never kept my promise. my first conscious journey, was followed by a second a had been allowed to visit my father, who was on holiday in Sachseln. From him I learned the impressive news that he had become friendly with the Catholic priest there. This seemed to me an act of extraordinary boldness, and secretly I admired my father's courage. While there, I paid a visit to the hermitage of Fliieli and the relics of Brother Klaus, who by then had been beatified. I wondered how the Catholics knew that he was in a beatific state. Perhaps he was still wandering about and had told people so? I was powerfully impressed by This, year or two later. I School Years the genius loci, and was able not only to imagine the possibility of a life so entirely dedicated to God but even to understand it. did so with an inward shudder and a question to which I his wife and children have borne a saint for a husband and father, when it was precisely having But I knew no answer: How could and inadequacies that made him particularly "Yes," I thought, "how could anyone live with a saint?" Obviously he saw that it was impossible, and therefore my father's faults lovable to me? he had to become a hermit Still, it was not so very far from his house. This wasn't a bad idea, I thought, to have the family in one house, while I would live some distance away, in a hut with a pile of books and a writing table, and an open fire cell to his I would roast chestnuts and cook my soup on a tripod. As a holy hermit I wouldn't have to go to church any more, but would have my own private chapel instead. From the hermitage I strolled on up the hill, lost in my thoughts, and was just turning to descend when from the left the slender figure of a young girl appeared. She wore the local costume, had a pretty face, and greeted me with friendly blue eyes. As though it were the most natural thing in the world we descended into the valley together. She was about my own age. where knew no other girls except my cousins, I felt rather emand did not know how to talk to her. So I began hesitantly explaining that I was here for a couple of days on holiday, that I was at the Gymnasium in Basel and later wanted to study at the university. While I was talking, a strange feeling of fatefulness crept over me. "She has appeared just at this moment," I Since I barrassed thought to myself, "and she walks along with me as naturally as we belonged together." I glanced sideways at her and saw an expression of mingled shyness and admiration in her face, which embarrassed me and somehow pierced me. Can it be possible, I wondered, that this is fate? Is my meeting her mere chance? A peasant girl could it possibly be? She is a Catholic, but perhaps her priest is the very one with whom my father has made friends? She has no idea who I am. I certainly couldn't talk to her about Schopenhauer and the negation of the Will, could I? Yet she doesn't seem in any way sinister. Perhaps her priest is not one of those Jesuits skulking about in black robes. if 79 But I cannot tell her, either, that my father is a Protestant clergyman. That might frighten or offend her. And to talk about phi- who more important than Faust even though Goethe made such a simpleton of him that is losophy, or about the devil, is dwells in the distant land of quite out of the question. She still innocence, but I have plunged into reality, into the splendor and cruelty of creation. How can she endure to hear about that? An impenetrable wall stands between us. There is not and can- not be any relationship. Sad at heart, I retreated into myself and turned the conversa- Was she going to Sachseln, wasn't the weather lovely, and what a view, and so on. Outwardly this encounter was completely meaningless. But, seen from within, it was so weighty that it not only occupied my tion to less dangerous topics. thoughts for days but has remained forever in my memory, like a shrine by the wayside. At that time I was still in that childlike where life consists of single, unrelated experiences. For could discover the threads of fate which led from Brother Klaus to the pretty girl? This period of my life was filled with conflicting thoughts. Schopenhauer and Christianity would not square with one an- state who one thing; and for another, No. i wanted to free himfrom the pressure or melancholy of No. 2. It was not No. 2 who was depressed, but No. i when he remembered No. 2. It was just at this time that, out of the clash of opposites, the first systematic fantasy of my life was born. It made its appearance piece by piece, and it had its origin, so far as I can remember, in an experience which stirred me profoundly. One day a northwest wind was lashing the Rhine into foaming other, for self My way to school led along the river. Suddenly I saw approaching from the north a ship with a great mainsail running up the Rhine before the storm. Here was something completely new in my experience a sailing vessel on the Rhinel My imagination took wings. If, instead of this swiftly flowing river, all of Alsace were a lake, we would have boats and waves. sailing great Then Basel would be a port; it would be almost as good as living by the sea. Then everything would be different, and we would live in another time and another world. There steamers. 80 School Years would be no Gymnasium, no long walk to school, and I would be grown up and able to arrange my life as I wished. There would be a hill of rock rising out of the lake, connected by a narrow isthmus to the mainland, cut through by a broad canal with a wooden bridge over it, leading to a gate flanked by towers and opening into a little medieval city built on the surrounding On the rock stood a well-fortified castle with a tall keep, a watchtower. This was my house. In it there were no fine halls or any signs of magnificence. The rooms were simple, paneled, and rather small. There was an uncommonly attractive library where you could find everything worth knowing. There was also a collection of weapons, and the bastions were mounted with heavy cannon. Besides that, there was a garrison of fifty menslopes. The little town had several hundred inand was governed by a mayor and a town council of old men. I myself was justice of the peace, arbitrator, and adviser, who appeared only now and then to hold court. On the landward side the town had a port in which lay my two-masted schooner, armed with several small cannon. The nerve center and raison d&tre of this whole arrangement was the secret of the keep, which I alone knew. The at-arms in the castle. habitants thought had come to me like a shock. For, inside the tower, extending from the battlements to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column or heavy wire cable as thick as a man's arm, which ramified at the top into the finest branches, like the crown of a tree or better still like a taproot with all its tiny rootlets turned upside down and reaching into the air. From the air they drew a certain inconceivable something which was conducted down the copper column into the cellar. Here I had an equally inconceivable apparatus, a kind of laboratory in which I made gold out of the mysterious substance which the copper roots drew from the air. This was really an arcanum, of whose nature I neither had nor wished to form any conception. Nor did my imagination concern itself with the nature of the transformation process. Tactfully and with a certain nervousness it skirted around what actually went on in this laboratory. There was a kind of inner prohibition: one was not supposed to look into it too closely, nor ask what kind of substance was extracted from Si Memories, Dreams, Reflections the air. As Goethe says of the Mothers, "Even to speak of them dismays the bold." 7 me for something ineffable, but at "Spirit/' of course, meant from very rareas it bottom I did not regard essentially different fied air. What the roots absorbed and transmitted to the copper trunk was a kind of spiritual essence which became visible down in the cellar as finished gold coins. This was certainly no mere secret of conjuring trick, but a venerable and vitally important nature which had come to me I know not how and which I had to conceal not only from the council of elders but, in a sense, also from myself. My long, boring walk to and from school began to shorten most delightfully. Scarcely was I out of the schoolhouse than I was already in the castle, where structural alterations were in progress, council sessions were being held, evildoers sentenced, disputes arbitrated, cannon fired. The schooner's decks were cleared, the sails rigged, and the vessel steered carefully out of the harbor before a gentle breeze, and then, as it emerged from behind the rock, tacked into a stiff nor'wester. Suddenly I found myself on my doorstep, as though only a few minutes had passed. I stepped out of my fantasy as out of a carriage which had effortlessly driven me home. This highly enjoyable occupation lasted for several months before I got sick of it. Then I found the fantasy silly and ridiculous. Instead of daydreaming I began building castles and artfully fortified emplacements out of small stones, using mud as mortar the fortress of Hiiningen, which at that time was still intact, serving me as a model. I studied all the available fortification plans of Vauban, and was soon familiar with all the technicalities. modern methods of means to build models to pied me in which time fortification, and From Vauban tried with I my turned limited of all the different types. This preocculeisure hours for more than two years, during my my leanings toward nature study and concrete things steadily increased, at the cost of No. 2. As long as I knew so little about real things, there was no point, I thought, in thinking fantasies, but real knowledge T Fatist, Part Two, p. 76. about them. Anyone could have was another matter. My parents School years me to take out a subscription for a scientific periodical, read with passionate interest. I hunted and collected all the fossils to be found in our Jura mountains, and all the obtainable minerals, also insects and the bones of mammoths and men mammoth bones from gravel pits in the Rhineland plain, human bones from a mass grave near Hiiningen, dating from 1811. Plants interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. allowed which I They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and flowering a hidden, secret meaning, one of God's thoughts. They were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was interesting, but it was not the essential thing. Yet I could not explain to myself what this essential thing was. How were plants related to the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example? This was something I could not fathom. They obviously partook of the divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb. By way of contrast, insects were denatured plants flowers and fruits which had presumed to crawl about on legs or stilts and to fly around with wings like the petals of blossoms, and busied themselves preying on plants. Because of this unlawful activity they were con- demned to mass executions, June bugs and caterpillars being the "sympathy especial targets of such punitive expeditions. with all creatures" was strictly limited to warm-blooded ani- My mals. The only were frogs and beings. exceptions among the cold-blooded vertebrates toads, because of their resemblance to human Ill Student Years SPITE OF my growing scientific interests, I turned back to time to my philosophical books. The question of a profession was drawing alarmingly close. I choice my looked forward with longing to the end of my school days. Then from time IN of I would go to the university and study natural science, of Then I would know something real. But no sooner had I course. this promise than my doubts began. Was not my bent rather toward history and philosophy? Then again, I was made myself intensely interested in everything Egyptian and Babylonian, and would have liked best to be an archaeologist. But I had no money to study anywhere except in Basel, and in Basel there for this subject So this plan very soon came to an end. For a long time I could not make up my mind and constantly postponed the decision. My father was very worried. He said once, "The boy is interested in everything imaginable, but he does not know what he wants." I could only admit that he was right. As matriculation approached and we had to decide what faculty to register for, I abruptly decided on science, but I left my schoolfellows in doubt as to whether I intended to go in was no teacher definitely for science or the humanities. Student Years This apparently sudden decision had a background of its own. previously, just at the time when No. i and No. a were wrestling for a decision, I had two dreams. In the first dream I was in a dark wood that stretched along the Rhine. I came to a little hill, a burial mound, and began to dig. After a while I turned up, to my astonishment, some bones of prehistoric animals. This interested me enormously, and at that moment I Some weeks knew: I must get to know nature, the world in which we live, and the things around us. Then came a second dream. Again I was in a wood; it was threaded with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a circular pool, surrounded by dense undergrowth. Half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant radiolarian, measuring about three feet across. It seemed me indescribably wonderful that this magnificent creature should be lying there undisturbed, in the hidden place, in the clear, deep water. It aroused in me an intense desire for knowledge, so that I awoke with a beating heart. These two dreams to decided my me overwhelmingly in favor of science, and removed all doubts. It became clear to me that I was living in a time and a place where a person had to earn his living. To do so, one had to be this or that, and it made a deep impression on me that all my schoolfellows were imbued with this necessity and thought about nothing else. I felt I was in some way odd. Why could I not make up my mind and commit myself to something definite? Even that plodding fellow D. who had been held up to me by my German teacher as a model of diligence and conscientiousness was certain that he would study theology. I saw that I would have to settle down and think the matter through. If I took up zoology, for instance, I could be only a schoolmaster, or at best an employee in a zoological garden. There was no future in that, even if one's demands were modest though I would certainly have preferred working in a zoo to the life of a school- teacher. In this blind alley the inspiration suddenly came to me that I Memories, Dreams, Reflections could study medicine. Strangely enough, this had never occurred to me before, although my paternal grandfather, of whom I had heard so much, had been a doctor. Indeed, for that very reason I had a certain resistance to this profession. "Only don't imitate/' was my motto. But now I told myself that the study of medicine at least began with scientific subjects. To that extent I would be doing what I wanted. Moreover, the field of medicine was so broad that there was always the possibility of specializing later. I had definitely opted for science, and the and as I had only question was: How? I had to earn my living, no money I could not attend a university abroad and obtain the kind of training that would give me hopes of a scientific career. At best I could become only a dilettante in science. Nor, since I possessed a personality that made me disliked by many of my schoolfellows and of the people who counted (i.e,, the teachers), was there any hope of finding a patron who would support my wish. When, therefore, I finally decided on medicine, it was with the rather disagreeable feeling that it was not a good thing to start life with such a compromise. Nevertheless, I felt considerably relieved now that this irrevocable decision had been made. The money painful question then presented itself: Where was the to come from? father could raise only part of it. He My applied to the University of Basel for a stipend for me, and to my shame it was granted. I was ashamed, not so much because our poverty was laid bare for all the world to see, but because I had secretly been convinced that all the "top" people, the people who "counted," were ill disposed toward me. I had never expected any such kindness from them. I had obviously profited by the reputation of cated person. Yet I in fact, my father, who was felt a good and uncompli- myself totally different two from him. I had, No. 1's eyes different conceptions of myself. Through myself as a rather disagreeable and I saw moderately gifted young man with vaulting ambitions, an undisciplined temperament, and dubious manners, alternating between naive enthusiasm and fits of childish disappointment, in his innnermost essence a hermit and obscurantist. On the other hand, No. 2, regarded No. i as a difficult and thankless moral task, a lesson 86 Student Years had to be got through somehow, complicated by a variety such as spells of laziness, despondency, depression, inept enthusiasm for ideas and things that nobody valued, liable to imaginary friendships, limited, prejudiced, stupid (mathematics!), with a lack of understanding for other people, vague and confused in philosophical matters, neither an honest Christian nor anything else. No. 2 had no definable character at all; he was a vita peracta, born, living, dead, everything in one; a total vision of life. Though pitilessly clear about himself, he was unable to express himself through the dense, dark medium of No. i, though he longed to do so. When No. 2 predominated, No. i was contained and obliterated in him, just as, conversely, No. i regarded No. 2 as a region of inner darkness. No. 2 felt that any conceivable expression of himself would be like a that of faults stone thrown over the edge of the world, dropping soundlessly into infinite night. But in him ( No. 2 ) light reigned, as in the spa- whose high casements open upon a with flooded sunlight. Here were meaning and hislandscape torical continuity, in strong contrast to the incoherent fortuitousness of No. i*s life, which had no real points of contact with its environment. No. 2, on the other hand, felt himself in secret accord with the Middle Ages, as personified by Faust, with the cious halls of a royal palace legacy of a past which had obviously stirred Goethe to the depths. For Goethe too, therefore and this was my great consolation No. 2 was a reality. Faust, as I now realized with something of a shock, meant more to me than my beloved Gospel according to St. John. There was something in Faust that worked directly on my feelings. John's Christ was strange to me, but still stranger was the Savior of the other gospels. Faust, on the other hand, was the living equivalent of No. 2, and I was convinced that he was the answer which Goethe had given to was not only comforting to me, it also an increased feeling of inner security and a sense of belonging to the human community. I was no longer isolated and a mere curiosity, a sport of cruel nature. My godfather and authority was the great Goethe himself. About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was his times. This insight gave me Memories, Dreams, Reflections making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense hands cupped fog was flying along everywhere. I had ray around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, must keep my little light going through night and wind, at once that regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized the figure was a "specter of the Brocken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I blew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the But at the that I only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. This dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No. i was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2* followed him like a shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back at the vita peracta; this was evidently a forbidden realm of light of a different sort. I must go forward against the storm, which sought to thrust me back into the immeasurable darkness of a world where one is aware of nothing except the surfaces of things in the background. In the role of No. i, I had to go for- ward into ments, study, confusions, moneymaking, errors, responsibilities, submissions, defeats. entangle- The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, which just as ceaselessly dogs our heels. It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it for a while by pressing forward. The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer. My view of the world spun around another ninety degrees; I recognized clearly that my path led irrevocably outward, into the limitations and darkness of three-dimensionality. It seemed to me that Adam must once have left Paradise in this manner; Eden had become a specter for him, and light was where a stony field had to be tilled in the sweat of his brow. 88 Student Years I asked myself: 'Whence comes such a dream?" Till then I had taken it for granted that such dreams were sent directly by God. But now I had imbibed so much epistemology that doubts assailed me. One might say, for instance, that my insight had been slowly ripening for a long time and had then suddenly broken through in a dream. And that, indeed, is what had happened. But this explanation is merely a description. The real question was why this process took place and why it broke through into consciousness. Consciously I had done nothing to promote any such development; on the contrary, my sympathies were on the other side. Something must therefore have been at work behind the scenes, some intelligence, at any rate something more intelligent than myself. For the extraordinary idea that in the light of consciousness the inner realm of light appears as a gigantic shadow was not something I would have hit on of my own accord. Now all at once I understood many things that had been inexplicable to me before in particular that cold shadow of embarrassment and estrangement which passed over people's faces whenever I alluded to anything reminiscent of the inner realm. I must leave No. 2 behind me, that was clear. But under no circumstances ought I to deny him to myself or declare him invalid. That would have been a self-mutilation, and would moreover have deprived me of any possibility of explaining the origin of the dreams. For there was no doubt in my mind that No. 2 had something to do with the creation of dreams, and I could him with the necessary superior intelligence. But I to be increasingly identical with No. i, and this state myself in turn to be merely a part of the far more comprehensive proved easily credit felt with whom for that very reason I could no longer feel myHe was indeed a specter, a spirit who could hold his own against the world of darkness. This was something I had not known before the dream, and even at the time I am No. 2, self identical. sure of this in retrospect knew I was conscious of it only vaguely, al- emotionally beyond a doubt. though At any rate, a schism had taken place between me and No. 2, was assigned to No. i and was separated with the result that from No. 2 in the same degree, who thereby acquired, as it I it T 89 were, an autonomous personality. I did not connect this with the idea of any definite individuality, such as a revenant might have, although with my rustic origins this possibility would not have seemed strange to me. In the country people believe in these things according to the circumstances: they are and they are not. The only distinct feature about this spirit was his historical character, his extension in time, or rather, his timelessness. Of course I did not tell myself this in so many words, nor did I form any conception of his spatial existence. He played the role of a factor in the background of my No. i existence, never clearly defined but yet definitely present. Children react much less to what grown-ups say than imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere. The to the child un- consciously adapts himself to them, and this produces in him compensatory nature. The peculiar "religious" correlations of a came to me even in my earliest childhood were spontaneous products which can be understood only as reactions to my parental environment and to the spirit of the age. The reli- ideas that gious doubts to which my father was later to succumb naturally to pass through a long period of incubation. Such a revolution of one's world, and of the world in general, threw its shadows ahead, and the shadows were all the longer, the more had desperately my father's conscious mind resisted their power. It is not surprising that my father's forebodings put him in a state of unrest, which then communicated itself to me. I never had the impression that these influences emanated from my mother, for she was somehow rooted in deep, invisible ground, though it never appeared to me as confidence in her Christian faith. For me it was somehow connected with animals, mountains, meadows, and running water, aH of which contrasted most strangely with her Christian surface and her conventional assertions of faith. This background corresponded so well to my own attitude that it caused me no uneasiness; on trees, the contrary, it gave me a sense of security and the conviction that here was solid ground on which one could stand. It never occurred to me how "pagan" this foundation was. mother's "No. 2," offered me My the strongest support in the conflict then 90 Student Jears beginning between paternal tradition and the strange, compensatory products which my unconscious had been stimulated to create. Looking back, I now see how very much my development as a child anticipated future events and paved the way for modes of father's religious collapse as well as to the adaptation to my shattering revelation of the world as we see it today a revelation which had not taken shape from one day to the next, but its shadows long in advance. Although we human behave our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. We can well think all our lives long that we are following our own noses, and may never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of the world theater. There are factors which, although we do not know them, nevertheless influence our lives, the more so if they are unconscious. Thus at least a part of our being lives in the centuries that part which, for my private use, I have designated "No. 2." That it is not an individual curiosity is proved by the religion of the West, which expressly applies itself to this inner man and for two thousand years has earnestly tried to had cast ings him knowledge of our surface consciousness with its personalistic preoccupations: "Non joras ire, in interiore homine bring to the habitat veritas" (Go not outside; truth dwells in the inner man). During the years 1892-94 I had a number of rather vehement discussions with my father. He had studied Oriental languages in Gottingen and had done his dissertation on the Arabic version of the Song of Songs. His days of glory had ended with his final examination. Thereafter he forgot his linguistic talent. As a country parson he lapsed into a sort of sentimental idealism and into reminiscences of his golden student days, continued to smoke a long student's pipe, and discovered that his marriage he had imagined it to be. He did a great deal of good much and as a result was usually irritable. Both parmade great efforts to live devout lives, with the result that was not all far too ents there were angry scenes between them only too frequently. 9* Memories, Dreams, Reflections These difficulties, understandably enough, later shattered my father's faith. and discontent had increased, and his condition filled me with concern. My mother avoided everyrefused to engage in disputes. thing that might excite him and Though I reaEzed that this was the wisest course to take, often I could not keep my own temper in check. I would remain passive during his outbursts of rage, but when he seemed to be in a more accessible mood I sometimes tried to strike up a conversaAt that time his irritability tion with him, hoping to learn something about his inner and his understanding of himself. It was clear to me thoughts that something quite specific was tormenting him, and I suspected that it had to do with his faith. From a number of hints he was convinced that he suffered from religious doubts. seemed to me, was bound to be the case if the necessary let fall I This, it experience had not come to him. From my attempts at discussion I learned in fact that something of the sort was amiss, for all my questions were met with the same old lifeless theological answers, or with a resigned shrug which aroused the spirit of contradiction in me. I could not understand why he did not seize on these opportunities pugnaciously and come to terms with his saw that my critical questions made him sad, but situation. I I nevertheless hoped for a constructive talk, since it appeared almost inconceivable to me that he should not have had experience of God, the most evident of all experiences. I knew enough about epistemology to realize that knowledge of this sort could not be proved, but it was equally clear to me that it stood in no more need of proof than the beauty of a sunset or the terrors of the night. I tried, no doubt very clumsily, to convey these ob- vious truths to him, with the hopeful intention of helping him to bear the fate which had inevitably befallen him. He had to quarrel with somebody, so he did it with his family and himself. didn't he do it with God, the dark author of all created things, who alone was responsible for the sufferings of the world? God Why would assuredly have sent him by way of an answer one of those magical, infinitely profound dreams which He had sent to me even without being asked, and which had sealed my fate. I did Student Years not know why, it simply was so. Yes, He had even allowed me a own being. This was a great secret which I dared not and could not reveal to my father. I might have been glimpse into His had he been capable of understanding the diGod. But in my talks with him I never got that far, never even came within sight of the problem, because I always set about it in a very unpsychological and intellectual way, and did everything possible to avoid the emotional aspects. Each time this approach was like a red rag to a bull and led to irritable reactions which were incomprehensible to me. I was unable to reveal it rect experience of how a perfectly rational argument could meet with such emotional resistance. These fruitless discussions exasperated my father and me, and in the end we abandoned them, each burdened with his own specific feeling of inferiority. Theology had alienated my father and me from one another. I felt that I had once again suffered a fatal defeat, though I sensed I was not alone. I had a dim premonition that he was inescapably succumbing to his fate. He was lonely and had no friend to talk with. At least I knew no one among our acquaintances whom I would have trusted to say the saving word. Once I heard him praying. He struggled desperately to keep his faith. I was shaken and outraged at once, because I saw how hopelessly he was entrapped by the Church and its theological thinking. They had. blocked all avenues by which he might have reached God directly, and then faithlessly abandoned him. Now I understood the deepest meaning of my earlier experience: God Himself had disavowed theology and the Church founded upon it, On the other hand God condoned this theology, as He condoned so much else. It seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that men were responsible for such developments. What were men, anyway? "They are born dumb and able to understand blind as puppies/' I thought, "and like all God's creatures are furnished with the dimmest light, never enough to illuminate the darkness in which they grope/' I was equally sure that none of the theologians I knew had ever seen **the light that shineth with his own eyes, for if they had they would not have been able to teach a "theological religion/' which in the darkness" 93 , urearns, Reflections to me, since there was nothing to do without hope. This was what my father had tried valiantly to do, and had run aground. He could not even defend himself against the ridiculous materialism of the psychiatrists. This, too, was something that one had to believe, just seemed quite inadequate with it but believe it like theology, only in the opposite sense. I felt more certain than ever that both of them lacked epistemological criticism as well as experience. My father was obviously under the impression that psychiatrists had discovered something in the brain which proved that in the place where mind should have been there was only matter, and nothing "spiritual.* This was borne out by his admonitions that if I studied medicine I should in Heaven's name not become a materialist. To me this warning meant that I ought to believe nothing at all, for I knew that materialists believed in their definitions just as the theologians did in theirs, and that poor father had simply jumped out of the frying pan into the my recognized that this celebrated faith of his had played deadly trick on him, and not only on him but on most of the cultivated and serious people I knew. The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience. How did the fire. I this theologians know that God had deliberately arranged certain things and "permitted" certain others, and how did the psychiatrists know that matter was endowed with the qualities of the human mind? I was in no danger of succumbing to materialism, but my father certainly was. Apparently someone had whispered something about "suggestion," for I discovered that he was reading Bernheim's book on suggestion in Sigmund 1 Freud's translation. This was a new and significant departure, for I had never before seen my father reading anything but novels or an occasional travel book. All "clever" and interesting books were taboo. But his psychiatric reading made him no happier. His depressive moods increased in frequency and intensity, and so did his hypochondria. For a number of years he had complained of all sorts of abdominal symptoms, though his doctor had been unable to find definite anything wrong with him. Now he complained of the sensation of having "stones in 1 Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung ( Leipzig and Vienna, 1888 ). 94 Student Years the abdomen.'* For a long time we did not take this seriously, but at last the doctor became suspicious. This was toward the end of the summer of 1895. In the spring of that year I had begun my studies at the University of Basel. The only time in my life that I have ever been bored my school days at the Gymnasium was over at last and the golden gates to the universitas litterarum and to academic freedom were opening wide for me. Now I would hear the truth about nature, at least its most essential aspects. I would learn all there was to know about the anatomy and physiology of man, and would acquire knowledge of the diseases. In addition to all this, I was admitted into a color-wearing which my father had belonged. Early in my freshhe came along on a fraternity outing to a wine-growyear in the Markgrafen country and there delivered a ing village whimsical speech in which, to my delight, the gay spirit of his own student days came back again. I realized in a flash that his life had come to a standstill at his graduation, and the verse of a student song echoed in my ears: fraternity to man Sie zogen mit geseriktem Blick In das Philisterland zuruck. O jerum, jerum, jerum, O quae mutatio. reruml 2 The words fell heavily on my soul. Once upon a time he too had been an enthusiastic student in his first year, as I was now; the world had opened out for him, as it was doing for me; the infinite treasures of knowledge had spread before him, as now before me. How can it have happened that everything was blighted for him, had turned to sourness and bitterness? I found no answer, or too many. The speech he delivered that summer evening over the wine was the last chance he had to live out his memories of the time when he was what he should have been. Soon afterward his condition deteriorated. In the late autumn of 1895 h became bedridden, and early in 1896 he died. I had come home after lectures, and asked how he was. "Oh, 2 'With downcast eyes they marched back to the land of the dear, how things have changed!" O dear, O 95 Philistines, O dear, the same. He's very weak/' my mother said. He whispered me with something to her, which she repeated to me, warning her eyes of his delirious condition: "He wants to know whether I you have passed the state examination." I saw that must lie. and closed his with He well." it went relief, "Yes, sighed very still eyes. A little later I went in to see him again. He was alone; my mother was doing something in the adjoining room. There was a could see that he was in the death rattling in his throat, and I seen anyone agony. I stood by his bed, fascinated. I had never die before. Suddenly he stopped breathing. I waited and waited for the next breath. It did not come. Then I remembered my mother and went into the next room, where she sat by the win- dow, knitting. "He is dying," I said. She came with me to the bed, and saw that he was dead. She said as if in wonderment: "How quickly it has all passed." The following days were gloomy and painful, and little of them has remained in my memory. Once my mother spoke to me and remarked, mean: "You did not understand each other and he might have become a hindrance to you." This view seemed to me to fit in with my mother's No. 2 personality. The words "for you" hit me terribly hard, and I felt that a bit of the old days had now come irrevocably to an end. At the same time, a bit of manliness and freedom awoke in me. After my father's death I moved into his room, and took his place inside the family. For instance, I had to hand out the housekeeping money to my mother every week, because she was unable to economize and could not manage money. Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream. Suddenly he stood before me and said that he was coming back from his holiday. He had made a good recovery and was now coming home. I thought he would be annoyed with me for having moved into his room. But not a bit of it! Nevertheless, I felt ashamed because I had imagined he was dead. Two days later the dream was repeated. My father had recovered and was coming home, and again I reproached myself because I had thought he was dead. Later I kept asking myself: "What does it mean that my father returns in dreams and that he seems so or to the surrounding air in her "second" voice, "He died in time for you." Which appeared 96 to Student years it forced me for time to think about life after death. With the death of my father difficult problems arose concerning the continuation of my studies. Some of my mother's relations took the view that I ought to look for a clerk's job in a business house, so as to earn money as quickly as possible. My mother's youngest brother offered to help her, since her resources were not nearly sufficient to live on. An uncle on my father's side helped me. At the end of my studies I owed him three thousand francs. The rest I earned by working as a junior assistant and by helping an aged aunt dispose of her small real?" It the was an unforgettable experience, and first them piece by piece at good prices, and received a very welcome percentage. I would not have missed this time of poverty. One learns to value simple things. I still remember the time when I was given a box of cigars as a present. It seemed to me princely. They lasted a whole year, for I allowed myself one only on Sundays. My student days were a good time for me. Everything was intellectually alive, and it was also a time of friendships. In the fraternity meetings I gave several lectures on theological and psychological subjects. We had many animated discussions, and collection of antiques. I sold We not always about medical questions only. Schopenhauer and Kant, we knew all about the argued over stylistic niceties and were interested in theology and philosophy. student days I received much stimulation in regard to religious questions. At home I had the welcome opportunity to talk with a theologian who had been my father's vicar. He was distinguished not only by his phenomenal appetite, which put mine quite in the shade, but by his remarkable erudition. From him I learned a great deal about the Church Fathers and the history of dogma. He also introduced me to of Cicero, During my aspects of Protestant theology. Ritschl's theology was much in fashion in those days. Its historicism irritated me, especially new 8 the comparison with a railway train, The theological students with whom I had discussions in the fraternity all seemed quite 8 Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) compared Christ's coining to the shunting of a railroad train. The engine gives a push from behind, the motion passes through the entire train, and the foremost car begins to move. Thus toe impulse given by Christ is transmitted down the centuries. A. J. 97 Memories, ureams, tiejieciions content with the theory of the historical effect produced by Christ's life. This view seemed to me not only soft-witted but to the tendency to altogether lifeless. Neither could I subscribe move Christ into the foreground and make him the sole decisive me this absolutely figure in the drama of God and man. To belied Christ's own view that the Holy Ghost, who had behis death. gotten him, would take his place among men after For me the Holy Ghost was a manifestation of the inconceivable God. The workings of the Holy Ghost were not only sublime but also partook of that strange and even questionable whom I quality which characterized the deeds of Yahweh, I had of as Christian the identified with God, image naively been taught in my instruction for confirmation. (I was also not aware at this time that the devil, properly speaking, had been born with Christianity.) Lord Jesus was to me unquestionably a man and therefore a fallible figure, or else a mere mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost. This highly unorthodox view, a far cry from the theological one, naturally ran up against utter incomprehension. The disappointment I felt about this gradually led me to a kind of resigned indifference, and confirmed my conviction that in religious matters only experience counted. During my first years at the university I made the discovery that while science opened the door to enormous quantities of it provided genuine insights very sparingly, and these in the main were of a specialized nature. I knew from philosophical reading that the existence of the psyche was knowledge, my responsible for this situation. Without the psyche there would be neither knowledge nor insight. Yet nothing was ever said about the psyche. Everywhere it was tacitly taken for granted, and even when someone mentioned it as did C. G. Carus, for example there was no real knowledge of it but only philosophical speculation which might just as easily take one turn as another. I could make neither head nor tail of this curious observation. At the end of my second semester, however, I made another discovery, which was to have great consequences. In the library of a classmate's father I came upon a small book on spiritualistic phenomena, dating from the seventies. It 98 was an account of the Student Years beginnings of spiritualism, and was written by a theologian. My initial doubts were quickly dissipated, for I could not help seeing that the phenomena described in the book were in principle much the same as the stories I had heard again and again in the country since my earliest childhood. The material, without a doubt, was authentic. But the great question of whether these stories were physically true was not answered to my satisfaction. Nevertheless, it could be established that at all times and all over the world the same stories had been reported again and again. There must be some reason for this, and it could not possibly have been the predominance of the same religious conceptions everywhere, for that was obviously not the case. must be connected with the objective behavior of the psyche. But with regard to this cardinal question the objective nature of the psyche I could find out absolutely nothing, except what the philosophers said. Rather it human The as observations of the spiritualists, weird and questionable they seemed to me, were the first accounts I had seen of objective psychic phenomena. Names like Zoellner and Crookes impressed themselves on me, and I read virtually the whole of the literature available to me at the time. Naturally I also spoke of these matters to my comrades, who to my great astonishment reacted with derision and disbelief or with anxious defensiveness. I wondered at the sureness with which they could assert that things like ghosts and table-turning were impossible and therefore fraudulent, and on the other hand at the evidently anxious nature of their defensiveness. I, too, was not certain of the absolute reliability of the reports, but why, after all, should there not be ghosts? How did we know that something was "impossible"? And, above all, what did the anxiety signify? For myself I found such possibilities extremely interesting and at- They added another dimension to my life; the world gained depth and background. Could, for example, dreams have anything to do with ghosts? Kant's Dreams of a Spirit Seer came tractive. just at the right moment, and soon who had I also discovered Karl evaluated these ideas philosophically and Duprel, I dug up Eschenmayer, Passavant, Justinus psychologically, Kerner, and Gorres, and read seven volumes of Swedenborg. 99 , Dreams, Reflections mother's No. 2 sympathized wholeheartedly with my enthusiasm, but everyone else I knew was distinctly discouragthe brick wall of tradiing. Hitherto I had encountered only tional views, but now I came up against the steel of people's My admit unconventional prejudice and their utter incapacity to with this even possibilities. I found all this was far worse than my closest friends. To them my preoccupation with theology. I had the feeling that I had pushed to die brink of the world; what was of burning interest to me was null and void for others, and even a cause for dread. Dread of what? I could find no explanation for this. After all, there was nothing preposterous or world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods, and rivers, of animals and "God's thoughts" (plants and crystals). I found this explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem, for I realized that for all its wealth of learning the urban world was mentally rather limited. This insight proved dangerous, because it tricked into fits of superiority, misplaced criticism, and aggressive- me ness, which got me deservedly back all disliked. This eventually brought the old doubts, inferiority feelings, and depressions a vicious circle I was resolved to break at all costs. No longer would I stand outside the world, enjoying the dubious reputa- tion of a freak. After my first introductory course I became junior assistant in anatomy, and the following semester the demonstrator placed me in charge of the course in histology to my intense satisfaction, naturally. I interested myself primarily in evolutionary theory and comparative anatomy, and I also became acquainted 100 Student Years What fascinated me most of all was the morphological point of view in the broadest sense. With physiology it was just the opposite. I found the subject thoroughly repellent because of vivisection, which was practiced with neo-vitalistic doctrines. merely for purposes of demonstration. I could never free myself from the feeling that warm-blooded creatures were akin to us and not just cerebral automata. Consequently I cut demonstration classes whenever I could. I realized that one had to experiment on animals, but the demonstration of such experiments nevertheless seemed to me horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary. I had imagination enough to picture the demonstrated procedures from a mere description of them. My compassion for animals did not derive from the Buddhistic trimmings of Schopenhauer's philosophy, but rested on the deeper foundation of a primitive attitude of mind on an unconscious identity with animals. At the time, of course, I was wholly ignorant of this important psychological fact. repugnance for physiology was so great that examination results in this My my were correspondingly poor. Nevertheless, subject I scraped through. kept me so busy that time remained for scarcely any my forays into outlying fields. I was able to study Kant only on Sundays. I also read Eduard von Hartmann assiduously. Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt I was insufficiently prepared. At that time he was much discussed, mostly in adverse terms, by the allegedly competent philosophy students, from which I was able to deduce the The clinical semesters that followed he aroused in the higher echelons. The supreme auwas Jakob Burckhardt, whose various critical comments on Nietzsche were bandied about. Moreover, there were some persons at the university who had known Nietzsche personally and were able to retail all sorts of unflattering tidbits about him. Most of them had not read a word of Nietzsche and therefore dwelt at length on his outward foibles, for example, his putting on airs as a gentleman, his manner of playing the piano, his stylistic exaggerations idiosyncrasies which got on the nerves of the good people of Basel in those days. Such things hostility thority, of course, 101 Memories, Dreams, Reflections me to postpone the reading of as the strongest incenacted Nietzsche on the contrary, they tive. But I was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him, at least in regard to the "secret" which had isolated would certainly not him from have caused his environment. Perhaps who knows? he had had inner experiences, insights which he had unfortunately attempted to talk about, and had found that no one understood him. Obviously he was, or at least was considered to be, an eccentric, a sport of nature, which I did not want to be under I feared I might be forced to recognize that was another such strange bird. Of course, he was a professor, had written whole long books and so had attained unimaginable heights, but, like me, he was a clergyman's son. He, however, had been born in the great land of Germany, which reached as far as the sea, while I was only a Swiss and sprang any circumstances. I too from a modest parsonage in a small border village. He spoke a polished High German, knew Latin and Greek, possibly French, Italian, and Spanish as well, whereas the only language I commanded with any certainty was the Waggis-Basel dialect. He, possessed of all these splendors, could well afford to be something of an eccentric, but I must not let myself find out how far I might be like him. In spite of these trepidations I was curious, and finally resolved to read him. Thoughts Out of Season was the first volume my hands. I was carried away by enthusiasm, and soon afterward read Thus Spake Zarathustra. This, like Goethe's Faust, was a tremendous experience for me. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's Faust, his No. 2, and my No. 2 now corre- that fell into to Zarathustra though this was rather like comparing a molehill with Mount Blanc. And Zarathustra there could be no doubt about that was morbid. Was my No. 2 also morbid? This possibility filled me with a terror which for a long time sponded but the idea cropped up again and again at inopportune moments, throwing me into a cold sweat, so that in the end I was forced to reflect on myself. Nietzsche had discovered his No. 2 only late in life, when he was already past middle age, whereas I had known mine ever since boyhood. Nietzsche had spoken naively and incautiously about this arrheI refused to admit, 102, Student Years ton, this thing not to be named, as though it were quite in order. But I had noticed in time that this only leads to trouble. He was so brilliant that he was able to come to Basel as a professor when a young man, not suspecting what lay ahead of him. Because of his very brilliance he should have noticed in time that something was amiss. That, I thought, was his morbid mis- still understanding: that he fearlessly and unsuspectingly let his No. 2 loose upon a world that knew and understood nothing about such things. He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies and could all values/* But he found only educated Philistines tragi-comically, he was one himself. Like the rest of them, he did not understand himself when he fell grasp his "transvaluation of head into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its to the dull, godforsaken masses. That was the reason praises for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymnlike raptures all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a first world which had sold And he its soul for a mass of disconnected facts. tightrope-walker that he proclaimed himself to be into depths far beyond himself. He did not know his way fell about in this world and was like a man possessed, one who could be handled only with the utmost caution. Among my and acquaintances I knew of only two who openly declared themselves adherents of Nietzsche. Both were homosexual; one of them ended by committing suicide, the other friends ran to seed as a misunderstood genius. The rest of my friends were not so much dumfounded by the phenomenon of Zarathus- simply immune to its appeal. Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zarathustra slammed one shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come. I felt like the old peasant who discovered that two of his cows had tra as evidently been bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. "How did that happen?" asked his small son. "Boy, one doesn't talk about such things/' replied his father. I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about the things they know. The naive person does not appreciate what an insult it is to talk to one's fellows about anything that is unknown to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior 103 Memories, Dreams, Reflections to see that a new only in a writer, journalist, or poet. I came old of an unusual an or even one, can be comidea, aspect just municated only by facts. Facts remain and cannot be brushed aside; sooner or later someone will come upon them and know what he has found. I realized that I talked only for want of someand these I lacked thing better, that I ought to be offering facts, in my hands. More than ever I entirely. I had nothing concrete found myself driven toward empiricism. I began to blame the away when experience was lacking, their tongues when they ought to have been answering with facts. In this respect they all seemed like watered-down theologians. I felt that at some time or other I philosophers for rattling and holding had passed through the vince no one not even closely valley of diamonds, but I could conmyself, when I looked at them more had brought back were not mere that the specimens I pieces of gravel. This was in 1898, when I began to think more seriously about my career as a medical man. I soon came to the conclusion that I would have to specialize. The choice seemed to lie between surgery and internal medicine. I inclined toward the former because of my special training in anatomy and my preference for pathology, and would very probably have made surgery my profession if I had possessed the necessary financial means. All along, it had been extremely painful to me to have to go into debt in order to study at all. I knew that after the final examination I would have to begin earning living as soon as possible. I a as at career assistant some cantonal hospital, where imagined my was more hope of obtaining a paid position than in a Moreover, a post in a clinic depended to a large extent on the backing or personal interest of the chief, With my questionable popularity and estrangement from others experienced all too often I dared not think of any such stroke of luck, and therefore contented myself with the modest prospect of a post in one of the local hospitals. The rest depended on hard work and on my capability and application. there clinic. During the summer holidays, however, something happened was destined to influence me profoundly. One day I was that setting in my room, studying , my 104 textbooks. In the adjoining Student "fears room, the door to which stood ajar, my mother was knitting. That was our dining room, where the round walnut dining table stood. The table had come from the dowry of my paternal grandmother, and was at this time about seventy years old. My mother was sitting by the window, about a yard away from the table. My sister was at school and our maid in the kitchen. Suddenly there sounded a report like a pistol shot. I jumped up and rushed into the room from which the noise of the explosion had come. My mother was sitting flabbergasted in her armchair, the knitting fallen from her hands. She stammered out, "W-w-what's It was right beside me!" and stared at the table. Following her eyes, I saw what had happened. The table top had split from the rim to beyond the center, and not along any the split ran right through the solid wood. I was thunderjoint; struck. How could such a thing happen? A table of solid walnut that had dried out for seventy years how could it split on a happened? summer day in the relatively high degree of humidity charour climate? If it had stood next to a heated stove on a cold, dry winter day, then it might have been conceivable. What in the world could have caused such an explosion? "There acteristic of mother nodded certainly are curious accidents," I thought. darkly. "Yes, yes," she said in her No. 2 voice, "that means somewill I was impressed and annoyed with mything." Against My my self for not finding anything to say. later I came home at six o'clock in the evethe household and found my mother, my fourteen-year-old ning in a great state of agitation. About an sister, and the maid hour earlier there had been another deafening report. This time it was not the already damaged table; the noise had come from Some two weeks the direction of the sideboard, a heavy piece of furniture dating from the early nineteenth century. They had already looked all over it, but had found no trace of a split. I immediately began examining the sideboard and the entire surrounding area, but just as fruitlessly. Then I began on the interior of the sideboard. In the cupboard containing the bread basket I found a loaf of bread, and, beside it, the bread knife. The greater part of the blade had snapped off in several pieces. The handle lay in one corner of the rectangular basket, and in each of the other corners Memories, Dreams, Re-flections knife had been used shortly before, lay a piece of the blade. The at four-o'clock tea, and afterward put away. Since then no one had gone to the sideboard. I took the shattered knife to one of the best The next day He examined the fractures with a magniknife is perfectly sound," fying glass, and shook his head. "This Someone must have steel. the in fault he said, 'TTiere is no It could be done, for it broken piece by piece. deliberately cutlers in the town. instance, breaking by off crack of the sticking the blade into the a piece at a time. Or else it might drawer and have been dropped on stone from a great height. But good steel can't I have carefully explode. Someone has been pulling your leg." kept the pieces of the knife to this day. My mother and my sister had been in the room when the sudden report made them jump. My mother's No. 2 looked at me meaningfully, but I could find nothing to say. I was completely at a loss and could offer no explanation of what had happened, and this was all the more annoying as I had to admit that I was profoundly impressed. Why and how had the table that it was just a split and the knife shattered? The hypothesis coincidence went much too far. It seemed highly improbable to me that the Rhine would flow backward just once, by mere chance and all other possible explanations were automatically ruled out. So what was it? A few weeks later I heard of certain relatives who had been engaged for some time in table-turning, and also had a medium, a young girl of fifteen and a half. The group had been thinking of having me meet the medium, who produced somnambulistic states and spiritualistic phenomena. When I heard this, I immediately thought of the strange manifestations in our house, and I conjectured that they might be somehow connected with this medium. I therefore began attending the regular stances which my relatives held every Saturday evening. We had results in the form of communications and tapping noises from the walls and the table. Movements of the table independently of the medium were questionable, and I soon found out that limiting conditions imposed on the experiment generally had an obstructive effect. I therefore accepted the obvious 106 autonomy Student Years of the tapping noises and turned my attention to the content of the results of these observations doctoral thesis. After about two years of experimentation the communications. I in my we to became set forth weary of it. I caught the medium trying produce phenomena by trickery, and this made me break off all rather much to my regret, for I had learned a No. 2 personality is formed, how it enters into a child's consciousness and finally integrates it into itself. She was one of these precociously matured personalities, the experiments from this very example how and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. I saw her once again, when she was twenty-four, and received a lasting impression of the independence and maturity of her personher death I learned from her family that during the ality. After last months of her life her character disintegrated bit by bit, and that ultimately she returned to the state of a two-year-old child, in which condition she fell into her last sleep. All in all, this was the one great experience which wiped out all my earlier philosophy and made it possible for me to achieve a psychological point of view. I had discovered some objective about the human psyche. Yet the nature of the experience was such that once again I was unable to speak of it. I knew no one to whom I could have told the whole story. Once more I had to lay aside an unfinished problem. It was not until two facts 4 years later that my dissertation appeared. At the medical clinic Friedrich von Miiller had taken the Immermann. In Miiller I encountered a mind that me. I saw how a keen intelligence grasped the formulated questions which in themselves were and problem half the solution. He, for his part, seemed to see something in me, for toward the end of my studies he proposed that I should go with him, as his assistant, to Munich, where he had received place of old appealed to an appointment. This invitation almost persuaded me to devote myself to internal medicine. I might have done so had not something happened in the meantime which removed all my doubts concerning my future career. *Zur Psychohgie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phanomene: eine psythe Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena/' in Psychiatric Studies (CW i). chiatrische Studte ( 1902); English trans.: 107 "On Memories, Dreams, Reflections psychiatric lectures and clinics, the in current instructor psychiatry was not exactly stimulating, and which the experience of asylums had effects the I recalled when Though had attended I my father, this was not calculated to prepossess me in favor of psychiatry. In preparing myself for the state examination, therefore, the textbook on psychiatry was the last I attacked. I expected nothing of it, and I still remember that as I 5 opened the book by Krafft-Ebing the thought came to me: had on now what a psychiatrist has to say for himself." demonstrations had not made the me. I could not remember a single one slightest impression on of the cases I had seen in the clinic, but only my boredom and "Well, The let's lectures see and clinical disgust. find out how a psyhis introduced chiatrist subject or, indeed, justified his reason for existing at all. By way of excuse for this high and mighty attitude I must make it clear that in the medical world at that time psychiatry was quite generally held in contempt. No one really knew anything about it, and there was no psychology I began with the preface, intending to which regarded man whole and included his pathological The director was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the institution was equally cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like an ancient lazaret with its lepers. No one liked looking in that dias a variations in the total picture. rection. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and and therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as well. psychiatrist was a strange figure in those days, as I learn from personal experience. Beginning with the preface, I read: "It is The was soon to probably due to the peculiarity of the subject and its incomplete state of development that psychiatric textbooks are stamped with a more or A less subjective character/' few lines further on, the author called the psychoses "diseases of the personality/* heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep My breath. My excitement was intense, for me, in a flash of iUumination, that for 5 Lehfbuch der Psychtotrte, 4th edn. ( 1890 ) 108 . it me had become clear to the only possible goal Student Years was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality. when Krafft-Ebing spoke of the character" of "subjective psychiatric textbooks. So, I thought, the textbook is in part the subjective confession of the author. My violent reaction set in With his specific prejudice, with the totality of his being, he stands behind the objectivity of his experiences and responds to the "disease of the personality" with the whole of his own personality. Never had I heard anything of this sort from teacher at the clinic. In spite of the fact that Krafft-Ebing's text- my book did not differ essentially from other books of the kind, few hints cast such a transfiguring light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spell. The decision was taken. When I informed my teacher in in- these ternal medicine of my intention, I could read in his face his amazement and disappointment. My old wound, the feeling of being an outsider and of alienating others, began to ache again. But now I understood why. No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined I could become interested in this obscure bypath. My friends were astounded and put out, thinking me a fool for throwing up the enviable chance of a sensible career in internal medicine, which dangled so temptingly before my nose, in favor of this psychiatric nonsense. I saw that once again I had obviously got myself into a side and alley where no one could or would follow me. But I knew nothing and nobody could have deflected that my decision stood, and that it was me from my purpose was as though were bearing me fate. It rivers had united and in one grand torrent inexorably toward distant goals. This confident feeling that I was a "united double nature" carried me as if on a magical wave through the examination, in which I came out at the top. Characteristically, the stumbling block that lurks in the path of all miracles that turn out too well tripped me up in the very two subject in which I really excelled, pathological anatomy. 109 By a Memories, Dreams, Reflections ridiculous error, in a slide which apart from all sorts of debris seemed to contain only epithelial cells, I overlooked some molds even guessed hiding in a corner. In the other subjects, I had I would be asked. Thanks to this, I cleared several dangerous reefs with flying colors. In revenge, I was then fooled in the most grotesque way just where I felt most certain of myself. Had it not been for this I would have had the what questions mark in the examination. another candidate received the same number of was, a lone wolf, with a personality quite He as I did. was points and to me suspiciously banal. It was impossible to talk opaque to him about anything except "shop/* He reacted to everything highest As it with an enigmatic smile, which reminded me of the Greek statues at Aegina. He had an air of superiority, and yet underneath it he seemed embarrassed and never quite fitted into any situation. Or was it a kind of stupidity? I could never make him out. The only definite thing about him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal ambition which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts. A few years afterward he became schizophrenic. I mention this as a characteristic example of the parallelism of events. My first book was on the psychology of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and in it my personality with its bias or "personal equation" responded to this "disease of the personality." I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be "normal." It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning. The evening after my last examination I treated myself fox the first time in my life to the longed-for luxury of going to the theater. Until then finances had not my permitted any such extravagance. But I still had some money left from the sale of the antiques, and this allowed me not only a visit to the opera but even a trip to Munich and Stuttgart. Bizet intoxicated and overwhelmed me, rocked me on the waves of an infinite sea. And next day, when the train carried no Student Years me over the border into a wider world, the melodies of Carmen accompanied me. In Munich I saw real classical art for the first time, and this in conjunction with Bizet's music put me in a springlike, nuptial mood, whose depth and meaning I could only dimly grasp. Outwardly, however, it was a dismal week between the first and the ninth of December, 1900. In Stuttgart I paid a farewell visit to my aunt, Frau ReimerJung, whose husband was a psychiatrist. She was the daughter of my paternal grandfather's first marriage to Virginia de Lassaulx. She was an enchanting old lady with sparkling blue eyes and a vivacious temperament. She seemed t6 me immersed in a world of impalpable fantasies and of memories that refused to go home visit the last breath of a vanishing, irrevocable past. This final farewell to the nostalgias of my childhood. was a On December 10, 1900, I took up my post as assistant at Burgholzli Mental Hospital, Zurich. I was glad to be in Zurich, for in the course of the years Basel had become too stuffy for me. For the Baslers no town "civilized," and north exists but their own: only Basel is of the river Birs the land of the barbarians friends could not understand my going away, and would be back in no time. But that was out of the question, for in Basel I was stamped for all time as the son of the Reverend Paul Jung and the grandson of Professor Carl Gustav Jung. I was an intellectual and belonged to a definite social set. I felt resistances against this, for I could not and would not let myself be classified. The intellectual atmosphere of Basel seemed to me enviably cosmopolitan, but the pressure of tradition was too much for me. When I came to Zurich I felt the begins. My reckoned I difference at once. Zurich relates to the world not by the intellect but by commerce. Yet here the air was free, and I had always valued that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture. For Basel I have to this day a nostalgic weakness, despite the fact that I know it no longer is as it was. I still remember the days when Bachofen and Burckhardt walked in the streets, and behind the cathedral stood the old chapter house, and the old bridge over the Rhine, half made of wood. ill Memories, Dreams, Reflections For my mother it was hard that I was leaving Basel. But I knew that I could not spare her this pain, and she bore it with my sister, a delicate and rather bravely. She lived together in every respect different from me. She was as sickly nature, to live the life of a spinster, and she never married. born though But she developed a remarkable personality, and I admired her attitude. She had to undergo an operation that was considered harmless, but she did not survive it. I was deeply impressed when I discovered that she had put all her affairs in order beforehand, down to the last detail. At bottom she was always a her. I was rather emostranger to me, but I had great respect for tional, whereas she was always composed, though very sensitive down. I could imagine her spending her days in a Home deep Gentlewomen, for of just as the only sister my grandfather had done. With my work at Burgholzli, life took on an undivided reality consciousness, duty, and responsibility. It was an the into monastery of the world, a submission to the vow entry to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, all intention, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, accidents without coherence, knowledge that shrank to ever smaller circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine. For six months I locked myself within the monastic walls in order to get accustomed to the life and spirit of the asylum, and I read through the fifty volumes of the Attgemeine Zeitschrift filr Psychiatric from its very beginnings, in order to acquaint myself with the psychiatric mentality. I wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight of its own destruction, for psychiatry seemed to me an articulate expression of that biological reaction which seizes upon the socalled healthy mind in the presence of mental illness. fessional colleagues seemed to me My pro- no less interesting patients. In the years that followed I secretly on the hereditary background of my compiled than the statistics Swiss colleagues, and Student Years gained much instruction. I did this for my personal edification as well as for the sake of understanding the psychiatric men- tality. need scarcely mention that my concentration and selfimposed confinement alienated me from my colleagues. They did not know, of course, how strange psychiatry seemed to me, and how intent I was on penetrating into its spirit. At that time my interest in therapy had not awakened, but the pathological I variants of so-called normality fascinated me, because they offered me the longed-for opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the psyche in general. These, then, were the conditions under which my career in psychiatry began the subjective experiment out of which my objective life emerged. I have neither the desire nor the capacity and observe my fate in a truly objective the familiar autobiographical mistake would commit way. either of weaving an illusion about how it ought to have been, or of writing an apologia pro vita sua. In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to stand outside myself I to the judgment of others. IV Psychiatric YEARS Activities at Burgholzli were years of apprenticeinterests and research was the burnship. Dominating ing question: "What actually takes place inside the THE my my mentally ill?" That was something which I did not understand then, nor had any of my colleagues concerned themselves with such problems. Psychiatry teachers were not interested in what the patient had to say, but rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe symptoms and to compile statistics. From the point of view which then prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his individuality, did not matter at all. clinical Rather, the doctor was confronted with Patient X, with a long of cut-and-dried diagnoses and a detailing of symptoms. list Patients were labeled, rubber-stamped with a diagnosis, and, most part, that settled the matter. The psychology of the for the mental patient played no role whatsoever. At this point Freud became vitally important to me, especially because of his fundamental researches into the psychology of hysteria and of dreams. For me his ideas pointed the way to a closer investigation and understanding of individual cases. Freud introduced psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a neurologist. 114 Psychiatric Activities I still recollect very well a case at the time. suffering which greatly interested me A young woman had been admitted to the hospital, from "melancholia." The examination was conducted tests, physical check-ups, and was diagnosis schizophrenia, or "dementia praecox," with the usual care: anamnesis, so on. The in the phrase of those days. The prognosis: poor. This woman happened to be in section. At first I did not my dare to question die diagnosis. I was still a young man then, a beginner, and would not have had the temerity to suggest another one. And yet the case struck me as strange. I had the feeling that it was not a matter of schizophrenia but of ordinary depression, and resolved to apply my own method. At the time I was much occupied with diagnostic association studies, and so undertook an association experiment with the patient. In addition, I discussed her dreams with her. In this way I succeeded in uncovering her past, which the anamnesis had not clarified. I obtained information directly from the unconscious, and this information revealed a dark and tragic story. Before the woman married she had known a man, the son of a I wealthy industrialist, in whom all the girls of the neighborhood were interested. Since she was very pretty, she thought her chances of catching him were fairly good. But apparently he did not care for her, and so she married another man. Five years later an old friend visited her. They were talking over old times, and he said to her, "When you got married it was quite a shock to someone your Mr. X" (the wealthy industrialist's son). That was the moment! Her depression dated from this period, and several weeks later led to a catastrophe. She was bathing her children, first her four-year-old girl and then her two-year-old son. She lived in a country where the water supply was not perfectly hygienic; there was pure spring water for drinking, and tainted water from the river for bathing and washing. While she was bathing the little girl, she saw the child sucking at the sponge, but did not stop her. She even gave her little son a glass of the impure water to drink. Naturally, she did this unconsciously, or only half consciously, for her mind was already under the shadow of the incipient depression. A short time later, after the incubation period had passed, Memories, ureams, Reflections came down with typhoid fever and died. The girl had been her favorite. The boy was not infected. At that moment the the woman was sent to depression reached its acute stage, and the girl the institution. From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, I had learned many of the details of her secret. It was at and this was a sufficient reason for her depreswas a psychogenic disturbance and not a case once apparent that sion. Essentially it of schizophrenia. Now what the could be done in the way of therapy? Up to then woman had been and had been her insomnia given narcotics to combat under guard to prevent attempts at suicide. But otherwise nothing had been done. Physically, she was in good condition. I was confronted with the problem: Should I speak openly with her or not? Should I undertake the major operation? I was faced with a conflict of duties altogether without precedent in experience. I had a difficult question of conscience to answer, and had to settle the matter with myself alone. If I had my asked my colleagues, they would probably have *warned me, "For heaven's sake, don't tell the woman any such thing. That will only make her still crazier ." To my mind, the effect might well be the reverse. In general it may be said that unequivocal rules scarcely exist in psychology, A question can be answered one way or another, depending on whether or not we take the unconscious factors into account. Of course I knew very well the personal risk I was running: if the patient got worse, I would be in the soup too! Nevertheless, I decided to take a chance on a therapy whose I told her everything I had discovered outcome was uncertain. test. It can easily be imagined how was for me to do this. To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was through the association difficult it never again institutionalized. There were other reasons that caused me to say nothing to my colleagues about this case. I was afraid of their discussing it 116 Psychiatric Activities and possibly raising legal questions. Nothing could be proved against the patient, of course, and yet such a discussion might have had disastrous consequences for her. Fate had punished her enough! It seemed to me more meaningful that she should return to life in order to atone in life for her crime. When she was discharged, she departed bearing her heavy burden. She had to bear this burden. The loss of the child had been frightful for her, and her expiation had already begun with the depression and her confinement to the institution. In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. The doctor's task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. In most cases exploration of the conscious material is insxifficient Sometimes an association test can open the way; so can the interpretation of dreams, or long and patient human contact with the individual. In therapy the problem is must always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We ask questions which challenge the whole personality. In 1905 I became lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich, and that same year I became senior physician at the Psychiatric Clinic. I held this position for four years. Then in 1909 I had to resign because by this time I was simply over my of the years I had acquired so large a private practice that I could no longer keep up with my tasks. However, I continued my professorship until the year 1913. I lectured on psychopathology, and, naturally, also on the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as on the psychology head in work. In the course of primitives. These were my principal subjects. During the first lectures dealt chiefly with hypnosis, also with semesters my Janet and Flournoy. Later the problem of Freudian psychoanalysis moved into the foreground. In my courses on hypnosis I used to inquire into the personal history of the patients case I still whom remember very I presented to the students. well. "7 One , vreams, nejiecnons A middle-aged woman, apparently with a strong religious bent, appeared one day. She was fifty-eight years old, and came on crutches, led by her maid. For seventeen years she had been of the left leg. I placed her in a suffering from a painful paralysis comfortable chair and asked her for her story. She began to tell the whole long tale of her it to me, and how terrible it all was came out with the greatest circumstantiality. Finally I have no more time for interrupted her and said, "Well now, we illness so much talk. I am now going to hypnotize you." closed her eyes and scarcely said the words when she without any hypnosis at all! I fell into a profound trance I had but did not disturb her. She went on talking without pause, and related the most remarkable dreams dreams that represented a fairly deep experience of the unconscious. This, however, I did not understand until years later. At the time I assumed she was in a kind of delirium. The situation was gradually growing rather uncomfortable for me. Here wondered at this, were twenty students present, to whom I was going to demon- strate hypnosis! After half an hour of this, I wanted to awaken the patient would not wake up. I became alarmed; it occurred She again. to me that I might inadvertently have probed into a latent psychosis. It took some ten minutes before I succeeded in waking her. All the while I dared not let the students observe my nervousness. When the woman came to, she was giddy and confused. I said to her, **I am the doctor, and everything is all right." Whereupon she cried out, "But I am cured!" threw crutches, and was able to walk. Flushed with embarrassment, I said to the students, "Now youVe seen what away her can be done with hypnosis!" In fact I had not the slightest idea what had happened. That was one of the experiences that prompted me to abandon hypnosis. I could not understand what had really happened, but the woman was in fact cured, and departed in the best of spirits. I asked her to let me hear from her, since I counted on a relapse in twenty-four hours at the latest. But her pains did not recur; in spite of my skepticism, I had to accept the fact of her cure. At the first lecture of the summer semester next year, she re- 118 Psychiatric Activities appeared. This time she complained of violent pains in the back which had, she said, begun only recently. Naturally I asked myself whether there was some connection with the resumption of my lectures. Perhaps she had read the announcement of the lecture in the newspaper. I asked her when the pain had started, and what had caused it. She could not recall that anything had happened to her at any specific time nor could she offer the slightest explanation. Finally I elicited the fact that the pains had actually begun on the day and at the very hour she saw the announcement in the newspaper. That confirmed my guess, but I still did not see how the miraculous cure had come about. I hypnotized her once more that is to say, she again fell spontaneously into a trance and afterward the pain was gone. This time I kept her after the lecture in order to find out more about her life. It turned out that she had a feeble-minded son who was in my department in the hospital. I knew nothing about this because she bore her second husband's name and the son was a child of her first marriage. He was her only child. Naturally, she had hoped for a talented and successful son, and it had been a terrible blow when he became mentally ill at an early age. At that time I was still a young doctor, and represented everything she had hoped her son might become. Her ambitious longing to be the mother of a hero therefore fastened upon me. She adopted me as her son, and proclaimed her miraculous cure far and wide. In actual fact she was responsible for my local fame as a wizard, and since the story soon got around, I was indebted to her for my first private patients. My psychotherapeutic practice began with a mother's putting me in the place of her mentally sonl Naturally I explained the whole matter to her, in all its ramifications. She took it very well, and did not again suffer a ill relapse. That was my my first I might say: real therapeutic experience talk with the old lady. first analysis. I distinctly recall my and exceedingly grateful that I had taken her seriously and displayed concern for her fate and that of her son. This had helped her. She was intelligent, In the beginning I employed hypnosis in my private practice Memories, urearns, Reflections but I soon gave it up because in using it one is only groping One never knows how long an improvement or a cure will last, and I always had compunctions about working in such uncertainty. Nor was I fond of deciding on my own what the patient ought to do. I was much more concerned to learn from the patient himself where his natural bent would lead him. In order to find that out, careful analysis of dreams and of also, in the dark. other manifestations of the unconscious was necessary. up a laboratory for experimental I had a number of psychopathology at the Psychiatric Clinic. I students there with whom investigated psychic reactions (i.e., During the years 1904-5 I set Franz Riklin, Sr., was my collaborator. Ludwig was currently writing his doctoral dissertation on Binswanger associations). the association experiment in connection with the psychogal1 vanic effect, and I wrote my paper "On the Psychological 2 Diagnosis of Facts/' There were also a number of Ameri- among our associates, including Frederick Peterson and Charles Ricksher. Their papers were published in American journals. It was these association studies which later, in 1909, pro- cans me my invitation to Clark University; I was asked to lecon my work. Simultaneously, and independently of me, Freud was invited. The degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa was bestowed on both of us. The association experiment and the psychogalvanic experiment were chiefly responsible for my reputation in America. Very soon many patients from that country were coming to me. 1 remember well one of the first cases. An American colleague sent me a patient. The accompanying diagnosis read "alcoholic cured ture 7 neurasthenia/ The prognosis called him 'Incurable/' My col- league had therefore taken the precaution of advising the patient to see also a certain neurological authority in Berlin, for he expected that attempt at therapy would lead to noth- my 1 The 2 "Zur psychogalvanic reflex is a momentary decrease in the apparent electrical resistance of the slcin, resulting from activity of the sweat glands in response to mental excitement. A. J. psychologischen Tatbestandsdiagnostfe," Zentrdblatt f&t Netvenheilkunde ttnd Psychiatric, XXVIII (1905), 813-15; English trans.: "On the Psychological Diagnosis of Facts," in Psychiatric Studies i). (CW Psychiatric Activities came for consultation, and after I had talked a saw that the man had an ordinary neurosis, of whose psychic origins he had no inkling. I made an association test and discovered that he was suffering from the effects of a formidable mother complex. He came from a rich and respected family, had a likeable wife and no cares externally speaking. Only he drank too much. The drinking was a desperate attempt ing. The little patient with him I to narcotize himself, to forget his oppressive situation. Natu- did not help. His mother was the owner of a large company, and the unusually talented son occupied a leading post in the firm. He really should long since have escaped from his oppressive subordination to his mother, but he could not summon up the resolution to throw up his excellent position. Thus he remained chained to his mother, who had installed him in the business. Whenever he was with her, or had to submit to her interference with his work, he would start drinking in order to stupefy or discharge his emotions. A part of him did not really want to leave the comfortably warm nest, and against his own instincts he was allowing himself to be seduced by wealth and comfort. After brief treatment he stopped drinking, and considered himself cured. But I told him, "I do not guarantee that you will not relapse into the same state if you return to your former situation." He did not believe me, and returned home to rally, it America in fine fettle. As soon as he was back under his mother's influence, the drinking began again. Thereupon I was called by her to a consultation during her stay in Switzerland. She was an intelligent woman, but was a real "power devil/' I saw what the son had to contend with, and realized that he did not have the strength to resist. Physically, too, he was rather delicate and no match for his mother. I therefore decided upon an act of force majeure. Behind his back I gave his mother a medical certificate to the her son's alcoholism rendered him incapable of fulof his job. I recommended his discharge. the requirements filling This advice was followed and the son, of course, was furious effect that with me. Here I had done something which normally would be con- Memories, Dreams, Reflections sidered unethical for a medical man. But I had to take this step. patient's sake I had knew that for the His further development? Separated from his mother, his own made a brilliant career in personality was able to unfold. He of the because rather or strong horse pill I had just spite of, her husband had not given him. His wife was grateful to me, for also struck out on his own had but his overcome alcoholism, only individual path with the greatest success. Nevertheless, for years I had a guilty conscience about this behind his back, patient because I had made out that certificate free him. And act could an such that I was certain only though indeed, once his liberation was accomplished, the neurosis disappeared. was constantly impressed by the way the human psyche reacts to a crime committed unconsciously. After all, that young woman was initially not aware that she had killed her child. And yet she had fallen into a condition that appeared to be In my practice I the expression of extreme consciousness of guilt. I once had a similar case which I have never forgotten. A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name, said it did not matter, since she wished to have only the one consultation. It was apparent that she belonged to the upper levels of society. She had been a doctor, she said. What she had to communicate to me was a confession; some twenty years ago she had com- mitted a murder out of jealousy. She had poisoned her best friend because she wanted to marry the friend's husband. She had thought that if the murder was not discovered, it would not disturb her. She wanted to marry the husband, and the simplest way was to eliminate her friend. Moral considerations were of no importance to her, she thought. The consequences? She had in fact married the man, but he died soon afterward, relatively young. During the following years a number of strange things happened. The daughter of this marriage endeavored to get away from her as soon as she was grown up. She married young and vanished from view, drew farther and farther away, and ultimately the mother contact with her. 122, lost all Psychiatric Activities This lady was a passionate horsewoman and owned several riding horses of which she was extremely fond. One day she discovered that the horses were beginning to grow nervous under her. Even her favorite shied and threw her. she had Finally riding. Thereafter she clung to her dogs. She owned unusually beautiful wolfhound to which she was greatly to give an up As chance would have it, this very dog was stricken with paralysis. With that, her cup was full; she felt that she was morally done for. She had to confess, and for this purpose she came to me. She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys his own soul. The murderer has already passed sentence on himself. If someone has committed a crime and is caught, he suflFers judicial punishment. If he has done it secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him, as our case shows. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even animals attached. and plants "know" it. As a result of the murder, the woman was plunged into unbearable loneliness. She had even become alienated from animals. And in order to shake off this loneliness, she had made me share her knowledge. She had to have someone who was not a murderer to share the secret, She wanted to find a person who could accept her confession without prejudice, for by so doing she would achieve once more something resembling a relationship to humanity. And the person would have to be a doctor rather than a professional confessor. She would have suspected a priest of listening to her because of his office, and of not accepting the facts for their own sake but for the purpose of moral judgment. She had seen people and animals turn away from her, and had been so struck by this silent verdict that she could not have endured any further condemnation. I never found out who she was, nor do I have any proof that her story was true. Sometimes I have asked myself what might have become of her. For that was by no means the end of her I cannot journey. Perhaps she was driven ultimately to suicide. imagine ness. how she could have gone on living in that utter loneli- Memories, urearns, Reflections Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation; but they do not help the patient. The crucial the human background and thing is the story. For it alone shows that at the human suffering, and only point can the doctors this to me most demonstrated case A to operate. therapy begin 3 cogently. The case concerned an old patient in the women's ward. She was about seventy-five, and had been bedridden for forty years. Almost fifty years ago she had entered the institution, but there was no one left who could recall her admittance; everyone who had been there had since died. Only one head nurse, who had been working at the institution for thirty-five years, still reof the patient's story. The old woman not and could could only take fluid or semifluid nourishspeak, ment. She ate with her fingers, letting the food drip off them into her mouth. Sometimes it would take her almost two hours to consume a cup of milk. When not eating, she made curious rhythmic motions with her hands and arms. I did not understand what they meant. I was profoundly impressed by the degree of destruction that can be wrought by mental disease, but saw no possible explanation. At the clinical lectures she used to be presented as a catatonic form of dementia praecox, but that meant nothing to me, for these words did not contribute in the slightest to an understanding of the significance and origin of membered something those curious gestures. The impression this case made upon me typifies my reaction to the psychiatry of the period. When I became an assistant, I had the feeling that I understood nothing whatsoever about what psychiatry purported to be. fortable beside my chief and my I felt colleagues, extremely uncom- who assumed such while I was groping perplexedly in the dark. main task of psychiatry as understanding the the regarded that were I things taking place within the sick mind, and as airs of certainty For I yet knew nothing about these things. Here I was engaged in a pro- which I did not know my way about! Late one evening, as I was walking through the ward, I saw the old woman still making her mysterious movements, and fession in 8 Cf. The Psyckogenesis of Mental Disease 124 ( CW 3), pp. 171-72, Psychiatric Activities again asked myself, 'Why must this be?" Thereupon I went to our old head nurse and asked whether the patient had always been that way. "Yes," she replied. "But my predecessor told me she used to make shoes." I then checked through her yellowing case history once more, and sure enough, there was a note to the effect that she was in the habit of making cobbler's motions. In the past shoemakers used to hold shoes between their knees and draw the threads through the leather with precisely such movements. (Village cobblers can still be seen doing this today.) When the patient died shortly afterward, her elder brother came to the funeral. him. He told "Why did your sister lose her sanity?T I asked me that she had been in love with a shoemaker who for some reason had not wanted to marry her, land that when he finally rejected her she had "gone off/' The shoemaker movements indicated an identification with her sweetheart which had lasted until her death. That case gave me my first inkling of the psychic origins of dementia praecox. Henceforth I devoted all my attention to the meaningful connections in a psychosis. Another patient's story revealed to me the psychological background of psychosis and, above all, of the "senseless" delusions. From this case I was able for the first time to understand the language of schizophrenics, which had hitherto been regarded as meaningless. The patient was Babette S., whose story I have 4 published elsewhere. In 1908 I delivered a lecture on her in the town hall of Zurich. She came out of the Old Town of Zurich, out of narrow, dirty where she had been born in poverty-stricken circum- streets and had grown up in a mean environment. Her sister was a prostitute, her father a drunkard. At the age of thirty-nine she succumbed to a paranoid form of dementia praecox, with characteristic megalomania. When I saw her, she had been in the institution for twenty years. She had served as an object lesson to hundreds of medical students. In her they had seen the uncanny process of psychic disintegration; she was a classic stances 4 "The Psychology of Dementia Praecox" and "The Content The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (CW 3). Cf. in of the Psychoses/' Memories, Dreams, Reflections case. Babette was completely demented and given to saying the craziest things which made no sense at all. I tried with all her abstruse utterances. might to understand the content of my For the reason for that example, she would say, "I am the Lorelei"; her case, would understand to was that the doctors, when trying 5 es bedeuten" Or she soil was always say, "Ich weiss nicht, would wail, "I am Socrates' deputy." That, as I discovered, was am unjustly accused like Socrates/' Absurd intended to mean: "I am the double polytechnic irreplaceable," or, cake on a corn-meal bottom," "I am Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter," "Naples and I must supply the world with noodles," signified an increase in her self-valuaoutbursts like: "I "I am plum a compensation for inferiority feelings. preoccupation with Babette and other such cases convinced me that much of what we had hitherto regarded as senseless was not as crazy as it seemed. More than once I have seen that even with such patients there remains in the background a personality which must be called normal. It stands tion, that is to say, My looking on, so to speak. Occasionally, too, this personality usually by way of voices or dreams can make altogether sensible remarks and objections. It can even, when physical illness ensues, move into the foreground again and make the patient seem almost normal. once had to treat a schizophrenic old woman who showed very distinctly the ''normal" personality in the background. This was a case which could not be cured, only cared for. Every physician, after all, has patients whom he cannot hope to cure, for whom he can only smooth the path to death. She heard voices which were distributed throughout her entire body, and a voice in the middle of the thorax was "God's voice." *'We must rely on that voice," I said to her, and was astonished at my own courage. As a rule this voice made very sensible remarks, and with its aid I managed very well with the patient. Once the voice said, "Let him test you on the Bible!" She I me brought along an old, tattered, much-read Bible, and at each to assign her a chapter to read. The next time I had to test her on it. I did this for about seven two years, once visit I had every 5 "I know not what it means": the first line of Heine's 126 famous poem "Die Lorelei." Psychiatric Activities weeks. At first I felt very odd in this role, but after a while I what the lessons signified. In this way her attention was so that she did not sink deeper into the disintegrating kept alert, dream. The result was that after some six the voices which realized years had formerly been everywhere had retired to the left half of her body, while the right half was completely free of them. Nor had the intensity of the phenomena been doubled on the left side; it was much the same as in the past. Hence it must be concluded that the patient was cured at least halfway. That was an unexpected success, for I would not have imagined that these memory exercises could have a therapeutic Through my work with the patients I ideas and hallucinations contain a germ a ality, effect. realized that paranoid of meaning. person- A a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind fault is ours if we do not understand them. It life history, The dawned upon me then the psychosis. for the first time that a general psyof the chology personality lies concealed within psychosis, and that even here we come upon the old human conflicts. Although patients may appear dull and apathetic, or totally imbecilic, there is more going on in their minds, and more that is meaning- than there seems to be. At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the sub- ful, stratum of our own natures. to me that psychiatry should have taken so long to look into the content of the psychoses. No one concerned himself with the meaning of fantasies, or thought to ask why this patient had one kind of fantasy, another an altogether different one; or what it signified when, for instance, a patient had the fantasy of being persecuted by the Jesuits, or when another imagined that the Jews wanted to poison him, or a third was convinced that the police were after him. Such quesIt was always astounding tions seemed altogether uninteresting to doctors of those days. The fantasies were simply lumped together under some generic name as, for instance, "ideas of persecution/' It seems equally odd to me that my investigations of that time are almost forgotten today. Already at the beginning of the century I treated schizophrenia psychotherapeutically. That method, therefore, is not something that has only just been discovered. It did, how- ls/ Memories, Dreams, Reflections ever, take a long time before people chology into psychiatry. While I was still at the clinic, I began had to to introduce psy- be most circumspect would have been schizophrenic patients, or I about treating my accused of woolgathering. Schizophrenia was considered incurable. If one did achieve some improvement with a case of not been real schizoschizophrenia, the answer was that it had phrenia. When Freud visited me in Zurich in 1908, 1 demonstrated the case of Babette to him. Afterward he said to me, "You know, is certainly Jung, what you have found out about this patient But how in the world were you able to Hear spending interesting. hours and days with this phenomenally ugly female?" I must have given him a rather dashed look, for this idea had never occurred to me. In a way I regarded the woman as a pleasant old creature because she had such lovely delusions and said such interesting things. And after all, even in her insanity, the human being emerged from a cloud of grotesque nonsense. Therapeutically, nothing was accomplished with Babette; she had been sick for too long. But I have seen other cases in which this kind of attentive entering into the personality of the patient produced a lasting therapeutic effect. Regarding them from the outside, is all we see of the mentally ill their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the turned away from us. Outward appearances are frequently deceptive, as I discovered to my astonishment in the case of a young catatonic patient. She was eighteen years old, and came from a cultivated family. At the age of fifteen she had been seduced by her brother and abused by a schoolmate. From her sixteenth year on, she retreated into isolation. She concealed herself from people, and ultimately the only emo- psyche which is tional relationship left to her was one with a vicious watchdog which belonged to another family, and which she tried to win over. She grew steadily odder, and at seventeen was taken to the mental hospital, where she spent a year and a half. She heard voices, refused food, and was completely mutistic ( i.e., no longer spoke). When I first saw her she was in a typical catatonic state. 128 Psychiatric Activities In the course of many weeks I succeeded, very gradually, in persuading her to speak. After overcoming many resistances, she told me that she had lived on the moon. The moon, it seemed, was inhabited, but at first she had seen only men. They had at once taken her with them and deposited her in a sublunar dwelling where their children and wives were kept. For on the high mountains of the moon there lived a vampire who kidnaped and killed the women and children, so that the moon people were threatened with extinction. That was the reason for the sublunar existence of the feminine half of the population. My patient made up her mind to do something for the moon people, and plannecj to destroy the vampire. After long preparations, she waited for the vampire on the platform of a tower which had been erected for this purpose. After a number of nights she at last saw the monster approaching from afar, winging his way toward her like a great black bird. She took her long sacrificial knife, concealed it in her gown, and waited for the vampire's arrival. Suddenly he stood before her. He had several pairs of wings. His face and entire figure were covered by them, so that she could see nothing but his feathers. Wonder-struck, she was seized by curiosity to find out what he really looked like. She approached, hand on the knife. Suddenly the wings opened and a man of unearthly beauty stood before her. He enclosed her in his winged arms with an iron grip, so that she could no longer wield the knife. In any case she was so spellbound by the vampire's look that she would not have been capable of with her. striking. He raised her from the platform and flew off After this revelation she was once again able to speak with- now her resistances emerged. It seemed that had stopped her return to the moon; she could no longer escape from the earth. This world was not beautiful, she said, but the moon was beautiful, and life there was rich in meaning. Sometime later she suffered a relapse into her catatonia, and I had to have her taken to a sanatorium. For a while she was out inhibition, and I violently insane. When she was discharged after some two months, it was again possible to talk with her. Gradually she life came once to see that on earth was unavoidable. Desperately, she fought against Memories, Dreams, Reflections consequences, and had to be sent back to I visited her in her cell and said to her, "All this won't do you any good; you cannot return to the moon!" She took this in silence and with an appearance of utter apathy. This time she was released after a short stay and resigned herself to her fate. For a while she took a job as nurse in a sanatorium. There was an assistant doctor there who made a somewhat rash approach to her. She responded with a revolver shot. Luckily, the man was this conclusion and the sanatorium. its Once only slightly wounded. But the incident revealed that she went about with a revolver all the time. Once before, she had turned up with a loaded gun. During the last interview, at the end of the treatment, she gave it to me. When I asked in amazement what she was doing with it, she replied, "I would have shot you down if you had failed me!" When the excitement over the shooting had subsided, she returned to her native town. She married, had several children, and survived two world wars in the East, without ever again suffering a relapse. What can be said As a by way result of the incest to of interpretation of these fantasies? which she had been subjected as a she felt humiliated in the eyes of the world, but elevated in the realm of fantasy. She had been transported into a mythic realm; for incest is traditionally a prerogative of royalty and divinities. The consequence was complete alienation from the girl, world, a state of psychosis. She became "extramundane," as it were, and lost contact with humanity. She plunged into cosmic distances, into outer space, where she met with the winged de- mon. As onto me is the rule with such things, she projected his figure during the treatment. Thus I was automatically threat- ened with death, as was everyone who might have persuaded her to return to normal human life. By telling me her story she had in a sense betrayed the demon and attached herself to an earthly human being. Hence she was able to return to life and even to marry. Thereafter I regarded the sufferings of the mentally ill in a For I had gained insight into the richness and importance of their inner experience. different light. 130 Psychiatric Activities am often asked about my psychotherapeutic or analytic cannot reply unequivocally to the question. Therapy is different in every case. When a doctor tells me that he adheres strictly to this or that method, I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect. So much is said in the literature about the resistance of the patient that it would almost seem as if the doctor were trying to put something over on him, whereas the cure ought to grow naturally out of the patient himself. PsychoI method. I therapy and analysis are as varied as are human individuals. I treat every patient as individually as possible, because the solution of the problem is always an individual one. Universal rules can be postulated only with a grain of salt. A psychological truth is valid only if it can be reversed. A solution which would be out of the question for me may be just the right one for someone else. Naturally, a doctor must be familiar with the so-called "methods." But he must guard against falling into any specific, routine approach. In general one must guard against theoretical assumptions. Today they may be valid, tomorrow it may be the turn of other assumptions. In my analyses they play no part. I am unsystematic very much by intention. To my mind, in dealing with individuals, only individual understanding will do. We need a different language for every patient. In one analysis I can be heard talking the Adlerian dialect, in another the Freudian. The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners. Analyst and patient sit facing one another, eye to eye; the doctor has something to say, but so has the patient. Since the essence of psychotherapy is not the application of a method, psychiatric study alone does not suffice. I myself had to work for a very long time before I possessed the equipment for psychotherapy. As early as 1909 I realized that I could not treat latent psychoses if I did not understand their symbolism. It was then that I began to study mythology. With cultivated and intelligent patients the psychiatrist needs more than merely professional knowledge. He must understand, aside from all theoretical assumptions, what really motivates the patient. Otherwise he stirs up unnecessary resistances. What memories, urearns, nejiections counts, after all, is not whether a theory is corroborated, but whether the patient grasps himself as an individual. This, however, is not possible without reference to the collective views, informed. For that, concerning which the doctor ought to be for the horizon of the does not mere medical training suffice, than the limited purmore embraces human psyche infinitely view of the doctor's consulting room. and inaccessible The psyche is distinctly more complicated than the body. It is, so to speak, the half of the world which comes into existence only when we become conscious of it. For that reason the psyche is not only a personal but a world problem, and the psychiatrist has to deal with an entire world. Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the psyches of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberra- man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their heads nowadays, a hydrogen bomb will go off. The psychotherapist, however, must understand not only the patient; it is equally important that he should understand himself. For that reason the sine qua non is the analysis of the analyst, what is called the training analysis. The patient's treatment begins with the doctor, so to speak. Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same. Only then. In the training analysis the doctor must learn to know his own psyche and to take it seriously. If he cannot do that, the patient will not learn either. He will lose a portion of his psyche, just as the doctor has lost that portion of his psyche which he has not learned to understand. It is not enough, therefore, for the training analysis to consist in acquiring a system of concepts. The analysand tion of must is realize that it concerns himself, that the training analysis life and is not a method which can be learned The student who does not grasp that fact in his own a bit of real by rote. training analysis will have to Though there is treatment pay dearly known for the failure later on. as "minor psychotherapy/' in any the whole analysis thoroughgoing personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases which 132 Psychiatric Activities the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. lenged. The must Then the doctor's whole being is chal- keep watch over himself, over For we do not react only with our consciousness. Also we must always be asking ourthe therapist way he selves: is at all times reacting to his patient. How is our unconscious experiencing this situation? We must therefore observe our dreams, pay the closest attention and study ourselves just as carefully as we do the patient. Oth- may go off the rails. I shall give a example of this. I once had a patient, a highly intelligent woman, who for various reasons aroused my doubts. At first the analysis went very well, but after a while I began to feel that I was no longer getting at the correct interpretation of her dreams, and I thought I also noticed an increasing shallowness in our dialogue. I therefore decided to talk with my patient about this, since it had of course not escaped her that something was going wrong. The night before I was to speak with her, I had the following dream. erwise the entire treatment single I was walking down a highway through a valley in late-afternoon sunlight. To my right was a steep hill. At its top stood a castle, and on the highest tower there was a woman sitting on a kind of balustrade. In order to see her properly, I had to bend my head far back. I awoke with a crick in the back of my neck. Even in the dream I had recognized the woman as my patient. The was immediately apparent to me. If in the dream up at the patient in this fashion, in reality I had probably been looking down on her. Dreams are, after interpretation I had to look compensations for the conscious attitude. I told her of the my interpretation. This produced an immediate in the situation, and the treatment once more began to change move forward. all, dream and Memories, Dreams, Reflections As a doctor I sage the patient means nothing, what kind of mesmean to me? If he does he me. What bringing have no point of attack. The doctor is effective constantly have to ask myself is I only when he himself is affected. "Only the wounded physician heals." But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. I take my patients seriously. Perhaps I am confronted with a problem just as much as they. It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the docsore spot. Because this is so, difficult situations can arise for or rather, especially for the doctor. Every therapist ought to have a control by some third person, tor's the doctor too he remains open to another point of view. Even the has a confessor. I always advise analysts: "Have a father pope confessor, or a mother confessor!" Women are particularly gifted for playing such a part. They often have excellent intuiso that critical insight, and can see what men their sleeves, at times see also into men's anima indoes not see. That is why trigues. They see aspects that the man tion and a trenchant have up no woman has ever been convinced that her husband man! is a super- It is understandable that a person should undergo analysis if he has a neurosis; but if he feels he is normal, he is under no compulsion to do so. Yet I can assure you, I have had some astonishing experiences with so-called '"normality/* Once I encountered an entirely "normal" pupil. He was a doctor, and came to me with the best recommendations from an old colleague. He had been his assistant and had later taken over his practice. Now he had a normal practice, normal success, a normal wife, normal children, lived in a normal little house in a normal little town, had a normal income and probably a normal diet. He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him, "Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right, how can the patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how can you convince him? You yourself must be the real stuff. If you are not, God help youl Then you will lead patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis of yourself." 134 Psychiatric Activities all right, the man said, but almost at once followed with: "I have no problems to tell you about." That should have been a warning to me, I said, well, then we can ex- That was this "Very amine your dreams." "I have no dreams/* he said. "You will soon have some," I responded. Anyone else would probably have dreamt that very night. But he was unable to recall any dreams. So it went on for about two weeks, and I began to feel rather uneasy about the whole affair. At last an impressive dream turned up. I am going to tell it because it shows how important it is, in practical psychiatry, to understand dreams. He dreamt that he was traveling by railroad. The train had a two-hour stop in a certain city. Since he did not know the city and wanted to see something of it, he set out toward the city center. There he found a medieval building, probably the town hall, and went into it. He wandered down long corridors and came upon handsome rooms, their walls lined with old paintings and fine tapestries. Precious old objects stood about. Suddenly he saw that it had grown darker, and the sun had set. He thought, I must get back to the railroad station. At this moment he discovered that he was lost, and no longer knew where the exit was. He started in alarm, and simultaneously realized that he had not met a single person in this building. He began to feel uneasy, and quickened his pace, hoping to run into someone. But he met no one. Then he came to a large door, and thought with relief: That is the exit. He opened the door and discovered that he had stumbled upon a gigantic room. It was so huge and dark that he could not even see the opposite wall. Profoundly alarmed, the dreamer ran across the great, empty room, hoping to find the exit on the other side. Then he saw precisely in the middle of the room something white on the floor. As he approached he discovered that it was an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had smeared itself with feces. At that moment he awoke with a cry, in a state of panic. here was a latent psychosis! I I knew all I needed to know must say I sweated as I tried to lead him out of that dream. I had to represent it to him as something quite innocuous, and gloss over all the perilous details. Memories, Dreams, Reflections approximately this: the trip on which He remains there, however, for in the center of the room is himself child The time. short a only as a two-year-old child. In small children, such uncouth behavior is somewhat unusual, but still possible. They may be in- What he the dream says is sets out is the trip to Zurich. which are colored and have an odd and possibly along strict such a failing. of be a child lines, guilty might easily But the dreamer, the doctor, was no child; he was a grown man. And therefore the dream image in the center of the room is a sinister symbol. When he told me the dream, I realized that his normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick of time, for the latent psychosis was within a hair's breadth of breaking out and becoming manifest. This had to be pretrigued by their feces, smell. Raised in a city environment, vented. Finally, with the aid of one of his other dreams, I succeeded in finding an acceptable pretext for ending the train- ing analysis. We were both of us very glad to stop. I had not informed him of my diagnosis, but he had probably become aware that he was on the verge of a fatal panic, for he had a dream in which he was being pursued by a dangerous maniac. Immediately afterward he returned home. He never again stirred up die unconscious. His emphatic normality reflected a personality which would not have been developed but simply shattered by a confrontation with the unconscious. These latent psychoses are the bStes noires of psychotherapists, since they are often very difficult to recognize. With this, we come to the question of lay analysis, I am in favor of non-medical men studying psychotherapy and practic- but in dealing with latent psychoses there is the risk of making dangerous mistakes. Therefore I favor laymen working as analysts, but under the guidance of a professional physician. As soon as a lay analyst feels the slightest bit uncertain, he ought to consult his mentor. Even for doctors it is diffiing it; their cult to recognize and treat a latent schizophrenia; all the more so for laymen. But I have repeatedly found that laymen who have practiced psychotherapy for years, and who have themselves been in analysis, are shrewd and capable. Moreover, there are not enough doctors practicing psychotherapy. For Psychiatric Activities such practice, long and thorough training is necessary, and a wide culture which very few possess. The relationship between doctor and patient, especially when a transference on the part of the patient occurs, or a more or less unconscious identification of doctor and patient, can lead to parapsychological phenomena. I have frequently run into this. One such case which was particularly impressive was that of a whom I had pulled out of a psychogenic depression. He went back home and married; but I did not care for his wife. The first time I saw her, I had an uneasy feeling. Her husband was grateful to me, and I observed that I was a thorn in her side patient because of my women who do influence over him. It frequently happens that not really love their husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love. The tient wife's attitude placed a tremendous burden of coping with. Under which he was incapable on the paits pressure after a year of marriage, into a new depression. this possibility, I had arranged with him that he was Foreseeing to get in touch with me at once if he observed his spirits sinking. he relapsed, He neglected to do so, partly because of his wife, who scoffed at moods. I heard not a word from him. At that time I had to deliver a lecture in B. I returned to my hotel around midnight. I sat with some friends for a while after the lecture, then went to bed, but I lay awake for a long time. At about two o'clock I must have just fallen asleep I awoke with a start, and had the feeling that someone had come into the room; I even had the impression that the door had been hastily opened. I instantly turned on the light, but there was nothing. Someone might have mistaken the door, I thought, and I looked into the corridor. But it was still as death. "Odd," I thought, "someone did come into the room!" Then I tried to rehis what had happened, and it occurred to me that I had been awakened by a feeling of dull pain, as though someback of my skull. thing had struck my forehead and then the The following day I received a telegram saying that my patient had committed suicide. He had shot himself. Later, I learned call exactly had come to rest in the back wall of the skull. This experience was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon that the bullet in connection with an archetypal quite often observed situation in this case, death. By means of a relativization of such as is time and space in the unconscious it could well be that I had in reality was taking place elseperceived something which where. The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the "sympathy of all had knowledge of my pathings/' In this case the unconscious tient's condition. All that restive evening, in fact, I had felt curiously in contrast to my usual mood, and nervous, very much never try to convert a patient to anything, and never exercise any compulsion. What matters most to me is that the patient should reach his own view of things. Under my treatment a pagan becomes a pagan and a Christian a Christian, a Jew a Jew, according to what his destiny prescribes for him. I I well recall the case of a Jewish woman who had lost her began with a dream of mine in which a young girl, un- faith. It to me, came to me as a patient. She outlined her case to me, and while she was talking, I thought, "I don't understand her at all. I don't understand what it is all about." But suddenly it occurred to me that she must have an unusual father complex. That was the dream. For the next day I had down in my appointment book a con- known A young woman appeared* She was and highly intelligent. She had already undergone an analysis, but the doctor acquired a transference to her and finally begged her not to come to him any more, for if she did, it would mean the desultation for four o'clock. Jewish, daughter of a wealthy banker, pretty, chic, struction of his marriage. The had been suffering for years from a severe anxiety which this experience naturally worsened. I began witihi an anamnesis, but could discover notibdng special. She was a girl neurosis, well-adapted, Westernized Jewess, enlightened down to her bones. At first I could not understand what her trouble was. Suddenly my Lord, so this dream occurred to me, and is the little girl of my I thought, "Good dream." Since, however, I Psychiatric Activities could detect not a trace of a father complex in her, I asked her, as I am in the habit of doing in such cases, about her grandfather. For a brief moment she closed her eyes, and I realized at once that here lay the heart of the problem. I therefore asked her to tell me about this grandfather, and learned that he had been a rabbi and had belonged to a Jewish sect. "Do you mean the Chassidim?" I asked. She said yes. I pursued my questioning. "If he was a rabbi, was he by any chance a zaddik?" "Yes/' she replied, "it is said that he was a kind of saint and also possessed second sight. But that is all nonsense. There is no such thing!" With that I had concluded the anamnesis and understood the history of her neurosis. I explained to her, "Now I am going to you something that you may not be able to accept. Your grandfather was a zaddik. Your father became an apostate to the Jewish faith. He betrayed the secret and turned his back on tell God. And you have got into you/' your neurosis because the fear of God has That struck her like a bolt of lightning. following night I had another dream. A reception was in my house, and behold, this girl was there too. place taking She came up to me and asked, "Haven't you got an umbrella? It The is raining so hard." I actually found an umbrella, fumbled it to open it, and was on the point of giving it to around with But what happened instead? I handed it to her on my knees, as if she were a goddess. I told this dream to her, and in a week the neurosis had van6 ished. The dream had showed me that she was not just a subut that beneath the surface were the makings perficial little girl, of a saint. She had no mythological ideas, and therefore the most essential feature of her nature could find no way to express itself. All her conscious activity was directed toward flirtation, clothes, and sex, because she knew of nothing else. She knew only the intellect and lived a meaningless life. In reality she was a child of God whose destiny was to fulfill His secret will. I had to awaken mythological and religious ideas in her, for she her. belonged to that ckss of human beings of 6 This case is ment. A. J. distinguished from most of Jung's cases 139 by whom spiritual ac- the brevity of the treat- memories, ur earns, ttejiecuons tivity is demanded. Thus her trace of the neurosis In this case I was life took on a meaning, and no left. had applied no "method,* but had sensed the explaining this to her had accompresence of the numen. not matter here; what mattered did Method cure. the plished My was. the "fear of God." 7 have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the ques- I life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are tions of usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me. The those majority of who had the lost sheep. my patients consisted not of believers but of to me were and the has the opbeliever day age to the life/' live We need church, "symbolic lost their faith, Even The ones who came in this portunity, in his only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi, and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself. There is, for example, the case of the theologian which I described in "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious/' 8 He had a certain dream which was frequently repeated. He dreamt that he was standing on a slope from which he had a beautiful r Cf. The Symbolic Life, Pastoral Psychology Guild Lecture, No. So (London, 1954), p, 18. 8 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9, i), pp. 17-18. 140 Psychiatric Activities view of a low valley covered with dense woods. In the dream he in the middle of the woods there was a lake, and he knew that also knew that hitherto something had always prevented him from going there. But this time he wanted to carry out his plan. As he approached the lake, the atmosphere grew uncanny, and suddenly a light gust of wind passed over the surface of the water, which rippled darkly. He awoke with a cry of terror. At first this dream seems incomprehensible. But as a theologian the dreamer should have remembered the "pool" whose waters were stirred by a sudden wind, and in which the sick were bathed the pool of Bethesda. An angel descended and touched the water, which thereby acquired curative powers. The light wind is the pneuma which bloweth where it listeth And that terrified the dreamer. An unseen presence is suggested, a numen that lives its own life and in whose presence man shudders. The dreamer was reluctant to accept the association with the pool of Bethesda. He wanted nothing of it, for such things are met with only in the Bible, or at most on Sunday mornings as the subjects of sermons, and have nothing to do with psychology. All very well to speak of the Holy Ghost on occasions but it is not a phenomenon to be experienced! I knew that the dreamer should have overcome his fright and, as it were, got over his panic. But I never force the issue if a patient is unwilling to go the way that has been revealed to him and take the consequences. I do not subscribe to the facile assumption that the patient is blocked merely by ordinary resistances. Resistances especially when they are stubborn merit attention, for they are often warnings which must not be overlooked. The cure may be a poison that not everyone can take, or prove an operation which, when it is contraindicated, can fatal. Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, most people are overcome by was the case with this theolorun Such and away. many fright, aware that course I am of theologians are in a more diffigian. cult situation than others. On the one hand they are closer to are more bound by church religion, but on the other hand they and dogma. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the into the nucleus of personality, 141 most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema spirit, is in any case alien to to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a "historical" foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this ques- the patient will often contempt for the psyche. tion, show an unsuspected but profound In contemporary psychotherapy the demand is often made that the doctor or psychotherapist should "go along" with the patient and his affects. I don't consider that to be always the right course. Sometimes active intervention on the part of the doctor is required. Once a lady of the aristocracy me who was in the her doctors. She sufincluding came to habit of slapping her employees fered from a compulsion neurosis and had been under treatment in a sanatorium. Naturally, she had soon dispensed the obligatory slap to the head physician. In her eyes, after all, he was only a superior valet de chambre. She was paying the bills, wasn't she? This doctor sent her on to another institution and there the same scene was repeated. Since the lady was not really insane, but evidently had to be handled with kid gloves, the hapless doctor sent her on to me. She was a very stately and imposing person, six feet tall and there was power behind her slaps, I can tell you! She came, then, and we had a very good talk. Then came the moment when I had to say something unpleasant to her. Furious, she sprang to her feet and threatened to slap me. I, too, jumped up, and said "Very well, you are the lady. You hit first ladies first! But then I hit back!*' And I meant it. She fell back into her chair and deflated before my eyes. "No one has ever said that to me to her, before!" she protested. to succeed. From that moment What on, the therapy began this patient needed was a masculine reaction. In this would have been entirely wrong to "go along/' That would have been worse than useless. She had a compulsion neurosis because she could not impose moral restraint upon herself. Such people must then have some other form of restraint and along come the compulsive symptoms to serve the purpose. case it 142 Psychiatric Activities Years ago I once drew up statistics on the results of my treatments. I no longer recall the figures exactly; but, on a conservative estimate, a third of my cases were really cured, a third considerably improved, and a third not essentially influenced. But it is precisely the unimproved cases which are hardest to judge, because many things are not realized and understood by the patients until years afterward, and only then can they take effect. How often former patients have written to me: "I did not realize what it was really all about until ten years after had been with you." I have had a few cases who ran out on me; very rarely indeed have I had to send a patient away. But even among them were some who later sent me positive reports. That is why it is often so difficult to draw conclusions as to the success of a treatment. I obvious that in the course of his practice a doctor will come who have a great effect on him too. He meets personalities who, for better or worse, never stir the interest of the public and who nevertheless, or for that very reason, possess unIt is across people usual qualities, or whose destiny dented developments and to pass through unpreceSometimes they are persons it is disasters. who might well inspire another to give them; but these talents may be implanted in so strangely unfavorable a psychic disposition that we cannot tell whether it is a question of genius or of fragmentary development. Frequently, too, in this unlikely soil there flower rare blossoms of the psyche which we would never have thought to find in the flatlands of society. For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffera constant comparison ing. The rapport consists, after all, in and mutual comprehension, in the dialectical confrontation of two opposing psychic realities. If for some reason these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced. Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no of extraordinary talents, his life for solution is Among found. the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good would not have been neurotic that If they had lived in a period is, divided against themselves. and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared many who in other ages this division am speaking of those who canmyth and who can neither find a way with themselves. I not tolerate the loss of to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom. These victims of the psychic dichotomy of our time are merely the optional neurotics; their apparent morbidity drops away moment the gulf between the ego and the unconscious is closed. The doctor who has felt this dichotomy to the depths of his being will also be able to reach a better understanding of the uncon- scious psychic processes, and will be saved from the danger of inflation to which the psychologist is prone. The doctor who does not know from his own experience the numinosity of the archetypes will scarcely be able to escape their negative effect when he encounters it in his practice. He will tend to over- or it, since he possesses only an intellectual point view but no empirical criterion. This is where those perilous aberrations begin, the first of which is the attempt to dominate underestimate of everything by the intellect. This serves the secret purpose of placing both doctor and patient at a safe distance from the archetypal effect and thus from real experience, and of substituting for psychic reality an apparently secure, artificial, but merely two-dimensional conceptual world in which the reality of life is well covered up by so-called clear concepts. Experi- and instead mere names are which are henceforth put in the place of reality. No one has any obligations to a concept; that is what is so agreeable about conceptuality it promises protection from experience. The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts. Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile procedure is repeated ad infinitum. In my experience, therefore, the most difficult as well as the most ungrateful patients, apart from habitual liars, are the soence is stripped of its substance, substituted, 144 Psychiatric Activities With them, one hand never knows what the They cultivate a "compartment psycholcan be settled by an intellect that is not subject ogy." Anything to the control of feeling and yet the intellectual still suffers called intellectuals. other hand is doing. from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped. From my encounters with patients and with the psychic phenomena which they have paraded before me in an endless stream of images, I have learned an enormous amount not just knowledge, but above all insight into my own nature. And not the least of what I have learned has come from my errors and have had mainly women patients, who often entered work with extraordinary conscientiousness, understandand intelligence. It was essentially because of them that I defeats. I into the ing, on new paths in therapy. my patients became my disciples in the original sense of the word, and have carried my ideas out into the world. Among them I have made friendships that have endured decade was able to A number strike out of after decade. patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. En- My counters with people of so many different kinds and on so many have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous. different psychological levels 145 V 1 Sigmund Freud EMBARKED on the adventuie of my intellectual devel- opment by becoming a psychiatrist In all innocence I began observing mental patients, clinically, from the outside, and thereby came upon psychic processes of a striking nature. I I noted and classified these things without the slightest under- contents, which were considered to be standing evaluated when they were dismissed as "pathologiadequately In the course of time cal." my interest focused more and more upon cases in which I experienced something understandable that is, cases of paranoia, manic-depressive insanity, and psy- of their chogenic disturbances. From the start of my psychiatric career the studies of Breuer and Freud, along with tie work of Pierre Janet, provided me with a wealth of suggestions and stimuli. Above all, I found that Freud's technique of dream analysis and dream interpretation cast a valuable light upon schizophrenic forms of expression. As early as 1900 1 had read Freud's The In1 This chapter should be regarded as a supplement to Jung's numerous writings on Freud. The most important of these are contained in Freud and Psychoanalysis (CW 4). Cf. also "Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting" (1934) and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" ( 1939), in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (CW 15). 146 Sigmund Freud 2 had laid the book aside, at the time, it. At the age of twenty-five I lacked the experience to appreciate Freud's theories. Such experience did not come until later. In 1903 1 once more took up The Interpretation of Dreams and discovered how it all linked up with my own ideas. What chiefly interested me was the application to dreams of the concept of the repression mechanism, which was derived from the psychology of the neuroses. This was important to me because I had frequently encountered repressions in my experiments with word association; in response to certain stimulus words the patient either had no associative answer or was unduly slow in his reaction time. As was later discovered, such a disturbance occurred each time the stimulus word had terpretation of Dreams. 1 because I did not yet grasp touched upon a psychic lesion or conflict. In most cases the pa- was unconscious of this. When questioned about the cause of the disturbance, he would often answer in a peculiarly artificial manner. My reading of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams showed me that the repression mechanism was at work here, and that the facts I had observed were consonant with his theory. Thus I was able to corroborate Freud's line of argument. The situation was different when it came to the content of the repression. Here I could not agree with Freud. He considered the cause of the repression to be a sexual trauma. From my practice, however, I was familiar with numerous cases of neurosis in which the question of sexuality played a subordinate tient part, other factors standing in the foreground problem of social adaptation, of oppression for example, the by tragic circumstances of life, prestige considerations, and so on. Later I presented such cases to Freud; but he would not grant that facthan sexuality could be the cause. That was highly unsatisfactory to me. At the beginning it was not easy for me to assign Freud the proper place in my life, or to take the right attitude toward him. When I became acquainted with his work I was planning an tors other 2 In his obituary on Freud (1939), Jung calls this work "epoch-making" and "probably the boldest attempt that has ever been made to master the riddles of the unconscious psyche upon the apparently firm ground of empiricism. For us, then young psychiatrists, it was ... a source of illumination, while for our older colleagues it was an object of mockery." A. J. 147 academic career, and was about to complete a paper that was intended to advance me at the university. But Freud was defiin the academic world at the time, and nitely persona non grata in scienany connection with him would have been damaging him mentioned surtific circles. "Important people" at most discussed only in the he was at and congresses reptitiously, corridors, never on the floor. Therefore the discovery that my association experiments were in agreement with Freud's theories was far from pleasant to me. Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these questions, the devil whispered to me that I would be justified in publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions without mentioning Freud. After all, I had worked out experiments long before I understood his work. But then I my my second personality: "If you do a thing you had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You cannot build your life upon a lie." With that, the question was settled. From then on I became an open partisan of Freud's and fought for him. I first took up the cudgels for Freud at a congress in Munich where a lecturer discussed obsessional neuroses but studiously forbore to mention the name of Freud. In 1906, in connection 8 with this incident, I wrote a paper for the Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschrift on Freud's theory of the neuroses, which had contributed a great deal to the understanding of obsessional neuroses. In response to this article, two German professors wrote to me, warning that if I remained on Freud's side and continued to defend him, I would be endangering my academic career. I replied: If what Freud says is the truth, I am with him. I don't give a damn for a career if it has to be based on the premise of restricting research and concealing the truth." And I went on defending Freud and his ideas. But on the basis of my own findings I was still unable to feel that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression or sexual traumata. In certain heard the voice of like that, as if 8 "Die Hysterielehre Freuds: Eine Erwiderung auf die Aschaffenburgsche Kritik," Mtinchener medizinische Wochensckrift, LIII (November, 1906), 47; English trans.: "Freud's Theory of Hysteria: A Reply to Aschaffenburg," in Freud and Psychoanalysis ( CW 4 ) . 148 Sigmund Freud but not in others. Nevertheless, Freud had of investigation, and the shocked outopened up 4 cries against him at the time seemed to me absurd. was cases that a so, new path had not met with much sympathy for the ideas expressed in "The Psychology of Dementia Praecox." In fact, my colleagues laughed at me. But through this book I came to know Freud. He invited me to visit him, and our first meeting took place in Vienna in March 1907. We met at one o'clock in the afternoon and talked virtually without a pause for thirteen hours. Freud was the first man of real importance I had encountered; in my I experience up to that time, no one else could compare with him. least trivial in his attitude. I found him There was nothing the extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable. And yet my first impressions of him remained somewhat tangled; I could not make him out. What he said about his sexual theory impressed me. Nevertheless, his words could not remove my hesitations and doubts. I tried to advance these reservations of mine on several occasions, but each time he would attribute them to my lack of experience. Freud was right; in those days I had not enough experience to support my objections. I could see that his sexual theory was enormously important to him, both personally and philosophically. This impressed me, but I could not decide to what extent this strong emphasis upon sexuality was connected with subjective prejudices of his, verifiable experiences. and to what extent it rested upon Freud's attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the super- Above all, natural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as "psychosexualJung sent Freud Diagnostische Assoziationsstudten ( 1906; Eng- 4 In 1906, after CW 2), the corExperimental Researches, began, and went on until 1913. In 1907 Jung sent Freud his book Vber die Psychology der Dementia Praecox (English trans.: 'The Psychology of Dementia Praecox," in The Psychogenests of Mental Dis- lish trans, of Jung's contributions in respondence between the two ease, CW 3 ).-A. men J. 149 I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon cul- ity." as a mere farce, the morbid he assented, "so it is, consequence of repressed sexuality. "Yes," and that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend." I was by no means disposed to agree, or to let it to argue it out with go at that, but still I did not feel competent ture. Culture would then appear him. There was something else that seemed to me significant at that I was able to think meeting. It had to do with things which out and understand only after our friendship was over. There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke first of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of and skeptical manner vanished. A strange, his normally critical moved expression came over his face, the cause of which was at a loss to understand. I had a strong intuition that for him sexuality was a sort of numinosum. This was confirmed by a conversation which took place some three years later (in deeply I 1910), again in Vienna. recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark." He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, "And promise me this one thing, my I can still promise dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday/' In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark against what?" To mud" and here he moment, then added "of occultism." First of was the words "bulwark" and "dogma'* that alarmed me; which he replied, "Against the black tide of hesitated for a all, it dogma, that is to say, an undisputable confession of faith, up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment; only with a personal power drive. for a is set This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude* What Freud seemed to mean by "occultism'* was virtually evI erything that philosophy and religion, including the rising con- 150 Sigmund Freud temporary science of parapsychology, had learned about the To me the sexual theory was just as occult, that is to say, unproven an hypothesis, as many other speculative views. As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis which might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an psyche. just as article of faith for all time. Although I did not properly understand it then, I had observed in Freud the eruption of unconscious religious factors. Evidently he wanted my aid in erecting a barrier against these threatening unconscious contents. The impression this conversation made upon me added to my confusion; until then I had not considered sexuality as a pre- and imperiled concept to which one must remain faithful. meant more to Freud than to other people. For him it was something to be religiously observed. In the face of such deep convictions one generally becomes shy and reticent. After a few stammering attempts on my part, the conversation soon came to an end. I was bewildered and embarrassed. I had the feeling that I had caught a glimpse of a new, unknown country from which swarms of new ideas flew to meet me. One thing was clear: Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had now cious Sexuality evidently constructed a dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God he had lost, he had substituted another compelling imthat of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domiage, neering, threatening, and morally ambivalent than the original whom one. Just as the psychically stronger agency is given "divine" or "daemonic" attributes, so the "sexual libido" took over the role of a deus dbsconditus, a hidden or concealed god. The ad- vantage of this transformation for Freud was, apparently, that he was able to regard the new numinous principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious taint. At bottom, however, the numinosity, that is, the psychological qualities of the two rationally incommensurable opposites Yahweh and sexuality remained the same. The name alone had changed, and with it, of course, the point of view: the lost god had now to be sought below, not above. But what difference does it make, one ultimately, to the stronger agency if it is called now by another? If psychology did not exist, but only concrete objects, the one would actually have been destroyed and replaced by the other. But in reality, that is to say, in psychoone whit the less of urgency, experience, there is not name and now by logical The problem still remains: how to overcome or escape our anxiety, bad conscience, guilt, compulsion, unconsciousness, and instinctuality. If we cannot do this from the bright, idealistic side, then perhaps we shall have better luck by approaching the problem from the dark, biological anxiety, compulsiveness, etc. side. Like flames suddenly flaring up, these thoughts darted through my mind. Much later, when I reflected upon Freud's character, they revealed their significance. There was one characteristic of his that preoccupied me above all: his bitterness. It had me at our first encounter, but it remained inexplicame until I was able to see it in connection with his attitude struck ble to sexuality. Although, for Freud, sexuality was undoubthis terminology and theory seemed to define a numinosurn, edly as a it biological function. It was only the emoexclusively he spoke of it that revealed the deeper with which tionality elements reverberating within him. Basically, he wanted to toward teach or so at least it seemed to me that, regarded from within, sexuality included spirituality and had an intrinsic meaning. But his concretistic terminology was too narrow to express this idea. He gave me the impression that at bottom he was working against his own goal and against himself; and there is, after all, no harsher bitterness than that of a person who is his own worst enemy. In his own words, he felt himself menaced by a "black tide of mud" he who more than anyone else had tried to let down his buckets into those black depths. Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually of sex, why this idea had taken such possession of him. He remained unaware that his ''monotony of interpretation" expressed a flight from himself, or from that other side of him which might perhaps be called mystical So long as he refused to acknowledge that side, he could never be reconciled with himself. He was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious, and did not know that every- Sigmund Freud thing which arises out of the unconscious has a top and a bottom, an inside and an outside. When we speak of the outside and that is what Freud did we are considering only half of the whole, with the result that a countereffect arises out of the unconscious. There was nothing to be done about this one-sidedness of some inner experience of his own might have his but then his intellect would have reduced any eyes; opened such experience to "mere sexuality" or "psychosexuality." He remained the victim of the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon. Freud's. Perhaps After that second conversation in Vienna I also understood Al- power hypothesis, to which I had hitherto paid scant attention. Like many sons, Adler had learned from his fred Adler's what the father said, but what he did. Instantly, the problem of love (Eros) and power came down upon me like a leaden weight. Freud himself had told me that he had never read Nietzsche; now I saw Freud's psychology as, so to "father" not speak, an adroit move on the part of intellectual history, compensating for Nietzsche's deification of the power principle. The problem had obviously to be rephrased not as "Freud versus Adler" but "Freud versus Nietzsche." It was therefore, I thought, more than a domestic quarrel in the domain of psychopathology. The idea dawned on me that Eros and the power drive might be in a sense like the dissident sons of a single father, or the products of a single motivating psychic force which manifested itself empirically in opposing forms, like positive and negative electrical charges, Eros as a patiens, the power drive an agens, and vice versa. Eros makes just as great demands upon the power drive as the latter upon the former. Where is the one drive without the other? On the one hand man succumbs to the drive; on the other hand, he tries to master it. Freud shows how the object succumbs to the drive, and Adler how man uses the drive in order to force his will upon the obin the hands of his destiny, had to creject. Nietzsche, helpless ate a "superman" for himself. Freud, I concluded, must himself as Memories, Dreams, Reflections be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma aere perennius like a relithat **Zarathustra" is the proclaimer gious numen. It is no secret of a gospel, and here was Freud also trying to outdo the church and to canonize a theory. To be sure, he did not do this too me of wanting to be a prophet. loudly; instead, he suspected He made his tragic claim and demolished it at the same time. That is how people usually behave with numinosities, and are true, in another untrue. rightly so, for in one respect they Numinous experience elevates and humiliates simultaneously. Freud had given somewhat more consideration to the psychological truth that sexuality is numinous both a god and a devil he would not have remained bound within the confines of a biological concept. And Nietzsche might not have been carried over the brink of the world by his intellectual excesses if he had only held more firmly to the foundations of human If existence. Wherever the psyche experience, there is is by a numinous by which one hangs set violently oscillating a danger that the thread man tumbles into an aban equally absolute negation, Nirdvandva (freedom from opposites) is the Orient's remedy for this. I have not forgotten that. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. The nvminosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error. Tout passe yesterday's truth is today's deception, and yesterday's false inference may be tomorrow's revelation. This is particularly so in psychological matters, of which, if truth were told, we still know very little. We are still a long way from understanding what it and signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small oh, so transitory consciousness has become aware of it. My conversation with Freud had shown me that he feared that the numinous light of his sexual insights might be extinw a '"black tide of mud. Thus a mythological situaguished by tion had arisen: the struggle between light and darkness. That explains its numinosity, and why Freud immediately fell back may be torn. Should that happen, one solute affirmation, another into 154 Sigmund Freud on his dogma as a religious means of defense/In my next book, 5 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, which dealt with the hero's struggle for freedom, Freud's curious reaction prompted me to investigate further this archetypal theme and its mytho- logical background. What with the sexual interpretation on the one hand and the power dogma on the other I was led, over the years, to a consideration of the problem of typology. It was necessary to drive of study the polarity and dynamics of the psyche. And I also embarked upon an investigation extending over several decades of "the black tide of mud of occultism" that is to say, I tried to understand the conscious and unconscious historical assumptions underlying our contemporary psychology. It interested me to hear Freud's views on precognition and on parapsychology in general. When I visited him in Vienna in 1909 I asked him what