CHAPTER ONE: The Problem of the Historical Jung
UNDERSTANDING THE HISTORY of ideas at play in the nineteenth century is a key to understanding the historical Jung -- a vision of Jung not provided in the posthumous "inner autobiography" of Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung (hereafter MDR) that forms the basis of almost every other biographical account of Jung to date.1 The search for the historical Jung is necessary if we are to even begin to understand the considerable impact of his life and work on the culture of the twentieth century. To trace the historical context of Jung's life is to also understand the paradoxes of Jungism, a movement that romanticizes and spiritualizes Jung's theories but has demonstrated little interest in documenting the historical facts of his life outside of the information provided in MDR.
MDR was primarily written and constructed by Aniela Jaffe, one of Jung's closest associates, and was originally to appear as a biography of Jung under her authorship with only "contributions by C. G. Jung." Jung personally wrote by hand only the first three chapters of the book, which concern his childhood, school days, and university years, and a final section entitled "Late Thoughts" that contains Jung's metaphysical speculations on the nature of God, life, and love. Although these comprise a third of MDR, they underwent further editing by Jaffe and others. A chapter that may or may not have been written directly by Jung concerning his intimate companion of forty years, Toni Wolff, was removed from the text early in the editorial process over objections by members of the Jung family while Jung was a semi-invalid in his last years. The book is therefore a product of discipleship.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections is unenlightening to those interested in history but compelling to those drawn to mystery. "The commonplace is so interwoven with the miraculous and the mythical that we can never be sure of our facts," Jung complains about the writings of St. Paul on Jesus, "and the most confusing thing of all is that [the disciple's writings] do not seem to have the slightest interest in Christ's existence as a concrete human being." [2] This criticism may be equally applied to MDR and its many imitators. [3] It is now apparent that like the Gospels, MDR, too, seems to be the work of many hands other than Jung's own, casting some doubt on its claim to be an autobiography. [4]
The sacralization of Jung's personality and ideas in MDR and by his disciples follows familiar patterns, repeated again and again for millennia, that are well known to the sociologist or historian of religion but less familiar to the historian of science or psychiatry. The biographical treatments of Jung more often than not follow a style derived from the pagan biographical tradition devoted to two related charismatic figures of late antiquity: the theos aner, or "divine man," and the ascetic holy man. [5]
Jung's dreams, visions, hunches, miraculous cures, psychokinetic and clairvoyant experiences, his musings on life after death and reincarnation, his experiences with the dead, his confrontation in the "Land of the Dead" (the collective unconscious) with gods (archetypes), his ascetic retreats to his stone tower at Bollingen, are all interwoven in MDR with the themes of his final theories -- those of the collective unconscious and the archetypes -- and therefore depict Jung's life as an exemplum of the theory. Jung thus becomes the only icon of complete individuation to be found in Jungian literature. In this respect MDR resembles -- in instructive intent and style -- a pagan biography of a theos aner such as the Life of Apollonius of Tyana of Philostratus (third century C.E.) or, to a lesser extent, the Christian hagiographies of the saints of the Middle Ages, [6] rather than a modern history of a "great man." [7]
The "divine man" of late antiquity was a charismatic individual, usually with a following of disciples who regarded him "as having a special relationship with the gods." [8] This special relationship allowed the divine man to perform miraculous feats of healing and divination. Apollonius of Tyana, for example, is depicted by Philostratus as having the gift of foreknowledge and could "receive and interpret divine communications in the form of dreams." [9] The divine man often performed wondrous cures, sometimes by exorcisms or by suggesting changes in diet or habits.
The ascetic "holy man" of late antiquity resembles the divine man in that he, too, worked miracles. Healing through ritualized exorcisms was also his stock and trade. "Above everything, the holy man is a man of power," notes classical scholar Peter Brown. [10] The holy man replaced the oracle as the social arbiter and healer of late antiquity. However, unlike the divine man who derived his power from occult sources or the gods, the holy man was empowered by his "close identification with the animal kingdom" [11] and with nature through his ascetic retreats to the desert. [12] In no small comparison to the Freudian and Jungian movements (among many others), some holy men collected hundreds of followers. Furthermore, like the founding of official training institutes for Freudian or Jungian analysts and the proliferation of Jungian social organizations largely comprised of the patients of Jungian analysts, Egypt of late antiquity (third to fifth centuries C.E.) "provides the first evidence of the formation of lay and clerical clientele around the holy man .... " [13] A further parallel to modern times can be found in the statement that "the lonely cells of the recluses of Egypt have been revealed, by the archaeologist, to have had well-furnished consulting rooms." [14]
Thus, with MDR we do not have the human history of a renowned physician and scientist, but instead the myth of a divine hero, a holy man, a saint, a life produced directly by essentially a religious community, and therefore a biography as "cult legend." The life of Jung becomes the basis of shared values and beliefs in the Jungian movement concerning the transcendent (the collective unconscious) and redemption (individuation). Yet, we now know how manufactured this image of Jung seems to be (admittedly the tragedy, unfortunately, of any celebrity biography). The cult legend of Jung that has been faithfully maintained after his death by the Jungian movement (especially its analytic elite) resembles the sociological phenomenon of "manufactured pseudocharisma" by which mass media is used by power-seeking elites to promote seductive fantasy images in order to secure and maintain economic and social rewards. [15] To get at the historical Jung one must find a way to reach the "pre-Jaffe" biographical material, a task comparable to trying to discern the true pre-Pauline facts concerning Jesus of Nazareth. [16]
CULT AND CHARISMA
The use of the word "cult" is always problematic. [17] The word has long been used to single out the Other in society: no one wants to ever think of themselves as participating in a cult, with its implications of fanaticism, irrationality, loss of individual will or decision-making ability ("zombification"), and of holding stigmatizing beliefs or unusual practices that set one outside conventional human society. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely the attraction of being outside society, and indeed of changing society from this outside perspective, that appeals to many who join spiritual, political, or other movements. Coming together on the outside often fuses people together through a strong bond of identity as outsiders, who nonetheless often sadly lament that they are misunderstood or not taken seriously by those who represent authority in conventional society. The bond is even stronger if the group coalesces around a charismatic leader with a certain totalizing worldview. While required to be physically present initially, after the passing of the charismatic leader only the legend or the image of the leader needs to be invoked for group identity. Such has been the case with those who have been attracted to the Jungian movement, starting with its first germinal "Jung cult" in Kusnacht-Zurich, and then in the multitude of regional cults that currently comprise the Jungian movement.
For my purposes here, I offer two different definitions of a cult. Following its use in the History of Religions School, I follow New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset's definition of a cult as simply "a community gathered for worship," however broadly defined; in the case of the Jungian movement, this is very much in the spirit of Carlyle's hero worship. [18] A contemporary psychiatrist here defines a charismatic group in a more psychological and especially sociological way, based on the work on "charismatic authority" by Max Weber (1864-1920):
A charismatic group consists of a dozen or so members, even hundreds or thousands. It is characterized by the following psychological elements: members (1) have a shared belief system, (2) sustain a high level of social cohesiveness, (3) are strongly influenced by the group's behavioral norms, and (4) impute charismatic (or sometimes divine) power to the group or its leadership. [19]
Jung, by all accounts, was the epitome of a charismatic leader. The power that a charismatic leader wields over his followers is perceived as coming from a supernatural force and Jung is reverently portrayed in these terms by Jungians. In his Religions-soziologie (Sociology of Religion) originally written between 1911 and 1913 but published posthumously, Weber observes that, "Already crystallized is the notion that certain beings are concealed 'behind' and are responsible for the activity of the charismatically endowed natural objects, artifacts, animals, or persons." [20] Thus, the charismatic leader is perceived by his followers as the source of universal powers that are focused and intensified like cosmic rays through the lens of his or her individual person. "It is primarily, though not exclusively, their extraordinary powers that have been designated by such special terms as 'mana,' 'orenda,' and the Iranian 'maga' .... We shall henceforth employ the term 'charisma' for such extraordinary powers." [21]
In 1928 Jung would introduce the concept of the "mana personality" to describe essentially the same concept. [22] However, the supernatural forces behind the mana personality are, of course, the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Although Weber's major work on the sociology of religion, in which he discusses the nature of the charismatic leader, was widely available in 1922, it is notable that Jung does not credit Weber for this concept, although he may have based his later concept of the "mana personality" on Weber's "charismatic leader." There is no record of direct contact between Weber and Jung, although Jung may have known Marianne Weber, Max's wife, through his participation as a guest speaker at the German Christian organization Die Kongener in the 1930s. [23] Jung certainly knew of Weber at least as early as 1908 through the "renegade psychoanalyst" Otto Gross, who had a disturbing impact on Weber and his immediate circle of intimates in Heidelberg around this time. (Gross's impact on Weber and Jung will be discussed in a later section.)
In addition to the numerous published accounts that attest to Jung's captivating influence as a pater pneumatikos ("spiritual father"), there are equally charismatic descriptions of him among the nearly two hundred interviews with persons who knew him that were collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Gene Nameche. Transcripts of these interviews comprise the Jung Oral Archives at the Countway Library of Medicine. In a filmed interview Lilliane Frey-Rohm, one of Jung's closest disciples in his last decades said, "When you met him in [the Psychological Club] or when you met him privately or in analysis, it was always a man interested in the, I would like to use the word, in the spiritual food. Always. And to the depths." [24] Judging by the literally hundreds of testimonials to his intuition, his extrasensory powers, indeed his personal charisma, Jung fed the multitude of his disciples in abundance.
Jung himself repeatedly reminded his readers that we are all born within a specific historical context and that this gives form to the specific conflicts played out in the individual psyche. Jung would agree with Weber's conviction that we are essentially "historical beings" (historische Individuen). [25] Who, then, is the historical Jung?
THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JUNG
It would be impossible to cover the details of Jung's life in depth as this is not a biographical work, but rather a discussion of Jung from the perspective of the history of ideas. For the historian attempting to distinguish the man from the myth, the task is an arduous one. Jung and his ideas are presented as eternal and therefore outside of history, with little or no priority given to historical accuracy or chronological sequence. Unlike Freud's comprehensive Standard Edition of his works, which follows a strict chronological arrangement, Jung's Collected Works are grouped "topically." As both the Freud and Jung collections are the products of discipleship, this very distinction may point to important differences in the core aims of these two movements: Freudians are interested in securing Freud's place in history as a major cultural figure, a scientific genius as cult-hero, whereas Jungians seem to place more value on preserving an image of Jung as a divinely inspired human vessel for dispensing the eternal truths of the spirit.
The most informative biographical material on Jung can be found in the work of historian of psychiatry Henri Ellenberger, and thus the reader is referred to Ellenberger's works. [26] Ellenberger's treatments are far superior to the relatively scant historical facts provided in the English edition of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, although the German edition does contain additional information on Jung's family.
Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, to Paul Achilles Jung (1842-1896)and Emilie Preiswerk (1848-1923). Ironically, each parent was the thirteenth child in bourgeois families that had undergone considerable financial loss. Hence, they keenly felt the sting of aristocratic decline. The male sides of Jung's family contain an abundance of Protestant ministers and theologians (some with Pietist leanings), physicians, and scholars in classical (Greek and Roman) and Oriental (Hebrew and Arabic) languages and cultures.
"Religion of the heart"
Religion mated with German nationalism in the eighteenth century and produced a fever in the people called Pietism. Schleiermacher had been visited by this fever in his youth, and although he forged his own path as a theologian and philosopher, he said his ideas remained closest to this "religion of the heart." To Schleiermacher, the highest form of religion was an "intuition" (Anschauung) of the "Whole," an immediate experience of every particular as part of a whole, of every finite thing as a representation of the infinite. This was the perfect theology for an age of nature-obsessed Romanticism, and at times Schleiermacher's rhetoric, adorned with organic metaphors of the whole derived from nature, shaded into pantheism and mysticism. By 1817, he most certainly infected Karl Jung with it, as he did that entire generation of young patriots through his sermons, his writings, and especially his revisions of the Reformed Protestant liturgy, making it more simple, festive, and Volkish. Additionally, in the decade before he met Jung, he had published translations of Plato and, by his own admission, had become quite influenced by Platonism. This, too, must be remembered when we fantasize about what the older spiritual adviser imparted to the enthusiastic young convert.
German Pietism was loosely related to contemporaneous religious movements, such as Quakerism and enthusiastic Methodism in England and America and Quietism and Jansenism in France. Pietism, however, was to play a key role in developing Volkish self-consciousness and a sense of nation in the politically fragmented German lands. In the spirit of Luther, Pietism was born of disgust with orthodoxies, dogmas, and church hierarchies in the traditional Protestant denominations, making it a form of radical Lutheranism. Pietists dared to question authority and to be suspicious of foreign interpreters of Christianity. They called it a Herzensreligion, a "religion of the heart," a spiritual movement that emphasized feeling, intuition, inwardness, and a personal experience of God. [15] The function of thinking, indeed reason itself, was disparaged and could not be trusted. To experience God, the intellect must be sacrificed. (For example, according to Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a prominent eighteenth-century Pietist who influenced Schleiermacher and twentieth-century figures Rudolph Otto and Hermann Hesse, only atheists attempted to comprehend God with their mind; the True sought revelation.)
Pietists' mystical enthusiasm is reflected in some of their favorite incendiary metaphors for their ecstatic experiences. It was the fire of the Holy Spirit that must burn within; indeed, it was often said that "the heart must burn." They emphasized the burning experience of "Christ within us" instead of the inanimate, automatic belief in the dogma of a "Christ for us."Solomon decorated his Twelve Masters with a sash on which was embroidered a flaming heart, as a token of ardent love among Brethren.
-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite[Parsifal] Amfortas! The wound! The wound! It burns here in my side! Ah! The cry! From the heart's depths it shrieketh up to me! Poor wretch! Ah, miserable! I saw the wound to bleed: -- now it doth bleed in me! -- Here! No! 'Tis not the wound. May his blood stream forth herein! Here! In the heart, 'mid flames!
-- Interpretation of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, directed by Hans-Jurgen Syberber
Such subtle distinctions had profound implications for German nationalism, for the belief arose in the feeling of group identity bound by common inner experience, a mystical blood-union of necessity, rather than as something external existing for an individual. Hence, the Pietist emphasis on service to others as a method of serving God.
Prussia, the most absolutist of the many German political entities, welcomed the Pietists to Berlin. Attracted to Pietism's rejection of the Lutheran clerical hierarchy -- which threatened the overriding legitimacy of the state -- the eighteenth-century rulers of Prussia adopted Pietism's religious philosophy and offered sanctuary to many of its exiled leaders. As populist movements, Pietism and pan-German nationalism were as threatening to the royal rulers of the dozens of German states as to Lutheran clerics, for they challenged the political status quo. Prussia, however, as the strongest of the German states, already presaged its manifest destiny as the unifier of Germany, and so its short-term goals coincided with those of such movements. Nicholas Boyle, one of Goethe's biographers, described the immense significance of this convergence of affinities for the next two centuries of German religious life and political history:
The particular feature of Pietism which makes it of interest to us is its natural affinity for state absolutism. A religion which concentrates to the point of anxiety, not to say hypochondria, on those inner emotions, whether of dryness or abundance, of despair or of confident love of God, from which the individual may deduce the state of his immortal soul; a religion whose members meet for preference not publicly, but privately in conventicles gathered round a charismatic personality who may well not be an ordained minister; a religion who disregards all earthly (and especially all ecclesiastical) differentiation of rank, and sees its proper role in the visible world in charitable activity as nearly as possible harmonious with the prevailing order ... such a religion was tailor-made for a state system in which all, regardless of rank, were to be equally servants of the one purpose; in which antiquated rights and differentiae were to be abolished; and in which ecclesiastical opposition was particularly unwelcome, whether it came from assertive prelates or from vociferous enthusiasts unable to keep their religious lives to themselves.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, German nationalism had become so intertwined with Pietism that the literature of the time blurs distinctions between inner and outer Fatherlands. The "internalized Kingdom of Heaven" became identical with the spiritual soil of the German ancestors, a Teutonic "Land of the Dead." In these patriotic religious tracts the sacrificial deaths of Teutonic heroes such as Arminius (Hermann the German, who defeated the Romans in the Teutoberg forest) and the mythic Siegfried are compared to the crucifixion of Christ, thus equating pagan and Christian saviors. By the early 1800s, this identity became even more explicit. To Ernst Moritz Arndt, the subjective experience of the "Christ within" was reframed in German Volkish metaphors. In his 1816 pamphlet Zur Befreiung Deutschlands ("On the Liberation of Germany"), Arndt urged Germans, "Enshrine in your hearts the German God and German virtue." They did. By the end of the nineteenth century the German God had reawakened and was moving to reclaim his throne after a thousand-year interregnum.
The primary literature of Pietism consisted of diaries and autobiographies, most driven by the psychological turn inward so valued as the path to reaching the kingdom of God. These confessional texts emphasize the spiritual evolution of the diarist. Each account peaks dramatically with the description of what Schleiermacher called the "secret moment," the tremendous subjective experience that completely changed the life course of an individual and became the central, vivid milestone of his or her faith. This experience was known as the Wiedergeburt, the "rebirth" or "regeneration." Sometimes this experience was preceded or accompanied by visions. Several of the more famous texts, such as the autobiography of Heinrich Jung-Stilling, became part of the canon read by educated nineteenth-century Germans.
Several of these spiritual autobiographies were in the library in C. G. Jung's household when he was growing up, and he cites some of them (such as the work of Jung-Stilling) in MDR and in his seminars. While MDR is highly unlike usual biographies or autobiographies, its story of Jung's spiritual journey is similar in many ways to the Wiedergeburt testimonies of the Pietists. MDR is indeed the story of Jung's rebirth, but the book diverges from the tradition in one uncanny respect: Rather than recording the renewal of Jung's faith as a "born-again Christian," MDR is a remarkable confession of Jung's pagan regeneration.
-- The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, by Richard Noll
Paul Jung's doctorate in theology made him a specialist in all of these areas and Jung's early homes contained scholarly books and images relating to antiquity. Not much is known of the women on the paternal side of the family, but the women on the maternal side are characterized by family legends of spiritualist and clairvoyant abilities.
Several aspects of Jung's early family matrix need to be addressed as they are often understated (sometimes deliberately) in biographical treatments of Jung.
First is the fact of Jung's essential German identity. Biographical accounts often accentuate his Swiss nationality, his Swiss patriotism, and so forth. Jung was indeed a proud and devoted citizen of democratically neutral Switzerland. Historically, most Swiss Germans resisted the nineteenth-century Pan-German unification movement so forcefully promoted (and eventually accomplished) by the Prussians, although Pan-Germanism among the Swiss Germans never completely died out as a source of internal Swiss conflict. The tragedy of German imperialism (the Franco-Prussian War, the two World Wars) led most "neutral" Swiss to downplay their Germanness, and Jung was no exception. In terms of politics and nationality Jung was Swiss, and he dissociated himself from the Germans and Austrians. This was especially true in the late 1930s when Jung's association with individuals and organizations strongly linked to Nazi Germany led to charges that he was a Nazi sympathizer; he and his disciples tried to dispel this image by fervently insisting that Jung was simply a neutral Swiss physician with only humanitarian concerns. [27]
Culturally and biologically, however, Jung identified very strongly with his German roots, or, more specifically, his Germanic ancestors. His famous paternal grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung the Elder (1794-1864) was a German Catholic physician, playwright, scientist, and eventually rector of Basel University (founded in 1460 by Pope Pius II). Jung the Elder was converted to Protestantism by none other than Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the great Protestant theologian who emphasized the role of feeling in the experience of God and who had a profound effect on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic movement.
Additionally, Jung the Elder was alleged to be the illegitimate child of Goethe, the epitome of the German genius and Nietzsche's model of an ubermensch. [28] This family fable was one that Jung told time and time again throughout his life, as he was apparently quite smitten with the romantic idea that he was a direct descendant of the genius Goethe. Therefore, in an age of intense concern over heredity, it was quite apparent to him that the only fruit of hereditary genius in the Jung family's tree was on the German side, not the Swiss. In fact, the maternal side of the family, which boasted multiple generations of Protestant Swiss stock, contained significant evidence of hereditary degeneration. Ellenberger tells us, "In those days considerable stress was put on heredity, and the whole maternal side of the family appeared to be tainted with insanity." [29]
In a 1928 book review of Das Spektrum Europas (The Spectrum of Europe) by Count Hermann Keyserling, in which Jung is mentioned as a "model Swiss," Jung good-naturedly backs away from this accolade by noting, "I have been Swiss for some five hundred years only on my mother's side, but on my father's side for only one hundred and six years. I must therefore beg the reader to see my 'relatively Swiss' attitude as the result of my little more than a hundred-year-old Swiss mentality." [30] Jung obviously puts greater emphasis on his paternal roots and, tellingly, does not need to emphasize that his greater ancestral influences are specifically from Germany.
Perhaps another way to approach this problem is through the conceptual schema of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), who distinguishes between "Civilization" and "Culture" in his own vitalistic Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy). For Jung, his experience of Civilization, the Weberian "iron cage" that was artificially imposed from without, was Swiss and Christian, but his Culture was Germanic. According to Spengler, it is only "Culture" that engenders and reflects soul. [31] Jung's soul was in this sense, therefore, deeply Germanic.
As is evident in the writings and letters of his first sixty years, Jung undoubtedly felt himself to be part of the community of Germanic Volk united in its faith in a field of life-energy, with all of its accompanying transcendent spirituality and pantheistic beliefs. In fact, in retrospect, his 1911-1912 reconceptualization of the libido as a generalized life force of psychic energy (which punctuated his break with Freud), his lifelong use of the anthropological concept of the magical bond between self and other (whether another individual or nature) known as the participation mystique, and his later (1946) speculations about kinship libido, [32] can each be interpreted as a reformulation of the volkisch belief in the cosmic "life force" linking each individual German "with every other member of the Volk in a common feeling of belonging, in a shared emotional experience." [33] The concept of transference itself takes on volkisch mystical proportions in Jung's hands after he liberated it from its mesmerist and Freudian traditions by claiming that one can project transpersonal (archetypal) images onto another, thus uniting in a mystical union the cosmic fate of both the projector and the "hook" that is projected upon. This was eventually how Jung psychologized the seemingly mystical "transference" relationship between Hitler and the German masses. In addition, Jung's frequent expositions on the influence of geography -- of how the very earth and one's natural environment were formative influences on the soul (and even on physiognomy!) through the directing characteristics of the soil (Bodenbeschaffenheit) -- also comes from this same nineteenth-century Germanic concept of Volk. [34]
But arguing that Jung undoubtedly considered himself a cell within the living body of the Volk and wrote from a volkisch perspective does not imply that he was a fascist, Nazi, or even an anti-Semite -- although evidence for this latter charge is present in many of Jung's private statements and covert actions. Whereas they may be confirmation of Jung's decidedly racialist thinking, which dominated intellectual discourse at the time, they may not necessarily be conclusive evidence of racism as we currently think of it. We are blinded by history and Hitler in this regard. Instead, we should remember that in German Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as historian Peter Gay observes, "grand old words like Volk and Reich and Geist were now given new meaning by this great crusade for Kultur. These are not, as they might seem to be, imaginary effusions; they are the words of Thomas Mann and Friedrich Gundolf, and there were thousands of others, young and old, who sounded precisely like them." [35]
The learning of aggressive attitudes is facilitated when respected and glorified figures, for example, professional athletes, movie stars, and political figures, engage in various kinds of aggressive behavior for which they reap many rewards. It is easy for a youngster to justify aggressive solutions to problems by referring to norms for such behavior promulgated by the media and others (Huesmann et al., 1984).
-- Stability of Aggression Over Time and Generations, by L. Rowell Huesmann and Leonard D. Eron
A second aspect of Jung's background that is often understated is his lifelong experience of being part of the elite. Due to the fame of C. G. Jung the Elder, the Jung family was quite well regarded in Basel where Jung grew up and attended Gymnasium (1886-1895) and the medical school at Basel University (1895- 1900). Basel was still a relatively small city during this time, and the social networks of the Protestant ministry caste (Pfarrerstand) made it seem even smaller. [36] The halo of Jung the Elder extended to his grandson in everyday social interactions once Jung the Elder's paternity was revealed.
Jung's father, Paul, lived out his life as a country minister in Switzerland. Although this may seem to be a modest role from our point of view, as Ellenberger reminds us, "The presbytery (Pfarrhaus) has been called 'one of the germinal cells of German culture.'" [37] In nineteenth-century German Europe the Pfarrerstand was a social caste of the best and the brightest. Often only the most gifted students were selected for theological training in German, Swiss, and Austrian universities, and for the most part the German cultural intelligentsia were created from the ranks of the Pfarrerstand. They served as the Protestant "old nobility," a bulwark against barbarism, paganism, occultism, and their combined threat in "Papist" Roman Catholicism. (Perhaps as a product of this upbringing, Jung could not bring himself to enter a Catholic church without fear and anxiety until he was a grown man in his thirties, and throughout his life he could never visit Rome despite his many trips to Italy.) [38] Families in this caste tended to intermarry (as in the case of Jung's parents, his mother was the daughter of a prominent Swiss Protestant minister), and they formed a cultural elite that one historian has called "the German Mandarins." [39]
Jung grew up well aware of his status within this elite and, for the first half of his life, generally followed bourgeois paths commensurate with it (becoming a physician, a university professor, a husband and father, etc.). Throughout his life Jung demonstrated a pattern of participating in elites and then, within a short time, rising to the main leadership positions within them and thereby often assuming a dominating influence. He did this within his university fraternity, the 120-member Zofingia fraternity (whose motto was Patriae, amicitiae, litteris, "For fatherland, friendship, and literature" -- reflecting its goal of promoting higher Pan-Germanic culture, but with a typically Swiss tolerance of divergent political associations), [40] by becoming president in 1897, only two years after entering it; at the Burgholzli hospital, where he became second in command under Eugen Bleuler in 1905, only five years after joining its large psychiatric staff; in the psychoanalytic movement, becoming second only to Freud in importance within a year of meeting him in 1907, and serving as the First President of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910-1914); and then (beginning circa 1912-1913) leading his own small group that slowly grew into a large cultural movement. Thus Jung's primary leadership experiences came from excelling in small elite groups, highly cohesive and arguably elitist in philosophy, each with specific ideals and aims to transform society at large. Nietzschean ideals of a new nobility were therefore grounded in Jung's personal and practical experience.
Perhaps reflecting on his own life in 1925, one month from his fiftieth birthday, Jung attributes the surprising appearance of leadership qualities in some individuals as possible evidence of a quasi-spiritualist, quasi-biological idea that he considered but never developed: ancestor possession -- that is, literally, spiritual possession by one's ancestors. "Another way of putting these ideas of ancestor possession would be that these autonomous complexes exist in the mind as Mendelian units, which are passed on from generation to generation intact, and are unaffected by the life of the individual." [41] Jung may be thinking of his own latent heredity of German genius:
Let us say that this imaginary normal man we are talking about gets into a responsible position where he wields much power. He himself was never made to be a leader, but among his inherited units there is the figure of such a leader, or the possibility of it. That unit now takes possession of him, and from that time on he has a different character. God knows what has become of him, it is really as though he had lost himself and the ancestral unit had taken over and devoured him. [42]
Hence, matter was always alive for Jung, and in his view our bodies pulse with the emotions and abilities of our racial forefathers. Despite his occasional efforts to distance himself from explicit support of vitalism in his scientific writings after 1916, in order to make his ideas more palatable to a professional readership that had become increasingly skeptical of vitalism and supportive of materialism, vitalistic metaphors and ideas always remained a significant part of his work.
A third relevant but often understated aspect of Jung's early years is the dominance of classical Greco-Roman culture in the educational philosophy and in the schools of German Europe of this era. This "tyranny of Greece over Germany," as Eliza Marian Butler termed it, began essentially with the rediscovery of the aesthetic wonders of the art and literature of pagan antiquity -- particularly Greece -- by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). [43] Goethe called it Winckelmann's heroic Gewahrwerden der griechischen Kunst, his "finding" of Greek art. The image of ancient Greece as an idyllic, serene, rational, golden age of truth and beauty painted by Winckelmann in his works dominated German culture until the end of the nineteenth century. Ancient Greece was pure, never vulgar, the birthplace of genius, not degeneracy, and therefore it became an ideal that German culture sought to emulate. Winckelmann's most famous statement accentuates the rational over the irrational, the Apollonian over the Dionysian, in his idealization of ancient Greece:
The universal, dominant characteristic of Greek masterpieces, finally, is noble simplicity and serene greatness in the pose as well as in the expression. The depths of the sea are always calm, however wild and stormy the surface; and in the same way the expression in Greek figures reveals greatness and composure of soul in the throes of whatever passions. [44]
Winckelmann's work became the primary source of inspiration for the art and literature of German Romanticism. Greek mythology became a dominating point of reference in the works of literary figures of German high culture, especially in the works of Goethe. Little needs to be said here about Goethe's place in European culture: he was, by all respects, an unusually gifted creative genius who influenced every cultural aspect of his age. Goethe furthermore infused incipient German Hellenism with the first sparks of sensuousness and passion, of Sturm und Drang, the first echoes of the subsequent Dionysian torrent of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and especially the later fin-de-siecle Hellenism of the classical philologist Nietzsche, who forced a notable cultural shift away from Winckelmann's Apollonian cult of serenity and reason. [45] Goethe's Faust in particular became the sacred text of Germanic culture (Jung's first of many readings was at age fifteen), and was memorized and recited by generation after generation of children in German schools.46 To even begin to understand the Goethe they were memorizing, these young students had to be given a smattering of basic Greek mythology first.
Through Goethe and the German Romantics, and through the widespread adoption of the teaching of Latin and Greek in secondary schools and universities, almost everyone had some familiarity with Greco-Roman mythology and culture, or could cite passages from pagan authors that would be commonly recognized. [47] Such widespread familiarity among persons at many levels of society in German Europe could seem quite mystifying to British or American visitors. British psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Ernest Jones later confessed with no small embarrassment that what struck him most about his initial contacts with first Jung in 1907, then Freud and his Viennese disciples in 1908, was their frequent quoting of "Latin and Greek passages by memory during their conversations and being astonished at my blank response." [48]
Jung's early life, then, is characterized by an immersion in the culture and mythology of Greek, Roman, and Germanic antiquity; by participation in cultural and spiritual elites promoting specific ideas about ways to transform culture; and by exceptionally important hereditarian concerns. Focusing on heredity and its consequences in the nineteenth century served as a scientific form of fantasizing about the dead and their influence on the present. These specific concerns dominated the next phase of Jung's life, a fin-de-siecle period that, Jung claimed in 1925, "contains the origin of all my ideas." [49]
