Re: The Tavistock Lectures: On the Theory and Practice of An
Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:54 am
Part 2 of 2
Discussion
Dr. David Yellowlees:
[273] I need hardly mention that I shall not attempt to discuss anything that has been said tonight. We are all glad Professor Jung has given us such an extraordinarily fascinating account of his own views, rather than spend time on controversial matters. But I think some of us would be grateful if he would recognize that we approach psychology and psychotherapy along lines not exclusively Freudian perhaps, but in accordance with certain fundamental principles with which Freud’s name is associated, though he may not have originated them. We are very grateful that Professor Jung has given us what we believe to be a wider view. Some of us prefer that view, and perhaps the Freudians would be able to tell us why. But the question was raised the other night as to the relationship between the concept of the unconscious which Professor Jung has been laying before us and Freud’s concept of it, and I think if Professor Jung will be so good he could help us a little in that direction. I know quite well I may be misinterpreting him, but the impression I got on Tuesday night was almost as if he had said that he was dealing with facts and Freud with theories. He knows as well as I do that this bald statement really requires some amplification and I wish he could tell us, for example, what we ought to do from a therapeutic point of view when faced with a patient who produces spontaneously what I would call Freudian material, and how far we should regard Freudian theories simply as theories in view of the evidence which can be proved by such material as infantile fixation of the libido—oral, anal, phallic, and so on. If Professor Jung would say a little to give us some kind of correlation we would be very grateful.
Professor Jung:
[274] I told you at the beginning that I do not want to be critical. I just want to give you a point of view of my own, of how I envisage psychological material, and I suppose that when you have heard what I have to contribute you will be able to make up your minds about these questions, and how much of Freud, how much of Adler, or myself, or I do not know whom, you will want to follow. If you want me to elucidate the question of the connection with Freud, I am quite glad to do it. I started out entirely on Freud’s lines. I was even considered to be his best disciple. I was on excellent terms with him until I had the idea that certain things are symbolical. Freud would not agree to this, and he identified his method with the theory and the theory with the method. That is impossible, you cannot identify a method with science. I said that in view of these things I could not keep on publishing the Jahrbuch15 and I withdrew.
[275] But I am perfectly well aware of the merits of Freud and I do not want to diminish them. I know that what Freud says agrees with many people, and I assume that these people have exactly the kind of psychology that he describes. Adler, who has entirely different views, also has a large following, and I am convinced that many people have an Adlerian psychology. I too have a following—not so large as Freud’s—and it consists presumably of people who have my psychology. I consider my contribution to psychology to be my subjective confession. It is my personal psychology, my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do. I admit that I see things in such and such a way. But I expect Freud and Adler to do the same and confess that their ideas are their subjective point of view. So far as we admit our personal prejudice, we are really contributing towards an objective psychology. We cannot help being prejudiced by our ancestors, who want to look at things in a certain way, and so we instinctively have certain points of view. It would be neurotic if I saw things in another way than my instinct tells me to do; my snake, as the primitives say, would be all against me. When Freud said certain things, my snake did not agree. And I take the route that my snake prescribes, because that is good for me. But I have patients with whom I have to make a Freudian analysis and go into all the details which Freud has correctly described. I have other cases that force me to an Adlerian point of view, because they have a power complex. People who have the capacity to adapt and are successful are more inclined to have a Freudian psychology, because a man in that position is looking for the gratification of his desires, while the man who has not been successful has no time to think about desires. He has only one desire—to succeed, and he will have an Adlerian psychology, because a man who always falls into the second place will develop a power complex.
[276] I have no power complex in that sense because I have been fairly successful and in nearly every respect I have been able to adapt. If the whole world disagrees with me it is perfectly indifferent to me. I have a perfectly good place in Switzerland, I enjoy myself, and if nobody enjoys my books I enjoy them. I know nothing better than being in my library, and if I make discoveries in my books, that is wonderful. I cannot say I have a Freudian psychology because I never had such difficulties in relation to desires. As a boy I lived in the country and took things very naturally, and the natural and unnatural things of which Freud speaks were not interesting to me. To talk of an incest complex just bores me to tears. But I know exactly how I could make myself neurotic: if I said or believed something that is not myself. I say what I see, and if somebody agrees with me it pleases me and if nobody agrees it is indifferent to me. I can join neither the Adlerian nor the Freudian confession. I can agree only with the Jungian confession because I see things that way even if there is not a single person on earth who shares my views. The only thing I hope for is to give you some interesting ideas and let you see how I tackle things.
[277] It is always interesting to me to see a craftsman at work. His skill makes the charm of a craft. Psychotherapy is a craft and I deal in my individual way—a very humble way with nothing particular to show— with the things I have to do. Not that I believe for a moment that I am absolutely right. Nobody is absolutely right in psychological matters. Never forget that in psychology the means by which you judge and observe the psyche is the psyche itself. Have you ever heard of a hammer beating itself? In psychology the observer is the observed. The psyche is not only the object but also the subject of our science. So you see, it is a vicious circle and we have to be very modest. The best we can expect in psychology is that everybody puts his cards on the table and admits: “I handle things in such and such a way, and this is how I see them.” Then we can compare notes.
[278] I have always compared notes with Freud and Adler. Three books have been written by pupils of mine who tried to give a synopsis of the three points of view.16 You have never heard this from the other side. That is our Swiss temperament. We are liberal and we try to see things side by side, together. From my point of view the best thing is to say that obviously there are thousands of people who have a Freudian psychology and thousands who have an Adlerian psychology. Some seek gratification of desire and some others fulfilment of power and yet others want to see the world as it is and leave things in peace. We do not want to change anything. The world is good as it is.
[279] There are many different psychologies in existence. A certain American university, year after year, issues a volume of the psychologies of 1934, 1935, and so on. There is a total chaos in psychology, so do not be so frightfully serious about psychological theories. Psychology is not a religious creed but a point of view, and when we are human about it we may be able to understand each other. I admit that some people have sexual trouble and others have other troubles. I have chiefly other troubles. You now have an idea of how I look at things. My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity. It would be so much simpler if I knew nothing; but I know too much, through my ancestors and my own education. Other people are not worried by such problems, they do not care about the historical burdens Christianity has heaped upon us. But there are people who are concerned with the great battle between the present and the past or the future. It is a tremendous human problem. Certain people make history and others build a little house in the suburbs. Mussolini’s case is not settled by saying he has a power complex. He is concerned with politics, and that is his life and death. The world is huge and there is not one theory only to explain everything.
[280] To Freud the unconscious is chiefly a receptacle for things repressed. He looks at it from the corner of the nursery. To me it is a vast historical storehouse. I acknowledge I have a nursery too, but it is small in comparison with the vast spaces of history which were more interesting to me from childhood than the nursery. There are many people like myself, I am optimistic in that respect. Once I thought there were no people like myself; I was afraid it was megalomania to think as I did. Then I found many people who fitted in with my point of view, and I was satisfied that I represented perhaps a minority of people whose basic psychological facts are expressed more or less happily by my formulation, and when you get these people under analysis you will find they do not agree with Freud’s or Adler’s point of view, but with mine. I have been reproached for my naïveté. When I am not sure about a patient I give him books by Freud and Adler and say, “Make your choice,” in the hope that we are going on the right track. Sometimes we are on the wrong track. As a rule, people who have reached a certain maturity and who are philosophically minded and fairly successful in the world and not too neurotic, agree with my point of view. But you must not conclude from what I present to you that I always lay my cards on the table and tell the patient all I mention here. Time would not allow me to go into all those details of interpretation. But a few cases need to acquire a great amount of knowledge and are grateful when they see a way to enlarge their point of view.
[281] I cannot say where I could find common ground with Freud when he calls a certain part of the unconscious the Id. Why give it such a funny name? It is the unconscious and that is something we do not know. Why call it the Id? Of course the difference of temperament produces a different outlook. I never could bring myself to be so frightfully interested in these sex cases. They do exist, there are people with a neurotic sex life and you have to talk sex stuff with them until they get sick of it and you get out of that boredom. Naturally, with my temperamental attitude, I hope to goodness we shall get through with the stuff as quickly as possible. It is neurotic stuff and no reasonable normal person talks of it for any length of time. It is not natural to dwell on such matters. Primitives are very reticent about them. They allude to sexual intercourse by a word that is equivalent to “hush.” Sexual things are taboo to them, as they really are to us if we are natural. But taboo things and places are always apt to be the receptacle for all sorts of projections. And so very often the real problem is not to be found there at all. Many people make unnecessary difficulties about sex when their actual troubles are of quite a different nature.
[282] Once a young man came to me with a compulsion neurosis. He brought me a manuscript of his of a hundred and forty pages, giving a complete Freudian analysis of his case. It was quite perfect according to the rules, it could have been published in the Jahrbuch. He said: “Will you read this and tell me why I am not cured although I made a complete psychoanalysis?” I said: “So you have, and I do not understand it either. You ought to be cured according to all the rules of the art, but when you say you are not cured I have to believe you.” He repeated: “Why am I not cured, having a complete insight into the structure of my neurosis?” I said: “I cannot criticize your thesis. The whole thing is marvellously well demonstrated. There remains only one, perhaps quite foolish, question: you do not mention where you come from and who your parents are. You say you spent last winter on the Riviera and the summer in St. Moritz. Were you very careful in the choice of your parents?” “Not at all.” “You have an excellent business and are making a good deal of money?” “No, I cannot make money.” “Then you have a big fortune from an uncle?” “No.” “Then where does the money come from?” He replied: “I have a certain arrangement. I have a friend who gives me the money.” I said: “It must be a wonderful friend,” and he replied, “It is a woman.” She was much older than himself, aged thirty-six, a teacher in an elementary school with a small salary, who, as an elderly spinster, fell in love with the fellow who was twenty-eight. She lived on bread and milk so that he could spend his winter on the Riviera and his summer in St. Moritz. I said: “And you ask why you are ill!” He said: “Oh, you have a moralistic point of view; that is not scientific.” I said: “The money in your pocket is the money of the woman you cheat.” He said, “No, we agreed upon it. I had a serious talk with her and it is not a matter for discussion that I get the money from her.” I said: “You are pretending to yourself that it is not her money, but you live by it, and that is immoral. That is the cause of your compulsion neurosis. It is a compensation and a punishment for an immoral attitude.” An utterly unscientific point of view, of course, but it is my conviction that he deserves his compulsion neurosis and will have it to the last day of his life if he behaves like a pig.
Dr. T. A. Ross:
[283] Did not that come out in the analysis?
Professor Jung:
[284] He went right away like a god and thought: “Dr. Jung is only a moralist, not a scientist. Anybody else would have been impressed by the interesting case instead of looking for simple things.” He commits a crime and steals the savings of a lifetime from an honest woman in order to be able to have a good time. That fellow belongs in gaol, and his compulsion neurosis provides it for him all right.
Dr. P. W. L. Camps:
[285] I am a humble general practitioner, not a psychologist, and may be labelled as a suburban villa. I am an outsider in this place. The first night I thought I had no right to be here; the second night I was here again; the third night I was glad to be here; and the fourth night I am in a maze of mythology.
[286] I would like to ask something about last night. We were sent away with the idea that perfection was most undesirable and completion the end and aim of existence. I slept soundly last night but I felt that I had had an ethical shock. Perhaps I am not gifted with much intellect and it was an intellectual shock too. Professor Jung declares himself a determinist or fatalist. After he had analysed a young man who went away disappointed and then went to bits, Professor Jung felt it was only right that he should go to bits. You as psychologists, I take it, are endeavouring to cure people, and you have a purpose in life, not merely to enjoy your interests, whether it be mythology or the study of human nature. You want to get at the bottom of human nature and try to build it up to something better.
[287] I listened with the greatest interest to Professor Jung’s simple English terms and rejoiced in them. I have been confounded with all this new terminology. To hear of our sensation and thinking and feeling and intuition—to which possibly an X may be added for something else—was most illuminating to me as an ordinary individual.
[288] But I feel that we did not hear where the conscious or rather where the unconscious of the child develops. I fear that we did not hear enough about children. I should like to ask Professor Jung where the unconscious in the child does become the conscious.
[289] I should also like to know whether we are not misled some what by this multitude of diagrams, barriers, Egos, and Ids, and other things I have seen portrayed; whether we could not improve on these diagrams by having a gradation of stages.
[290] As Professor Jung has pointed out, we have inherited faces and eyes and ears and there are a multitude of faces and in psychology there are a multitude of types also. Is it not reasonable to suppose that there is an enormous possibility of varieties planted on that inheritance, that they are a sort of mesh, a sieve as it were, that will receive impressions and select them in the unconscious years of early life and reach through into consciousness later? I should like to ask Professor Jung whether these thoughts have crossed the mind of an eminent psychologist such as he is— the very greatest psychologist in my view—tonight?
Professor Jung:
[291] After that severe reproach for immorality I owe an explanation of my cynical remarks of yesterday. I am not as bad as all that. I naturally try to do my best for my patients, but in psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one’s own will and conviction on the patient. We have to give him a certain amount of freedom. You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. You cannot save certain people from committing terrible nonsense because it is in their grain. If I take it away they have no merit. We only gain merit and psychological development by accepting ourselves as we are and by being serious enough to live the lives we are trusted with. Our sins and errors and mistakes are necessary to us, otherwise we are deprived of the most precious incentives to development. When a man goes away, having heard something which might have changed his mind, and does not pay attention, I do not call him back. You may accuse me of being unchristian, but I do not care. I am on the side of nature. The old Chinese Book of Wisdom says: “The Master says it once.” He does not run after people, it is no good. Those who are meant to hear will understand, and those who are not meant to understand will not hear.
[292] I was under the impression that my audience consisted chiefly of psychotherapists. If I had known that medical men were present I would have expressed myself more civilly. But psychotherapists will understand. Freud—to quote the master’s own words—says it is not good to try to cure at all costs. He often repeated that to me, and he is right.
[293] Psychological truths are two-edged, and whatever I say can be used in such a way that it can work the greatest evil, the greatest devastation and nonsense. There is not one statement I have made which has not been twisted into its opposite. So I do not insist on any statement. You can take it, but if you do not take it, all right. You may perhaps blame me for that, but I trust that there is a will to live in everybody which will help them to choose the thing that is right for them. When I am treating a man I must be exceedingly careful not to knock him down with my views or my personality, because he has to fight his lonely fight through life and he must be able to trust in his perhaps very incomplete armour and in his own perhaps very imperfect aim. When I say, “That is not good and should be better,” I deprive him of courage. He must plough his field with a plough that is not good perhaps: mine may be better, but what good is it to him? He has not got my plough. I have it and he cannot borrow it; he must use his own perhaps very incomplete tools and has to work with his own inherited capacities, whatever they are. I help him of course, I may say for instance: “Your thinking is perfectly good, but perhaps in another respect you could improve.” If he does not want to hear it, I shall not insist because I do not want to make him deviate.
Dr. Marion Mackenzie:
[294] In the same way that the rich young man was not called back but went away sorrowful?
Professor Jung:
[295] Yes, it is the same technique. If I were to say to a man, “You should not go away.” he would never come back. I have to say, “Have your own way.” Then he will trust me.
[296] As to the question about children, there has been in the last decades such a noise about children that I often scratch my head at a meeting and say: “Are they all midwives and nurses?” Does not the world consist chiefly of parents and grandparents? The adults have the problems. Leave the poor children alone. I get the mother by the ears and not the child. The parents make the neuroses of children.
[297] It is certainly interesting to make researches into the development of consciousness. The beginning of consciousness is a fluid condition, and you cannot say when the child has become really conscious and when it has not yet. But that belongs to an entirely different chapter: the psychology of the ages. There is a psychology of childhood, which apparently consists in the psychology of the respective parents; a psychology from infancy to puberty; a psychology of puberty, of the young man, of the adult man of thirty-five, of the man in the second half of life, of the man in old age. That is a science in itself, and I could not possibly bring in all that too. I have a most difficult time as it is to illustrate one single dream. Science is large. It is as if you expected a physicist, when he talks of the theory of light, to elucidate at the same time the whole of mechanical physics. It is simply not possible. Psychology is not an introductory course for nurses; it is a very serious science and consists of a heap of knowledge, so you should not expect too much from me. I am doing my level best to grapple with dreams and to tell you something about them, and I naturally cannot fulfil all expectations.
[298] As to the question about perfection: to strive for perfection is a high ideal. But I say: “Fulfil something you are able to fulfil rather than run after what you will never achieve.” Nobody is perfect. Remember the saying: “None is good but God alone,”17 and nobody can be. It is an illusion. We can modestly strive to fulfil ourselves and to be as complete human beings as possible, and that will give us trouble enough.
Dr. Eric B. Strauss:
[299] Does Professor Jung intend to publish the reasons which led him to identify certain archetypal symbols with physiological processes?
Professor Jung:
[300] The case you refer to was submitted to me by Dr. Davie, and afterwards he published it without my knowledge.18 I do not wish to say more about this correlation because I do not yet feel on very safe ground. Questions of differential diagnosis between organic disease and psychological symbols are very difficult, and I prefer not to say anything about it for the time being.
Dr. Strauss:
[301] But your diagnosis was made from the facts of the dream?
Professor Jung:
[302] Yes, because the organic trouble disturbed the mental functioning. There was a serious depression and presumably a profound disturbance of the sympathetic system.
Dr. H. Crichton-Miller:
[303] Tomorrow is the last seminar, and there is a point that interests us that has not been referred to. That is the difficult problem of transference. I wonder if Professor Jung would think it proper to give us his view tomorrow—without dealing necessarily with other schools—as to transference and the proper handling of it?
_______________
Notes:
1 “And Isis, the great lady of enchantments, said, ‘Flow on, poison, and come forth from Rā. … I have worked, and I make the poison to fall on the ground, for the venom hath been mastered.… Let Rā live, and let the poison die; and if the poison live then Rā shall die.’ And similarly, a certain man, the son of a certain man, shall live, and the poison shall die.” E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Literature, I, p. 55.
2 [Symbols of Transformation, pars. 375ff.]
3 R. Campbell Thompson, The Epic of Gilgamish.
4 [Josephus, The Jewish War 2.111–115.]
5 [Cf. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (C.W., vol. 8), frontispiece and refs. with it.]
6 [Thus far, the dream is documented in the “Life of Sophocles,” sec. 12, in Sophoclis Fabulae, ed. Pearson, p. xix.]
7 [The people of ancient Phocaea, on the western coast of Asia Minor, founded Massilia (Marseilles) and colonies on the east coast of Spain.]
8 [Cf. Psychological Types, ch. V, 4a.]
9 [Symbols of Transformation, pars. 572f.]
10 [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 105, n. 35, citing Foucart, Les Mystères d’Eleusis. According to classicists, Asterios’ report referred to rituals of Demeter celebrated at Alexandria in which a priest (not of Apollo) and a priestess performed the hierosgamos. The narration of aischrologia to please Demeter occurred during the Thesmophoria, an autumn festival in her honour, the Stenia, celebrating her return, and the mid-winter Haloa, sacred to Demeter and Dionysus. Cf. Harrison, Prolegomena, ch. IV, esp. pp. 136, 148f.]
11 [Herodotus 2.60 (Penguin edn., pp. 125f.).]
12 [See Aion (C.W., vol. 9, ii), frontispiece, and Symbols of Transformation, index, s.v.]
13 New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel, ed. by Grenfell and Hunt [pp. 36 and 15].
14 [It is MS. Bruce 96, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 138f.]
15 [For further analysis of this dream, from the Basel Seminar (supra, p. 3), see Jung’s L’Homme à la découverte de son âme, pp. 214ff.]
15 [Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Leipzig and Vienna); Jung withdrew from the editorship in 1913.]
16 W. M. Kranefeldt, Secret Ways of the Mind; G. R. Heyer, The Organism of the Mind; Gerhard Adler, Entdeckung der Seele.
17 [Luke 18:19.]
18 [See supra, par. 135, n. 15.]
Discussion
Dr. David Yellowlees:
[273] I need hardly mention that I shall not attempt to discuss anything that has been said tonight. We are all glad Professor Jung has given us such an extraordinarily fascinating account of his own views, rather than spend time on controversial matters. But I think some of us would be grateful if he would recognize that we approach psychology and psychotherapy along lines not exclusively Freudian perhaps, but in accordance with certain fundamental principles with which Freud’s name is associated, though he may not have originated them. We are very grateful that Professor Jung has given us what we believe to be a wider view. Some of us prefer that view, and perhaps the Freudians would be able to tell us why. But the question was raised the other night as to the relationship between the concept of the unconscious which Professor Jung has been laying before us and Freud’s concept of it, and I think if Professor Jung will be so good he could help us a little in that direction. I know quite well I may be misinterpreting him, but the impression I got on Tuesday night was almost as if he had said that he was dealing with facts and Freud with theories. He knows as well as I do that this bald statement really requires some amplification and I wish he could tell us, for example, what we ought to do from a therapeutic point of view when faced with a patient who produces spontaneously what I would call Freudian material, and how far we should regard Freudian theories simply as theories in view of the evidence which can be proved by such material as infantile fixation of the libido—oral, anal, phallic, and so on. If Professor Jung would say a little to give us some kind of correlation we would be very grateful.
Professor Jung:
[274] I told you at the beginning that I do not want to be critical. I just want to give you a point of view of my own, of how I envisage psychological material, and I suppose that when you have heard what I have to contribute you will be able to make up your minds about these questions, and how much of Freud, how much of Adler, or myself, or I do not know whom, you will want to follow. If you want me to elucidate the question of the connection with Freud, I am quite glad to do it. I started out entirely on Freud’s lines. I was even considered to be his best disciple. I was on excellent terms with him until I had the idea that certain things are symbolical. Freud would not agree to this, and he identified his method with the theory and the theory with the method. That is impossible, you cannot identify a method with science. I said that in view of these things I could not keep on publishing the Jahrbuch15 and I withdrew.
[275] But I am perfectly well aware of the merits of Freud and I do not want to diminish them. I know that what Freud says agrees with many people, and I assume that these people have exactly the kind of psychology that he describes. Adler, who has entirely different views, also has a large following, and I am convinced that many people have an Adlerian psychology. I too have a following—not so large as Freud’s—and it consists presumably of people who have my psychology. I consider my contribution to psychology to be my subjective confession. It is my personal psychology, my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do. I admit that I see things in such and such a way. But I expect Freud and Adler to do the same and confess that their ideas are their subjective point of view. So far as we admit our personal prejudice, we are really contributing towards an objective psychology. We cannot help being prejudiced by our ancestors, who want to look at things in a certain way, and so we instinctively have certain points of view. It would be neurotic if I saw things in another way than my instinct tells me to do; my snake, as the primitives say, would be all against me. When Freud said certain things, my snake did not agree. And I take the route that my snake prescribes, because that is good for me. But I have patients with whom I have to make a Freudian analysis and go into all the details which Freud has correctly described. I have other cases that force me to an Adlerian point of view, because they have a power complex. People who have the capacity to adapt and are successful are more inclined to have a Freudian psychology, because a man in that position is looking for the gratification of his desires, while the man who has not been successful has no time to think about desires. He has only one desire—to succeed, and he will have an Adlerian psychology, because a man who always falls into the second place will develop a power complex.
[276] I have no power complex in that sense because I have been fairly successful and in nearly every respect I have been able to adapt. If the whole world disagrees with me it is perfectly indifferent to me. I have a perfectly good place in Switzerland, I enjoy myself, and if nobody enjoys my books I enjoy them. I know nothing better than being in my library, and if I make discoveries in my books, that is wonderful. I cannot say I have a Freudian psychology because I never had such difficulties in relation to desires. As a boy I lived in the country and took things very naturally, and the natural and unnatural things of which Freud speaks were not interesting to me. To talk of an incest complex just bores me to tears. But I know exactly how I could make myself neurotic: if I said or believed something that is not myself. I say what I see, and if somebody agrees with me it pleases me and if nobody agrees it is indifferent to me. I can join neither the Adlerian nor the Freudian confession. I can agree only with the Jungian confession because I see things that way even if there is not a single person on earth who shares my views. The only thing I hope for is to give you some interesting ideas and let you see how I tackle things.
[277] It is always interesting to me to see a craftsman at work. His skill makes the charm of a craft. Psychotherapy is a craft and I deal in my individual way—a very humble way with nothing particular to show— with the things I have to do. Not that I believe for a moment that I am absolutely right. Nobody is absolutely right in psychological matters. Never forget that in psychology the means by which you judge and observe the psyche is the psyche itself. Have you ever heard of a hammer beating itself? In psychology the observer is the observed. The psyche is not only the object but also the subject of our science. So you see, it is a vicious circle and we have to be very modest. The best we can expect in psychology is that everybody puts his cards on the table and admits: “I handle things in such and such a way, and this is how I see them.” Then we can compare notes.
[278] I have always compared notes with Freud and Adler. Three books have been written by pupils of mine who tried to give a synopsis of the three points of view.16 You have never heard this from the other side. That is our Swiss temperament. We are liberal and we try to see things side by side, together. From my point of view the best thing is to say that obviously there are thousands of people who have a Freudian psychology and thousands who have an Adlerian psychology. Some seek gratification of desire and some others fulfilment of power and yet others want to see the world as it is and leave things in peace. We do not want to change anything. The world is good as it is.
[279] There are many different psychologies in existence. A certain American university, year after year, issues a volume of the psychologies of 1934, 1935, and so on. There is a total chaos in psychology, so do not be so frightfully serious about psychological theories. Psychology is not a religious creed but a point of view, and when we are human about it we may be able to understand each other. I admit that some people have sexual trouble and others have other troubles. I have chiefly other troubles. You now have an idea of how I look at things. My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity. It would be so much simpler if I knew nothing; but I know too much, through my ancestors and my own education. Other people are not worried by such problems, they do not care about the historical burdens Christianity has heaped upon us. But there are people who are concerned with the great battle between the present and the past or the future. It is a tremendous human problem. Certain people make history and others build a little house in the suburbs. Mussolini’s case is not settled by saying he has a power complex. He is concerned with politics, and that is his life and death. The world is huge and there is not one theory only to explain everything.
[280] To Freud the unconscious is chiefly a receptacle for things repressed. He looks at it from the corner of the nursery. To me it is a vast historical storehouse. I acknowledge I have a nursery too, but it is small in comparison with the vast spaces of history which were more interesting to me from childhood than the nursery. There are many people like myself, I am optimistic in that respect. Once I thought there were no people like myself; I was afraid it was megalomania to think as I did. Then I found many people who fitted in with my point of view, and I was satisfied that I represented perhaps a minority of people whose basic psychological facts are expressed more or less happily by my formulation, and when you get these people under analysis you will find they do not agree with Freud’s or Adler’s point of view, but with mine. I have been reproached for my naïveté. When I am not sure about a patient I give him books by Freud and Adler and say, “Make your choice,” in the hope that we are going on the right track. Sometimes we are on the wrong track. As a rule, people who have reached a certain maturity and who are philosophically minded and fairly successful in the world and not too neurotic, agree with my point of view. But you must not conclude from what I present to you that I always lay my cards on the table and tell the patient all I mention here. Time would not allow me to go into all those details of interpretation. But a few cases need to acquire a great amount of knowledge and are grateful when they see a way to enlarge their point of view.
[281] I cannot say where I could find common ground with Freud when he calls a certain part of the unconscious the Id. Why give it such a funny name? It is the unconscious and that is something we do not know. Why call it the Id? Of course the difference of temperament produces a different outlook. I never could bring myself to be so frightfully interested in these sex cases. They do exist, there are people with a neurotic sex life and you have to talk sex stuff with them until they get sick of it and you get out of that boredom. Naturally, with my temperamental attitude, I hope to goodness we shall get through with the stuff as quickly as possible. It is neurotic stuff and no reasonable normal person talks of it for any length of time. It is not natural to dwell on such matters. Primitives are very reticent about them. They allude to sexual intercourse by a word that is equivalent to “hush.” Sexual things are taboo to them, as they really are to us if we are natural. But taboo things and places are always apt to be the receptacle for all sorts of projections. And so very often the real problem is not to be found there at all. Many people make unnecessary difficulties about sex when their actual troubles are of quite a different nature.
[282] Once a young man came to me with a compulsion neurosis. He brought me a manuscript of his of a hundred and forty pages, giving a complete Freudian analysis of his case. It was quite perfect according to the rules, it could have been published in the Jahrbuch. He said: “Will you read this and tell me why I am not cured although I made a complete psychoanalysis?” I said: “So you have, and I do not understand it either. You ought to be cured according to all the rules of the art, but when you say you are not cured I have to believe you.” He repeated: “Why am I not cured, having a complete insight into the structure of my neurosis?” I said: “I cannot criticize your thesis. The whole thing is marvellously well demonstrated. There remains only one, perhaps quite foolish, question: you do not mention where you come from and who your parents are. You say you spent last winter on the Riviera and the summer in St. Moritz. Were you very careful in the choice of your parents?” “Not at all.” “You have an excellent business and are making a good deal of money?” “No, I cannot make money.” “Then you have a big fortune from an uncle?” “No.” “Then where does the money come from?” He replied: “I have a certain arrangement. I have a friend who gives me the money.” I said: “It must be a wonderful friend,” and he replied, “It is a woman.” She was much older than himself, aged thirty-six, a teacher in an elementary school with a small salary, who, as an elderly spinster, fell in love with the fellow who was twenty-eight. She lived on bread and milk so that he could spend his winter on the Riviera and his summer in St. Moritz. I said: “And you ask why you are ill!” He said: “Oh, you have a moralistic point of view; that is not scientific.” I said: “The money in your pocket is the money of the woman you cheat.” He said, “No, we agreed upon it. I had a serious talk with her and it is not a matter for discussion that I get the money from her.” I said: “You are pretending to yourself that it is not her money, but you live by it, and that is immoral. That is the cause of your compulsion neurosis. It is a compensation and a punishment for an immoral attitude.” An utterly unscientific point of view, of course, but it is my conviction that he deserves his compulsion neurosis and will have it to the last day of his life if he behaves like a pig.
Dr. T. A. Ross:
[283] Did not that come out in the analysis?
Professor Jung:
[284] He went right away like a god and thought: “Dr. Jung is only a moralist, not a scientist. Anybody else would have been impressed by the interesting case instead of looking for simple things.” He commits a crime and steals the savings of a lifetime from an honest woman in order to be able to have a good time. That fellow belongs in gaol, and his compulsion neurosis provides it for him all right.
Dr. P. W. L. Camps:
[285] I am a humble general practitioner, not a psychologist, and may be labelled as a suburban villa. I am an outsider in this place. The first night I thought I had no right to be here; the second night I was here again; the third night I was glad to be here; and the fourth night I am in a maze of mythology.
[286] I would like to ask something about last night. We were sent away with the idea that perfection was most undesirable and completion the end and aim of existence. I slept soundly last night but I felt that I had had an ethical shock. Perhaps I am not gifted with much intellect and it was an intellectual shock too. Professor Jung declares himself a determinist or fatalist. After he had analysed a young man who went away disappointed and then went to bits, Professor Jung felt it was only right that he should go to bits. You as psychologists, I take it, are endeavouring to cure people, and you have a purpose in life, not merely to enjoy your interests, whether it be mythology or the study of human nature. You want to get at the bottom of human nature and try to build it up to something better.
[287] I listened with the greatest interest to Professor Jung’s simple English terms and rejoiced in them. I have been confounded with all this new terminology. To hear of our sensation and thinking and feeling and intuition—to which possibly an X may be added for something else—was most illuminating to me as an ordinary individual.
[288] But I feel that we did not hear where the conscious or rather where the unconscious of the child develops. I fear that we did not hear enough about children. I should like to ask Professor Jung where the unconscious in the child does become the conscious.
[289] I should also like to know whether we are not misled some what by this multitude of diagrams, barriers, Egos, and Ids, and other things I have seen portrayed; whether we could not improve on these diagrams by having a gradation of stages.
[290] As Professor Jung has pointed out, we have inherited faces and eyes and ears and there are a multitude of faces and in psychology there are a multitude of types also. Is it not reasonable to suppose that there is an enormous possibility of varieties planted on that inheritance, that they are a sort of mesh, a sieve as it were, that will receive impressions and select them in the unconscious years of early life and reach through into consciousness later? I should like to ask Professor Jung whether these thoughts have crossed the mind of an eminent psychologist such as he is— the very greatest psychologist in my view—tonight?
Professor Jung:
[291] After that severe reproach for immorality I owe an explanation of my cynical remarks of yesterday. I am not as bad as all that. I naturally try to do my best for my patients, but in psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one’s own will and conviction on the patient. We have to give him a certain amount of freedom. You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. You cannot save certain people from committing terrible nonsense because it is in their grain. If I take it away they have no merit. We only gain merit and psychological development by accepting ourselves as we are and by being serious enough to live the lives we are trusted with. Our sins and errors and mistakes are necessary to us, otherwise we are deprived of the most precious incentives to development. When a man goes away, having heard something which might have changed his mind, and does not pay attention, I do not call him back. You may accuse me of being unchristian, but I do not care. I am on the side of nature. The old Chinese Book of Wisdom says: “The Master says it once.” He does not run after people, it is no good. Those who are meant to hear will understand, and those who are not meant to understand will not hear.
[292] I was under the impression that my audience consisted chiefly of psychotherapists. If I had known that medical men were present I would have expressed myself more civilly. But psychotherapists will understand. Freud—to quote the master’s own words—says it is not good to try to cure at all costs. He often repeated that to me, and he is right.
[293] Psychological truths are two-edged, and whatever I say can be used in such a way that it can work the greatest evil, the greatest devastation and nonsense. There is not one statement I have made which has not been twisted into its opposite. So I do not insist on any statement. You can take it, but if you do not take it, all right. You may perhaps blame me for that, but I trust that there is a will to live in everybody which will help them to choose the thing that is right for them. When I am treating a man I must be exceedingly careful not to knock him down with my views or my personality, because he has to fight his lonely fight through life and he must be able to trust in his perhaps very incomplete armour and in his own perhaps very imperfect aim. When I say, “That is not good and should be better,” I deprive him of courage. He must plough his field with a plough that is not good perhaps: mine may be better, but what good is it to him? He has not got my plough. I have it and he cannot borrow it; he must use his own perhaps very incomplete tools and has to work with his own inherited capacities, whatever they are. I help him of course, I may say for instance: “Your thinking is perfectly good, but perhaps in another respect you could improve.” If he does not want to hear it, I shall not insist because I do not want to make him deviate.
Dr. Marion Mackenzie:
[294] In the same way that the rich young man was not called back but went away sorrowful?
Professor Jung:
[295] Yes, it is the same technique. If I were to say to a man, “You should not go away.” he would never come back. I have to say, “Have your own way.” Then he will trust me.
[296] As to the question about children, there has been in the last decades such a noise about children that I often scratch my head at a meeting and say: “Are they all midwives and nurses?” Does not the world consist chiefly of parents and grandparents? The adults have the problems. Leave the poor children alone. I get the mother by the ears and not the child. The parents make the neuroses of children.
[297] It is certainly interesting to make researches into the development of consciousness. The beginning of consciousness is a fluid condition, and you cannot say when the child has become really conscious and when it has not yet. But that belongs to an entirely different chapter: the psychology of the ages. There is a psychology of childhood, which apparently consists in the psychology of the respective parents; a psychology from infancy to puberty; a psychology of puberty, of the young man, of the adult man of thirty-five, of the man in the second half of life, of the man in old age. That is a science in itself, and I could not possibly bring in all that too. I have a most difficult time as it is to illustrate one single dream. Science is large. It is as if you expected a physicist, when he talks of the theory of light, to elucidate at the same time the whole of mechanical physics. It is simply not possible. Psychology is not an introductory course for nurses; it is a very serious science and consists of a heap of knowledge, so you should not expect too much from me. I am doing my level best to grapple with dreams and to tell you something about them, and I naturally cannot fulfil all expectations.
[298] As to the question about perfection: to strive for perfection is a high ideal. But I say: “Fulfil something you are able to fulfil rather than run after what you will never achieve.” Nobody is perfect. Remember the saying: “None is good but God alone,”17 and nobody can be. It is an illusion. We can modestly strive to fulfil ourselves and to be as complete human beings as possible, and that will give us trouble enough.
Dr. Eric B. Strauss:
[299] Does Professor Jung intend to publish the reasons which led him to identify certain archetypal symbols with physiological processes?
Professor Jung:
[300] The case you refer to was submitted to me by Dr. Davie, and afterwards he published it without my knowledge.18 I do not wish to say more about this correlation because I do not yet feel on very safe ground. Questions of differential diagnosis between organic disease and psychological symbols are very difficult, and I prefer not to say anything about it for the time being.
Dr. Strauss:
[301] But your diagnosis was made from the facts of the dream?
Professor Jung:
[302] Yes, because the organic trouble disturbed the mental functioning. There was a serious depression and presumably a profound disturbance of the sympathetic system.
Dr. H. Crichton-Miller:
[303] Tomorrow is the last seminar, and there is a point that interests us that has not been referred to. That is the difficult problem of transference. I wonder if Professor Jung would think it proper to give us his view tomorrow—without dealing necessarily with other schools—as to transference and the proper handling of it?
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Notes:
1 “And Isis, the great lady of enchantments, said, ‘Flow on, poison, and come forth from Rā. … I have worked, and I make the poison to fall on the ground, for the venom hath been mastered.… Let Rā live, and let the poison die; and if the poison live then Rā shall die.’ And similarly, a certain man, the son of a certain man, shall live, and the poison shall die.” E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Literature, I, p. 55.
2 [Symbols of Transformation, pars. 375ff.]
3 R. Campbell Thompson, The Epic of Gilgamish.
4 [Josephus, The Jewish War 2.111–115.]
5 [Cf. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (C.W., vol. 8), frontispiece and refs. with it.]
6 [Thus far, the dream is documented in the “Life of Sophocles,” sec. 12, in Sophoclis Fabulae, ed. Pearson, p. xix.]
7 [The people of ancient Phocaea, on the western coast of Asia Minor, founded Massilia (Marseilles) and colonies on the east coast of Spain.]
8 [Cf. Psychological Types, ch. V, 4a.]
9 [Symbols of Transformation, pars. 572f.]
10 [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 105, n. 35, citing Foucart, Les Mystères d’Eleusis. According to classicists, Asterios’ report referred to rituals of Demeter celebrated at Alexandria in which a priest (not of Apollo) and a priestess performed the hierosgamos. The narration of aischrologia to please Demeter occurred during the Thesmophoria, an autumn festival in her honour, the Stenia, celebrating her return, and the mid-winter Haloa, sacred to Demeter and Dionysus. Cf. Harrison, Prolegomena, ch. IV, esp. pp. 136, 148f.]
11 [Herodotus 2.60 (Penguin edn., pp. 125f.).]
12 [See Aion (C.W., vol. 9, ii), frontispiece, and Symbols of Transformation, index, s.v.]
13 New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel, ed. by Grenfell and Hunt [pp. 36 and 15].
14 [It is MS. Bruce 96, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 138f.]
15 [For further analysis of this dream, from the Basel Seminar (supra, p. 3), see Jung’s L’Homme à la découverte de son âme, pp. 214ff.]
15 [Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Leipzig and Vienna); Jung withdrew from the editorship in 1913.]
16 W. M. Kranefeldt, Secret Ways of the Mind; G. R. Heyer, The Organism of the Mind; Gerhard Adler, Entdeckung der Seele.
17 [Luke 18:19.]
18 [See supra, par. 135, n. 15.]