THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:38 pm

The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung
by Richard Noll
© 1997 by Richard Noll
Jacket design: Robbin Schiff

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Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• PART ONE: GENESIS
o 1. The Inner Fatherland
o 2. Summoning the Spirits
o 3. Hidden Memories
o 4. Religion Can Only Be Replaced by Religion
• PART TWO: MYSTERIA
o 5. Polygamy
o 6. Sun Worship
o 7. The Mystery of Deification
o 8. Zurich 1916: Abraxas and the Return of the Pagan Gods
• PART THREE: ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
o 9. Fanny Bowditch Katz -- "Analysis Is Religion"
o 10. Edith Rockefeller McCormick -- The Rockefeller Psychoanalyst
o 11. The Passion of Constance Long
• PART FOUR: REVELATIONS
o 12. From Volkish Prophet to Wise Old Man
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:42 pm

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Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithras, 1911
Aion, the Mithraic lion-headed god that Jung became in a visionary ecstasy in December 1913. At the time, the Mithraic mysteries were considered the most ancient form of Aryan spirituality.


In every man ... there is one part which concerns only himself and his contingent existence, is properly unknown to anybody else and dies with him. And there is another part through which he holds to an idea which is expressed through him with an eminent clarity, and of which he is the symbol.
-- Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Autobiographical Fragment," 1816


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Richard Noll, a clinical psychologist, is Lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University. He is a former resident fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. His previous book, The Jung Cult, won the 1994 Best Book in Psychology Award from the Association of American Publishers.
Author photo: © Stephen Rumpf


Introduction

Sifting through the private literature of the past, the letters and diaries intended only for those now dead, is like listening to a conversation at the next table as we pretend to be lost in thought. Inevitably, we gather only bits of detritus that we -- like magpies -- weave into something meaningful. We construct -- not really reconstruct -- stories about the past for the purposes of the present. We imagine that the dead have returned, move about, gossip. We try to convince our readers that they have joined us, to sip tea nonchalantly and strain to hear the tales being told nearby.

If one thinks about it this way, the craft of the historian seems almost Dadaist. The dead are astoundingly dead. How can we really hear what they're saying? Why the delusion that the dead said what they said, wrote what they wrote, for us? Yet we always feel that these things are so. For better or worse, we personalize the past. The dead become ours. And we become upset, disturbed, when our preferred tales of the dead are heard differently -- and retold differently -- by others.

I relate the following tale of Carl Gustav lung under the cloud of such vexation.

***

"The cradle rocks above an abyss," Vladimir Nabokov wrote at the outset of his autobiography, "and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." [1] But with biography, when the subject is someone other than ourselves, the situation is often reversed. We seem to see an illuminated path of events that lead up to the birth of an individual and, with the omniscience of a blind god, foresee what happened afterward. The historian or biographer often discovers that the arc between birth and death is frustratingly obscured in shadow. Data are often missing -- or deliberately fudged by the subject or intimates -- that are necessary for the proper calculation of the trajectory. And, of course, to tell a proper story we always want to know why A led to B and not C.

I can state with confidence that Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, and died on June 6, 1961. Born near Basel, Switzerland, over the last sixty years of his life he lived and worked -- and died -- near the banks of Lake Zurich. We know the dates of many of his travels to foreign lands, his publications, his public lectures, and a few other factual items. We have the letters he sent to Sigmund Freud and vice versa; consequently, we have a consistently useful record of many of his inner and outer concerns from 1907 to 1913. We can consult two published volumes of letters he wrote from age thirty-one until his death, heavily edited and selected by his estate for a favorable depiction of him. We have the twenty-plus volumes of his Collected Works and published transcripts of some of the seminars he taught. As a scientist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, he achieved world renown while still in his thirties, and today he is regarded as the most famous man that Switzerland has ever produced. His face adorns a Swiss postage stamp.

At this point, the trail of evidence fades. Upon careful consideration, we are led to the surprising conclusion that very little about the historical Jung -- particularly the first sixty years of his life (until 1936) -- is known to us. Jung's life remains largely a mystery.

The book you hold before you is not a biography of Carl Gustav Jung. I sincerely doubt an authentic, comprehensive biography of Jung' s entire life will be written any time soon. To do so would require that the heirs of Jung's estate open up everything to a scholar -- Jung's private diaries, all the letters he wrote and received, his famous "Red Book" of paintings of his visions and discussions with the Dead, [2] and of course all the personal papers and letters of his wife and collaborator, Emma Jung, who many forget had an interesting and full life independent of her husband's. What we know about Emma Jung would barely fill two or three pages of text, and this will remain the case unless her personal papers are made available to scholars. The Jung family would also have to allow access to any diaries or papers from Jung's collaborator and lover, Antonia Wolff, that may be in the archives, along with documents belonging to Jung's early associate, J. J. Honegger, to which Jung's heirs have no discernible legal claim. As we shall learn, the Honegger papers are of paramount importance for making judgments about Jung's character and intellectual honesty. [3] Regrettably, the surviving members of the Jung family and the administrators of the Jung estate have shown little interest in contributing to the historical record.

We do have, however, the posthumously published "autobiography" known as Memories, Dreams, Reflections (hereafter MDR), which purports to be an honest statement from Jung himself about his own life. This is only partly true. As the scholar Alan Elms was the first to document, this book is less an autobiography than a patchwork of material brilliantly integrated by Aniela Jaffe, Jung's assistant in his last years, with copious editorial assistance from the American editors at Pantheon, who brought out the English edition before a German one appeared. [4] Although Jung wrote the initial draft of the first three chapters and a later one entitled "Late Thoughts," in which he speculated on life after death, these were not intended to be the first chapters of an autobiography, despite what the published volume would lead one to think. Furthermore, against Jung's own wishes, his words in these chapters were altered or deleted to conform to the image preferred by his family and disciples. Jaffe took Jung's own contributions, transcripts of his old lectures, and her own notes of discussions with him, put them into the first person, and allowed this to be passed off on an unsuspecting public as an autobiography. Unflattering material was, of course, left out, and even the usual sort of factual material that one expects in a biography or an autobiography is missing, leaving the strange story of an extraordinary individual who somehow lived outside of time and escaped history.

The Jung portrayed in MDR is a clairvoyant sage, a miracle worker, a god-man who earns his apotheosis through his encounter with the Dead and with God. His is a morality tale of mystical evolution, as his life becomes the exemplum of his theories, the heroic saga of an "individuated" man who survived a terrifying encounter with extramundane beings (the archetypes) from a transcendent reality (the collective unconscious). Unfortunately, MDR has served as the basis for all subsequent "biographies" of Jung since its first publication in 1962. Until recently, the truthfulness of this preferred version of Jung's "myth" has gone unquestioned. There is great resistance to altering the myth, which would mean tangling Jung in time and space and restoring him to his German cultural milieu, a humiliating descent from mythopoesis into history.

MDR, rightly or wrongly, has become one of the primary spiritual documents of the twentieth century. As the story of Jung's spiritual rebirth, it has inspired awe and hope in its readers, reenchanting their worlds. It is a powerful book, and I recall my bewildered reaction to it at age seventeen after the first of what was to become many readings. As I have subsequently learned from years of critical readings of Jung and historical research into his life, MDR and its imitators have actually- obscured the story of a Jung who is much more interesting -- and at times terrifyingly flawed -- because of his humanity, not his semidivinity.

In this volume I have no desire to diagnose Jung or to continue the tradition of idealizing him as a god-man. There are hagiographies and hatchet jobs enough. In the pages that follow, with the guidance of the voices of the dead who spoke to me while I read through crumbling letters and diaries in archives throughout the United States and Europe -- extracts from which appear in this book for the first time -- my project is to supply some of the missing chapters in the story of Jung's life.

In a departure from the style, though not the substance, of my earlier scholarship on Jung, this volume is written as a sort of narrative history. Composing history in this style is much like writing a novel about people and events that we know and can document -- "dead certainties," as the historian Simon Schama calls them. Unlike most narrative history, however, this is not the retelling of Jung's entire life and career, but instead a series of stories behind the official story. These episodes give form to an alternate myth of the unfolding of Carl Gustav Jung. At the core of Jung's life -- and he is consistently clear about this -- was always an obsession with existential issues, with the coin toss of life's meaning or meaninglessness, with mystery and with things sacred. Regarded by Jung himself as rooted in eternal currents, outside of time, outside of history, and represented as such by the many authors of his "autobiography," his subjective experiences in MDR are less a revelation than an occultation. The man himself, the historicity of his spirituality, and the roots of his ideas in German cultural soil all vanish from view.

Many who encounter Jung do so within the community of the spirit, and some look to the personal myth of C. G. Jung in MDR as a contemporary gospel that contains the kerygma of a new dispensation. To those readers I say: You may consider the book you now hold in your hands as its apocryphon. It is the apocryphon of a historian, however, and the rejected secrets in these pages have more to do with history than mystery.

This is not an easy story to tell. The Carl Jung I discovered is not too different in one respect from the Carl Jung in MDR: I am convinced by the historical evidence that Jung believed himself to be a religious prophet with extraordinary powers. I further believe that despite his multiple professional personas of physician, psychotherapist, and social critic, he consciously devoted his life to promoting the growth of a religious community centered on his personality and his teachings. This was his calling, and many in his earliest circle of disciples in Zurich during the First World War followed him because they believed he was "the new light," a charismatic prophet of a new age. In later life, after studying the ancient mystery cults and alchemy, Jung openly told more than one person that he -- and those who follow his methods -- were chosen to be the redeemers of God. "He spoke of his mission," said Eugen Bohler, a Swiss scholar who knew Jung intimately from 1955 on. "He regarded his life as a mission: to serve the function of making God conscious. He had to help God to make himself conscious, and not for our own sake, but for the sake of God." [5] I believe this is at the core of what Jung was about. Most persons who consider themselves Jungians would not disagree with this, and many openly acknowledge their participation in such a mystery. Some, worried about how this reflects on the public perception of their secular professional identity, which they have bound totemic ally with Jung's name, have grave reservations.

I will risk controversy with an additional observation. Through years of reflection on Jung's considerable impact on the culture and spiritual landscape of the twentieth century, I have come to the conclusion that, as an individual, he ranks with the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (fourth century C.E.) as one who significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored the polytheism of the Hellenistic world in Western civilization. I realize this is quite an incautious statement, reflecting the hubris of the historian who succumbs to the fantasy of being a demiurge. Nevertheless, I believe that, for a variety of historical and technological factors -- modern mass media being the most important -- Jung has succeeded where Julian failed. For the first sixty years of his life -- the period of his "secret life" largely lost to history -- Jung was openly hostile to Judeo-Christian orthodoxies, particularly Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Contemporaneously, the patriarchal monotheism of the orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths has all but collapsed. Filling that void, however, we increasingly find Protestants, Catholics, and Jews adopting alternative, syncretic belief systems that often belie a basis in Jungian "psychological" theories.

I place the term "psychological" in quotation marks because I believe -- and argue in this book -- that this twentieth-century mask was constructed deliberately, and somewhat deceptively, by Jung to make his own magical, polytheist, pagan worldview more palatable to a secularized world conditioned to respect only those ideas that seem to have a scientific air to them. I make this judgment about Jung without being either Christian or Jew or Moslem--or Freudian. From the perspective of the history of religions, I find Jung and Jungism a remarkable phenomenon -- that is all.6 Not surprisingly, Jung's polytheism and extremely uncritical relativism have made him the perfect source of quotations for a new generation of postmodern literary critics and classicists.

Evidence -- and there is much of it -- reveals Jung to have been an acutely self-conscious heresiarch, much like Julian the Apostate, with whom Jung believed he was an initiate into a fourth-century mystical brotherhood. Like Julian, for many years Jung presented himself as a Christian but in private practiced paganism. Further, even late in life Jung looked upon the orthodoxies of Judeo-Christianity as his enemy and as the enemy of life itself. R.F.C. Hull, the principal translator of Jung's Collected Works into English, expressed outrage over how the Jung family and Aniela Jaffe removed or softened so many of Jung's outspoken views "concerning Christian theology" in his handwritten contributions to MDR. Hull, who knew Jung well in his later years, said, "I am absolutely sure everything vital and creative came to him out of the depths of his pagan unconscious." [7]

Nevertheless, whatever the disposition of Jung's many students and intimates, nearly all studies of him and his work have overlooked the historical container in which his amalgam of ideas about pagan antiquity was distilled: namely, the German cultural context of his time, tellingly illustrated by the beliefs widely held by the classicists Jung respected, regarding the place of Indo-European pagans and Hellenistic Gnostics within the evolution of the Aryan race.

This brings me back to the challenges of storytelling. The success of the tale that follows pivots on your willingness to attempt an understanding of the story of Jung as an actor living entirely within the categories of the world as he knew it. His perspective on reality was framed by a concrete belief in a spirit world and in the ability to communicate directly with the Dead or discarnate entities of mysterious origin -- not an easy leap of faith for many. Less difficult to imagine is a world where a belief in myth is more important than fact-based history and where intuition and feeling are valued above a reliance on rational thought. Those familiar with the popular philosophies of the American mythologist Joseph Campbell or Eugen Drewerman of Germany will understand these latter categories of mythic or mystic perception. But the most troublesome part of this story comes from asking you, the reader, to do the morally impossible: to imagine a world -- fin-de-siecle German Kultur -- in which the words "Hitler" and "Nazi" and "Holocaust" do not exist, a world in which spirituality is fused with blood and soil and the sun, a world in which an Aryan Christ could find apostles -- and sincerely promise redemption to his redeemers.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:45 pm

PART ONE: Genesis

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Fidus, "Liebe" ("Love"), 1916

Chapter 1: The Inner Fatherland

Along the banks of upper Lake Zurich, on a silent patch of land in Bollingen, the stone structure known as Jung's Turm (Tower) remains a site of pilgrimage. Jung began building the small, primitive refuge in 1923 as a round container for his solitude. Later, with additions, it became a tower and a sacred space where he could paint his visions on the walls and preserve them in carved stone. It also became a sexual space, a pagan sin altar where, removed from his wife and family in Kusnacht and his disciples in Zurich, he could enjoy his intimate companion, Toni Wolff, with orgiastic abandon. An unsettling mural that covers the entire wall of the bedroom depicts his spirit guide, Philemon, the transpersonal entity whom Jung met in visions during the First World War. Philemon is an interloper from the Hellenistic period, an old man with a long white beard and the wings of a kingfisher. [1] It is from his discussions with Philemon, or so the story goes in MDR, that Jung received his most profound insights about the nature of the human psyche. Jung's most famous ideas -- the collective unconscious, which he first described -in print in 1916, and the archetypes (its "gods"), which were added shortly thereafter -- would not have been possible without guidance from Philemon. [2] It is from this Gnostic-Mithraic guru, who lives in a timeless space that Jung called the Land of the Dead, that Jung received instruction in "the Law," the esoteric key to the secrets of the ages. Jung inscribed these lessons in his "Red Book."

Privileged visitors who are invited by members of the Jung family are allowed to see this icon of Philemon. Another painting, in another part of the Tower, is revealed only to intimates. Usually concealed, perhaps to protect the eyes of the uninitiated from witnessing the sacred mysteries it portrays, is the image of a thin crescent ship, like those that carry the dead in Egyptian iconography, with male and female figures facing each other. In the center of Jung's vision is a large, reddish solar disk that brings to mind the frightful passage of souls to the underworld in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Outside in the courtyard, adjacent to the Tower, stand three stone tablets upon which, as Jung tells it in MDR, "I chiseled the names of my paternal ancestors." [3] The imaginal world of the ancestors, Jung's inner fatherland, was a living presence in Jung's everyday experience. Ahnenerbe, "ancestral inheritance," is the ground of all subjective experience within every individual, according to Jung. We find this idea at the epicenter of his worldview from a very early age, in an alien part of his child-self that he called his "number two personality" -- an elderly gentleman of the eighteenth century-allowing him to imagine he was "living in two ages simultaneously, and being two different persons." [4] He is an individual, yet a second heart beats in his breast, a sacred heart that squeezes the lifeblood of the ancestors through his veins. This, too, has origins in the nostalgic culture of his day, an era when heredity and Kultur and the landscape were merged with one's soul in the timeless and deeply resonant concept of Volk (a much fuller term than our poor derivative "folk"; the German spelling will be kept throughout to maintain this distinction).

"When I was working on the stone tablets," Jung confided, "I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors .... It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished." [5]

What questions did Jung's paternal ancestors leave unanswered? What did Jung feel compelled to complete or to continue? What was the family karma that bound Jung to a specific fate? These questions already contain the seeds of their answers. What we must listen for here are the assumptions behind the queries, the brand of reality that would allow the possibility of such statements or questions in the first place. It is an arcane reality that Jung was destined to keep alive for millions in the twentieth century.

1817: The Thing at the Wartburg

What no one could forget were the bells. Joyously ringing their welcome to the young men who had come from afar, the bells of Eisenach would be forever etched in their memories. [6] Having gathered just outside the red-tiled buildings of this medieval German town, the young men lit torches and began their solemn procession up to the castle, yellow and red autumn leaves blanketing their path. Some of the young men referred to this congregation at the Wartburg castle as a Thing -- what the ancient Germans called their annual tribal gatherings. Some of the young men were in ancient German dress, but most wore the Trachten, or traditional folk dress, of their native regions. They were urged to do so by the event's organizers, one of whom was Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the famous "Turnvater Jahn," best remembered for founding gymnastics societies (Turnvereinen). There was no Germany in 1817, only several dozen principalities united by language, culture, and their common history of being recently overrun by Napoleon's armies. Jahn's gymnastics societies were designed to kindle the sparks of German nationalism in a defeated, fragmented, and often sleepy population. (Many of the foreign travelers through these lands in the nineteenth century described the Germans as rather indifferent, dreamy folk, all too glad to share their bread, wurst, and beer -- not as seething tribes of warriors.)

Many of the young men marching with torches to the Wartburg castle that day were members of these proud gymnastics societies. The rest belonged to student fraternities, some of them secret known as Burschenschaften. Most were from the university in Jena. These student fraternities had only just come into being, but they would play an important role in German cultural life in the nineteenth century. [7] Some of them were also affiliated with an older secret society, the Freemasons, for whom the rose and the cross were blended into a meaningful occult symbol. Some of the participants at the Wartburg festival wore cloth bands around their torsos in the colors that comprise the flag of today's Germany -- black, red, and gold.

It was no coincidence that these rituals of nascent German national fervor played out in the shadow of the mighty Wartburg fortress on an October night. It was here that Martin Luther gave Jesus a German accent. Luther's translation of the New Testament into German catalyzed nationalist sentiment and revolutionized the German world of letters. Heinrich Heine captures so many of the contradictions in the German soul in his often quoted description of Luther as "not merely the greatest but also the most German man in our history, so that in his character all the virtues and failings of the Germans were united in the most magnificent way." Luther was "the tongue as well as the sword of his age ... a cold scholastic word-cobbler and an inspired, God-drunk prophet who, when he had worked himself almost to death over his laborious and dogmatic distinctions, in the evening reached for his flute and, gazing at the stars, melted in melody and reverence." [8] For many of the young men, the commanding walls of the Wartburg fortress rose above them like the brooding, corpulent specter of Martin Luther himself.

In October of 1517 a defiant Martin Luther hammered his theses of protestation to a church door. October also was celebrated as the anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813. The feeling of being German swelled whenever these victories of the Volk were recounted.

"Feelings" of being German were all that one could have, for "Germany" was a word for an ideal, not a reality. German-speaking peoples lived in a loose confederation of dozens of autonomous states of varying sizes and significance bound only by a weakly ruled political entity called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They shared no common currency or legal system, and travel and commerce between many of them was a gauntlet of complex taxes, customs fees, and unanticipated local restrictions on personal freedoms.

At the foot of the Wartburg, the men built a huge, blazing bonfire and other pillars of fire that could be seen by the people of Eisenach. Encircling the central fire, with an excitement driven by a sense of the sacred and the dangerous, the men sang the traditional hymn "Eine Feste Burg" ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"). One of the leaders then offered a few inspirational remarks about justice and invoked the important symbol of the German forest of oaks. The mighty oak was sacred to the ancient Teutons and indeed was the "cross" upon which Wotan (Odin) underwent his revelatory self-sacrifice. Nostalgic references to it recur throughout more than a century of German spiritual longing.

More songs were sung and a patriotic sermon was delivered. Then, before a final hymn to end the formal segment of their ritual, the young men joined hands around the fire and took a collective oath of allegiance to one another and to their group (Bund). They also pledged to preserve the purity of the Volk. Before the Wartburgfest concluded, for the first time in recorded German history "un-German books" were denounced and burned in the great central fire.

Karl Gustav Jung -- the grandfather of Carl Gustav Jung -- considered his participation in the Wartburgfest one of the purest and most meaningful experiences of his life. He was twenty-three. He carefully preserved his black, red, and gold wrap from his days of student activism, and it became one of his grandson's most cherished possessions.

The problem for Karl Follen was to find a new intellectual and political environment in Switzerland, since he had lost his school teaching post. Once again, he managed to come upon just the right place: the University of Basel. It had been an important intellectual center in the sixteenth century, and then had fallen into decay. In 1817, however, the university was refounded and reorganized. Professors' chairs were being filled with German exile intellectuals, many of whom the Swiss authorities could find throughout the country. What was being set up at Basel was an international center of liberal and even radical ideas, a place from which the Swiss students would profit because of the excellence of the new German scholars, and from which the liberal scholars would gain because there they would be allowed to freely discuss their political and religious ideas, and make plans for the future of Germany.

Follen was appointed as a lecturer on natural, civil, and ecclesiastical law, and found many of his former friends already installed at Basel. The exact title of his designated academic field (venia legendi), awarded to him in November of 1821, was "psychology and logic." Follen taught as a member of the philosophical faculty. His lectures were on the Pandects, philosophy of law, public law, and canon law. In January of 1824, it was suggested by the university administration that he should be made a full professor because of the "thoroughness of his knowledge and his constant work for the best of the university." He remained at the university until the summer semester of 1824, during which he was on sabbatical from his teaching responsibilities. The social surroundings at Basel were as agreeable as the university scene. Follen became engaged to marry Anna de Lassaulx, the daughter of a local professor (she later refused to follow him to America). While the city council was quite conservative and dominated by a group of older local notables, there was also a set of younger, more liberal, and modern-minded intellectuals around the city with whom Follen and others like him could come into contact, for instance through a new "literary society" founded in the fall of 1821. Most important for Follen, however, was the opportunity to once again gather with many of his longtime political associates from Germany, many of them now refugees at Basel University.

The most prominent of the German exiles, to be sure, was the new professor of theology. Wilhelm Leberecht de Wette, author of the open letter of sympathy to Carl Sand's mother, had now found a new home in Basel, and began editing a university scholarly journal together with Karl Follen. De Wette had been a student and Privatdozent in Jena from 1799 to 1807, and then professor of theology at Heidelberg. In 1810 he accepted a chair at Berlin, from which he was removed by the government in 1819. After a stay in Weimar he arrived in Basel in 1822, staying there until his death in 1849. He was known throughout the scholarly world not only for his important research in Protestant theology but also for his unambiguously liberal opinions. He was an open sympathizer of the Burschenschaft and one of the closest friends of the Jena philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.

Another German scholar at Basel was De Wett'es stepson Karl Beck, who would eventually accompany Follen on his journey to America three years later. In addition, there was the legal scholar Wilhelm Snell from Hesse, who had worked with Follen in the Hesse German reading society and the Blacks, and another radical, a medical doctor named Carl Gustav Jung. The Burscheschaft leader Wilhelm Wesselhoft, whose brother Robert had been a key speaker at the Wartburg festival, was also present on the university faculty. De Wette tried in 1822 to persuade his friend Jakob Friedrich Fries, who was being investigated at Jena and would soon lose his professorship there, to move to Basel. Fries would not himself come, but he suggested someone else to be hired in his place. This was Karl Seebold, one of Follen's closest friends and a very early member of the Giessen Blacks. Only a few years later Wilhelm Snell's brother Ludwig was also able to join the philosophical faculty. He was given the venia legendi for philosophy. It is astounding how these radicals, who had been working together for over ten years, were able to gather once more in the same town; many of the original Giessen Blacks were together again at Basel.

-- Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America 1796-1840, by Edmund Spevack


"Where Jung was, there was life and movement, passion and joy"

Karl Gustav Jung was born in Mannheim in 1794 to a physician, Franz Ignaz Jung, and his wife, Maria Josepha, rumored by later generations to have submitted, like Europa, to a most remarkable infidelity. Little is known about Karl's childhood. The Jungs were Roman Catholics from Mainz and distinguished by their heritage of German physicians and jurists. In a diary Karl kept in his later years, we know that his father had always remained something of a stranger to him and that his mother was inclined toward bouts with depression. (A similar parental constellation is described by Karl's grandson in the early chapters of MDR.) The Jung family cannot be traced prior to its residence in Mainz, for the public archives were burned in 1688 during the French occupation. Franz Ignaz Jung served in a lazaretto during the Napoleonic wars. His brother, Sigismund von Jung, was a high-ranking Bavarian official who was married to the youngest sister of perhaps the most famous religious and nationalist figure in Germany at that time, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In a drawing of Karl dated February 1821, we see a young man with longish curls, seductive, heavy-lidded eyes, and a truly aquiline nose; he resembles a Teutonic Byron. [9] In his youth he was, simultaneously, political activist, poet, playwright, and physician. In his lifetime he would give thirteen children to three wives. Energetic, extraverted, full of passion for living, his boundless energy thrilled and, at times, crushed others. At his burial in 1864, his friend the chemist Schoenbrun said, "Where Jung was, there was life and movement, passion and joy." [10] At the 1875 opening of the Vesalianum, the anatomical institute at the University of Basel, the elderly Wilhelm His remembered Jung's "continual optimism and unbending high-spirits, which were not broken by difficult family sorrows." These sorrows were the early deaths of most of Jung's children, as well as of his first two wives. One of the few progeny that survived into adulthood was his last child, the lucky thirteenth, Johann Paul Achilles Jung, who would live to sire a son, Carl Gustav, in 1875 and a daughter, Gertrud, in 1884.

Like his father and grandson, Karl Gustav Jung was a physician. He was trained at Heidelberg, that famous university town, an important center of alchemy and a symbol in Rosicrucian lore. He earned his medical degree in 1816, then moved to Berlin to practice as a surgical assistant to an ophthalmologist. Berlin changed him forever.

Place, landscape, soil -- to understand the imaginal world of Jung it is important to identify these nodal spaces where meaning condenses, the earthen crossroads upon which history rains. Such a place was the home of the Berlin bookseller and publisher Georg Andreas Reimer, an intimate friend of Schleiermacher. Reimer served as the host of the Reading Society, a patriotic club that met in his home. Ernst Moritz Arndt, one of the founding fathers of the nationalist Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) in Germany, befriended Schleiermacher here. To avoid prosecution for anti-French activity in the occupied German heartland, Arndt fled to Berlin, the capital of Prussia, and lived in Reimer's home from 1809 to 1810. [11] In 1816 and 1817, so did Karl Gustav Jung.

At Reimer's, Jung found himself in one of the central incubators of German Romanticism and nationalism. He came into contact with a steady flow of ideas from determined men- -- ome of them political fugitives -- who were convinced of the idea of a Volksgeist, the unique characteristics or genius of the German people as a single nation, determined by language, climate, soil or landscape, certain economic factors, and, of course, race. These ideas found form in the essays of J. G. Herder, Arndt, Jahn, and the sermons of Schleiermacher. Here Jung met the Schlegel brothers -- Friedrich and August Wilhelm -- and Ludwig Tieck, all noted writers and founders of the Romantic movement. Jung underwent a transformation not only of political consciousness, as evidenced by his contributions to the Teutsche Liederbuch anthology of German nationalist poem-songs (Lieder), but of religious consciousness as well. As confirmed in the baptismal certificate signed by Schleiermacher -- another proud possession of the grandson [12] -- Karl Gustav Jung renounced the Roman Catholic faith and became an Evangelical Protestant in the Romantic and nationalist mode.

The aftershocks of the grandfather's renunciation of his ancestral faith can still be felt by those touched by the life and work of the grandson. The sudden conversion of the grandfather, his act of apostasy, his angry rejection of Rome, would arguably prove to be one of the most powerful determinants of the destiny of C. G. Jung. The importance of this familial mark of Cain cannot be overstated. [13]


"Religion of the heart"

Religion mated with German nationalism in the eighteenth century and produced a fever in the people called Pietism. [14] 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.) [16]

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."



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 some thing 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. [17]


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. [18] 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." [19] 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. [20] 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.

Prison and exile

Two years after the Wartburgfest, Karl Jung was arrested by Prussian authorities after a friend of his assassinated a government official. Charged with being a political demagogue, Jung spent the next thirteen months in a Berlin prison.

Sitting in his filthy cell, the stench of human waste ever present, he lamented the sad fact that his medical career in his beloved Fatherland was over before it really began. Losing hope as the months continued to pass, he struggled to resist the temptation to interpret his long prison term as the Creator's revenge for his strident apostasy. His intense desire to participate in the political, cultural, and spiritual union of his Volk, his hatred of the Pope and the Papists, his Pietistic rebirth in the hands of Schleiermacher -- all of these newly flowering branches were suddenly and cruelly chopped from the trunk of his living soul, abandoning him to a lifetime of torturous fantasies that swirled around questions never answered, heroic tasks never completed.

Expelled from Prussia, unable to work in most of the German principalities due to his criminal record, in 1821 Karl Jung fled to Paris, the capital of the recent oppressors of the German peoples. This must have seemed like the ultimate capitulation, but his retreat into the heart of his enemy, this embrace of the negation of all that he thought he was and wanted to be, would bring unintended rewards. Jung tempered his Volkish romanticism and his nationalist activism and redirected his attention and vitality to the practice of medicine. The religious zeal of the new convert that energized him in Berlin was, by necessity, submerged in Roman Catholic France. He married a Frenchwoman and learned to become more cautious politically. Career and home replaced Volkish utopianism as his primary concerns.

In Paris he had the good fortune to meet Alexander von Humboldt, next to Goethe perhaps the most famous German man of science of his age. [21] Humboldt was impressed by the young physician, and upon his recommendation Jung was able to procure work as a surgeon at the famous Hotel Dieu. In 1822, Humboldt wrote a letter recommending Jung to the medical faculty at the University of Basel in Switzerland, where Jung went on to assume the chair in surgery, anatomy, and obstetrics, rising from Dozent (lecturer) to Ordinarius (professor) within the year.

The position Jung assumed was not exactly one of the most coveted in Europe. Between 1806 and 1814, the University of Basel only produced one doctorate in medicine. For many years there was only one instructor in the medical faculty, and often lectures were given to only a single medical student and a few barber-surgeons who only required a little training in bloodletting, nail clipping, and haircutting. To his credit, Jung succeeded in modernizing medical education and research at this institution, and his lasting fame in Basel derives from this pioneering effort. By 1828, Jung was made rector of the university. He became a legendary figure in Basel, and there were many still alive who knew old Professor Doctor Karl Jung when his grandson grew up in Basel and received his own medical training at the university in the late 1890s.

But in 1822 the soul of Karl Jung was still profoundly rooted in his German homeland, and initially he felt alien among the Swiss. He was homesick most of the time, and because the people of Basel spoke their own Swiss-German dialect, he had difficulty understanding and being understood. He came to Switzerland as an exile, knowing in all likelihood he could never go home again. Although geographically close to Germany, Basel was psychologically remote, almost otherworldly, "in a comer of the world, across from the Fatherland." Perhaps most painful was his loss of national identity: "I am no longer a German," he lamented. [22]

As he threw himself into the building of new hospitals and clinics (including one for the mentally alienated), Karl Jung forged new relationships and became a prominent citizen and a relatively wealthy man. To rekindle the spirit of belonging to a brotherhood of idealists, which he missed dearly, Jung joined a powerful secret society. In time, he became its supreme leader in Switzerland.

Reconstructing the Temple of Solomon with Philosopher's Stones

Karl Jung first became acquainted with Freemasonry during his student days. There were many thriving lodges in Paris, but as a German he had little chance of joining. Opportunities were plentiful in Switzerland, however. As a stranger in a strange land, Jung gravitated naturally toward the local Masonic community as a way of assimilating into Swiss society. Then, as now, Freemasonry provided unique opportunities for making friends and advancing one's career through a network of individuals from a variety of occupations and social, political, and religious backgrounds. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, Masonic lodges were places where men could gather outside their family, their church, and bodies of government. Often driven by the ethical idealism of the Enlightenment, Masonic lodges were places where nationalists could congregate and conspire, where anti-papists could vent their spleens, and where philanthropic projects could be planned and carried out. Jung's own hospital and clinic projects in Basel were no doubt expedited by his relationships with the secret Masonic brotherhood. [23]

There was another side to Freemasonry, however: its esoteric approach to religion. Behind the not-so-secret rites and rituals, grades and degrees, breathed a very different order. Spiritual growth, Freemasons believed, was best nurtured in a secret society of those farther along the illuminated path who initiated those less enlightened.

When Karl Jung first encountered Freemasonry in Germany, it was a movement still recovering from its 1784 banning by the Bavarian government, which claimed to have discovered a radical republican conspiracy within the Illuminati, the exalted inner circle of the Masons. Bavaria made it a capital crime to recruit others to this secret society, and most of the other German governments followed suit. In Germany and in Switzerland, Freemasons continued to assemble and enact rituals under the ruse of being patriotic clubs or philanthropic societies. Not surprisingly, during the Napoleonic wars they became efficient vehicles for organizing resistance to the French.

Traditionally, the German Freemasons were split into two sometimes contentious camps. One advocated the organizational goal of fostering Enlightenment virtues of liberty, equality, and ethical universalism in the German peoples. Its ideological rival, a faction that generally referred to itself as Rosicrucian, saw itself as the bearer of the torch for the ancient theology handed down to the first Freemasons from the prisci theologi, the "pristine theologians," from whom all wisdom is derived. [24] Although Freemasonry did not emerge with any force in Germany until the 1740s, the Masonic Rosicrucians claimed that they were the keepers of occult knowledge passed to them by the ancient Rosicrucians, whose symbol was the Christian cross wrapped in roses. The wisdom of the ancients was passed from man to man in secret through a series of initiatory steps or grades or degrees. The Grand Masters were the true adepts, experts in the arcane, even allegedly gifted with healing powers and second sight.

From its inception in the mid-1600s, Freemasonry has been related to the mythology of the Rosicrucians, although there is no evidence that such a secret society ever existed. [25] The fascination with Rosicrucianism can be traced to the appearance of two anonymous pamphlets published in Cassel, the German Fama (1614) and the Latin Confessio (1615); and to a German book by Johann Valentin Andreae called the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz (The chemical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz), which appeared in 1616. The two manifestos tell the story of "Father C.R.C.," also known as "Christian Rosenkreutz," the founder of an ancient order or brotherhood -- symbolized by a red cross and a red rose -- that had been secret but now wanted new members. The appearance of these mysterious invitations ignited considerable speculation, and soon copycat secret societies were formed, many claiming to be the true keepers of the Rosicrucian flame. It was out of this Rosicrucian mania that Freemasonry was born.

The legend that Karl Jung learned in the early nineteenth century is still very much the basis of arcane Masonic lore today: the first Freemasons were the stonemasons who built the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. During the construction, some of the masons were initiated into cosmic mysteries related to geometry and mathematics and, it was later said, alchemy. Each stone they used to build the Temple was not an ordinary stone, but an alchemical Philosopher's Stone. This knowledge was passed secretly from mason to mason through the ages to the men in the medieval guilds who built the magnificent cathedrals. Together, the esoteric goal of each of the Masonic brethren was to metaphysically rebuild the sacred Temple of Solomon within each Masonic lodge. In Masonic lore, the Philosopher's Stone has many names. Sometimes it is called the Word of God, and the path of illumination is described as the search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. Throughout, we find the collective fantasy of a mutual journey, a quest, a search for the Holy Grail in its myriad manifestations. Above all, the ability to keep a secret was the key to the spiritual advancement of each individual.

In truth, Freemasonry probably did arise out of guilds of masons, and master masons did have secret handshakes and coded knowledge that apprentices would not know. Out of these guilds of skilled craftsmen emerged secret societies that transmitted philosophies about the moral and mystical interpretation of building. Eventually, these "speculative masons" ritualized the passage of knowledge within the masonic-guild structure and the practice of keeping secrets that allowed masters to recognize their members.

Unlike their brethren to the north, the Swiss lodges did not close down in the purges of the late 1780s and so were a haven for German Freemasons, both Illuminatist and Rosicrucian. When Karl Jung knew them, each, to a greater or lesser degree, continued the traditions of Freemasonry: as vanguard proponents of Enlightenment civic virtues and as an occult brotherhood united by the symbols of the rose and the cross. The secret rituals of initiation demanded the wearing of special caps and aprons, the recitation of special arcane incantations, and the mastery of the esoteric interpretations of symbols of transformation that were hewn from Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and especially alchemy -- occult philosophies thus quite familiar to Grand Master Jung. Even his personal image of God as the "eternal Space" conjures up Masonic images of the interior of the Temple of Solomon. In fact, his identity as a Freemason was so important to him that he added such traditional Masonic symbols as an alchemical gold star to the Jung family coat of arms. In the twentieth century, his grandson would paint these Masonic emblems from the family crest on the ceiling of his Tower in Bollingen. Other arcane symbols familiar to his grandfather would be carved into walls and special monuments, each stone worked by his own hands in the old way.

The rose, the cross, and the mysteries

Goethe enters our story at this point, less as an apparition than as a visitation from a god.

There were many affinities between these two contemporaries, Karl Gustav Jung and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was also a Freemason, but unlike Jung, he did not remain ardent about the veiled brotherhood for very long.

While in Weimar, Goethe applied for membership to the Amalia lodge, as it was called, in 1780. By 1782, he had risen rapidly to become a Master Mason, and in February 1783 he rose to the exalted inner circle of Illuminists. Having mastered all the secret handshakes, the Masonic myths of origin, the alchemical metaphors for personal transformation and growth, the progression of occult symbols associated with each grade -- such as a casket with the Seal of Solomon on it and an image of the Ark of the Covenant-he expressed dissatisfaction, indeed annoyance, that he had been so naive to believe that some great secret would be revealed to him if he could only reach the lofty inner circle. A few weeks after finally reaching this circle, Goethe said to a friend, "They say you can best get to know a man when he is at play and now I have reached the ark of the covenant I have nothing to add. To the wise all things are wise, to the fool foolish." [26]

Goethe later blended portions of the arcane knowledge and symbolism introduced to him through Freemasonry in Faust, but two pieces of literature in particular were more directly influenced by his gaming with the "brethren." One was a Masonic comedy, Der Gross-Cophta (The grand kophta), which he wrote in 1790. The protagonist of this play, a young knight, joins a special brotherhood that claims to be dedicated to only the most spiritual and noblest of aims. Indeed, this altruistic brotherhood believes its work is the salvation of a misguided humanity. However, the young knight soon realizes that he has been deceived and that the brotherhood has much more base and pecuniary motives. With his missionary zeal to save the souls of his fellow humans destroyed, he wonders what to do with his misspent idealism. Wisely, the young knight realizes, "Fortunate he, if it is still possible for him to find a wife or a friend, on whom he can bestow individually what was intended for the whole human race." [27]

Goethe's disillusionment with his Masonic involvement is nakedly revealed in the hard-earned wisdom of the young knight. However, his humanistic idealism and his earlier hopes for a true Holy Order of the Rose and the Cross that would unite humankind in spiritual brotherhood appear in a second work, never completed, that he called Die Geheimnisse (The mysteries). [28] Both Jungs, grandfather and grandson, committed it to their hearts.

The work begins, as all initiations do, with a quest. A certain Brother Markus is traveling through the mountains during Holy Week and seeks a place to sleep in an unfamiliar monastery. As the sun sinks behind the mountain peaks, the bells of the monastery suddenly start to ring, filling him with hope and consolation. As he nears the gates he sees a Christian cross. Suddenly, he realizes it is not the usual crucifix, but a remarkable sight that he has never seen before: a cross tightly wound with roses. "Who delivered these roses to the cross?" he wonders. The tower gate opens and Brother Markus is greeted and invited inside by a wise old man whose openness, innocence, and gestures make him seem like a man from another world. Soon Brother Markus is welcomed by a community of gray-haired knights who are too old for adventure but are proud men who have all lived life to the fullest. They have chosen to spend their remaining years in peaceful contemplation, and they accept no new brother if he is still "young and his heart has led him to renounce the world too soon."

Yet all is not in harmony at the monastery. Their founder and master, Brother Humanus, has informed his brethren that he will be leaving them soon. Brother Markus hears wondrous tales about the childhood of Humanus, which is filled with such miracles as making a spring flow out of dry stone with the touch of a sword. He is entranced by the wisdom of Humanus ("the Holy One, the Wise One, the best man I've ever laid eyes on"), but hears him relate something incomprehensible:

Von der Gewalt, die all Wesen bindet,
Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich ueberwindet

From the force that binds all beings,
The man frees himself who overcomes himself.


Brother Markus is led to a great hall and is shown something rarely seen: a ritual room -- resembling a chapel -- in which thirteen seats line the walls, one for the master of the order and twelve for the knights. Behind the seat of each knight hangs a unique coat of arms with unfamiliar symbols of faraway lands. Brother Markus sees that the seats· are arranged around a cross with rose branches wound around it. Swords and lances and other weapons are also scattered about the chamber. It is a holy place, but unlike any chapel he's ever seen. [29]

That night, Brother Markus gazes out of his window and sees "a strange light wandering through the garden." He then is astounded by the sight of three young men with torches, clad in white garments, off in the distance. Who are they? We'll never know, for here Goethe's fragment comes to its premature end.

Goethe decided to publish it as is, but in response to queries on April 9, 1816, in the prominent newspaper Morganblatt, he published a description of how Die Geheimnisse would end. The twelve knights were to each represent a different religion and nationality, and each would have then had his turn to narrate a tale about the remarkable life of Humanus. Together these stories would comprise the entire range of human religious experience, the unity of which is symbolized by this Order of the Rosy Cross. Goethe revealed that the poem would climax with the Easter death of Humanus, who then would be replaced by Brother Markus, of course, as grand master of the order.

***

Exactly one hundred years after Die Geheimnisse appeared in print, Carl Gustav Jung stood before a historic gathering of his disciples in Zurich and delivered an inspirational address that spoke almost exclusively of spiritual matters: of self-deification, of overcomings, of disturbing the Dead, and of this poem. [30] The occasion of his talk was the founding of the Psychological Club, based on the new psychological theories he derived from the insights he received from his own visions and encounters with Philemon, his spiritual master.

To describe the essence of their collective purpose, as he saw it, he invoked the Grail-knights imagery of Wagner's Parsifal and the Rosicrucian brotherhood in Goethe's fragmentary fantasy. Jung framed the Psychological Club within these ancient German motifs of holy orders of knights in search of occult knowledge, healing powers, and especially spiritual redemption. By mentioning this poem, and by invoking the spirit of Goethe, Jung was also paying homage to his ancestors, to his ancestral soul. I mean this in several senses: as homage to the Dead, to his own fathers, and to the ancestors of the Fatherland as spirits who have traveled the same paths on the same Grail quest. Further, there is good reason to believe that as he delivered this inaugural address, Carl Jung believed that his grandfather, Karl Gustav Jung, was the bastard son of the great Goethe. In an age and culture obsessed with the commanding influence of heredity and race on an individual, the possibility that Goethe was his great-grandfather was a very powerful fantasy.

Near the end of his life, however, Jung changed the story. No longer was he merely the blood-kin of the greatest genius the German Volk had produced. He believed instead that he was an eternal recurrence, an avatar, a revenant. Carl Jung believed himself to be, literally, the reincarnation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Atavisms and Illuminati

The family fable -- discounted by everyone with an amused smile, including by Carl Jung himself sometimes -- lives in the tradition of all myths of erotic union between mortal women and the gods. Many within the Jung family and without would occasionally tell the story furtively, relishing the role of an insider privy to celebrity gossip, that the mother of Professor Doctor Karl Jung had a "spring to the side" as they say in German, an extramarital tryst with Goethe that resulted in Karl, so the story goes. True or not, Carl Jung enjoyed telling this anecdote throughout his life. Its origins are not known, but there is good reason to suspect it was alive even during Karl Jung's lifetime. Jung said he first heard this story from strangers when he was a schoolboy, which must have only reinforced the possibility that it might be more than a frivolous family story.

Carl Jung marveled at the similarities between his grandfather and Goethe. Both were vital, energetic, productive men who dominated, intellectually and temperamentally, most people. Both were scientists as well as poets, influenced by Pietism in their youth and disaffected from it in their maturity. Both were Germans and Freemasons -- Illuminati, in fact -- and above all, true Romantics until the end. They both seemed larger than life, daemonic, godlike, more like forces of nature than men.

Carl Jung knew that he shared many of the temperamental qualities of his grandfather (and therefore, by extension, of Goethe). By his own admission, it was the legend of his grandfather, not the living example of his father, against which Jung constantly measured himself as a young man.

In a seminar he gave in Zurich in 1925, Carl Jung expressed his belief in the idea of "ancestor possession" -- that is, that certain hereditary units would become activated under certain circumstances in one's life, allowing the spirit of one's ancestor to then "take over" one's actions. Jung gave the example of an "imaginary normal man" who, on the surface, never indicated a capacity for leadership but in whom, when put in a position of power, the "ancestral unit" of a leader somewhere in the family past was awakened. [31] These ancestral units were a far cry from anything resembling genetics but were in sympathy with nineteenth-century biological theories that were on the verge of dying out. Jung also used this concept in a spiritualist sense. It is hard not to imagine him fantasizing about his own grandfather, and perhaps Goethe, in these terms. During the first sixty years of Jung's life, biology and spirituality were fused in ways difficult -- indeed, distasteful -- for us to imagine. And so, the scientist in Jung no doubt found support in the surviving Lamarckian currents in German biology to keep the possibility open that the inherited personality characteristics of his great-grandfather, those blinding rays of Goethe's genius, were radiating from his own personality.

But the scientist in Jung would always remain just his "number one personality," his day side, his compromise to a skeptical world that insisted on erasing magic from life, a feat as impossible to the night side of Jung' s personality as removing the stars from the evening sky. His belief in reincarnation is one of many renditions of a melody of eternal recurrence that plays throughout Jung's inner and outer lives.

Jung felt a special kinship with Goethe by age fifteen, after his first of many readings of Faust. "It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm," he recalled. [32] Faust, the learned scholar who has many doctorates but is "no wiser than before," is the seeker of truth who sacrifices the realm of the intellect to turn to the magical invocation of spirits for occult wisdom. Jung regarded Goethe's Faust as a new dispensation, a product of revelation, a contribution to the world of religious experience as a new sacred text. In 1932 he wrote in a letter, "Faust is the most recent pillar in that bridge of the spirit which spans the morass of world history, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic, the I Ching, the Upanishads, the Tao-te-Ching, the fragments of Heraclitus, and continuing in the Gospel of St. John, the letters of St. Paul, in Meister Eckhardt and in Dante." [33] In his eyes, Goethe became "a prophet," especially for confirming the autonomous reality of "evil" and "the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering." [34]

The public expression of Jung's position on reincarnation, to be found in the chapter "On Life After Death" in MDR, is that he keeps "a free and open mind" and is not "in a position to assert a definite opinion," while at the same time several cryptic pages are devoted to "hints" of his past lives. In fact, Jung says at one point, "Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance." After remarking that he has "never come across any such dreams in other persons," he has no basis for comparison and therefore chooses "not to go into it any further." He does admit, however, that "after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes." [35] But we know from archival sources that his private opinion was that these dreams confirmed to him that he had been Goethe in a previous incarnation. [36]

"I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me," Jung confessed in MDR. "Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know." [37]

Yet reincarnation implies many existences, and Jung did not end his metaphysical antecedents with Goethe. In replies to questions about his possible past lives, Jung sometimes claimed he was Meister Eckhardt. [38] Eckhardt, born in Erfurt in 1260, was considered one of the most profoundly philosophical and original of all the Christian mystics. Eckhardt (like Jung) used poetical expression and paradox to convey the meaning of his beliefs about God, which can be easily interpreted as pantheism. In 1329, Pope John XXII condemned portions of his writings as heretical.

The addition of Eckhardt to Goethe brings Jung's inner fatherland into focus. The fact that he believed in an immortal soul or life after death or even reincarnation is no revelation to those who read him, or who read between the lines of MDR. As Jung himself maintained, beliefs about such matters are always deeply subjective and inordinately personal, which is precisely why Jung's speculations about his own past lives are so revealing -- and so difficult to accept unless we first understand the worlds in which he lived, both inner and outer fatherlands.

The ethnic pattern of his incarnations is what is so important. His own logic mirrors that of his culture, and is consistent, indisputable, and racial: Jung is the perfected result of the evolution of his ancestors, whose heritage converges in him. And it is always German genius, the genius of his Volk.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:12 pm

Chapter 2: Summoning the Spirits

One month before he turned twenty, and just two after he was officially matriculated into medical school, Carl Jung began his first formal dialogues with the Dead. In June 1895, he and a circle of female kin -- like a coven of white witches -- first gathered in secrecy to contact the spirit world. He had already reached the commanding height and bulging weight that framed him throughout most of his life. His hair was cropped military short in the Prussian style. While youthful and unsure of himself, to most people he seemed stiff, perhaps a bit arrogant. Those who knew him well considered that behind his severe, sometimes contemptuous, pronouncements on people and events and his dismissive remarks -- particularly to and about women -- lay a sensitive boy playing at being a man. Girls were enthralled by his height and broad shoulders, his piercing intellect and delightful wit, his promise as a man and as a mate. And women who were a bit older than this wunderkind admired all this and more, for they sensed his acute emotional sensitivity, an alluring quality -- almost an aura -- that set him apart from most men. For his part, Jung himself was more comfortable in the company of women than in the company of men, and from this important month onward Jung often found himself presiding over groups of women, many of whom adored him.

Although Jung concealed many of the details of these youthful meet ings in his published work (sometimes contradicting himself), his experiences with spiritualism were far more important to his later world view and psychotherapeutic techniques than he would have wished those outside his inner circle to know. [1] By the time of the First World War, when Jung was developing the concepts of his psychological theories, spiritualism was resurging in popularity, but to many -- particularly to academics and medical professionals -- it still bore the taint of its history of frauds and scandals. Hence, his own public statements on the subject were always framed within the safe containers of psychiatric or philosophical jargon. He would later claim the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer and William James, or the psychiatric theories of Pierre Janet, Theodore Flournoy, or Sigmund Freud had shaped his own theories, but these were only intellectual masks for inexplicable paranormal phenomena that he himself had directly, vividly, experienced.

Jung's early encounters with the spirit world bore fruit in his later psychiatric career (especially after his final break with Freud in January 1913), but the influence of spiritualism on his early thought is apparent in the lectures he gave to his medical-school fraternity, the Zofingia, to which his father had also belonged as a student. As the noted historian of psychiatry Henri Ellenberger observed, "The germinal cell of Jung's analytic psychology is to be found in his discussions of the Zofingia Students Association and in his experiments with his young medium cousin, Helene Preiswerk." [2] Therefore, the events of 1895 marked the opening of a door that never completely closed, an invitation to countless discarnate voices and prescient entities that Jung would consult -- and teach others to consult -- for the rest of his life. Spiritualist techniques of visionary-trance induction not only introduced Jung to his deceased ancestors but also to the spirits and gods of the Land of the Dead, who, under various pseudonyms of psychological jargon, remained his traveling companions along the trails of life. Jung never lost his "will to believe," to use the words of William James, and this attracts disciples to him even now.

But June 1895 altered Jung' s fate in other ways. It brought him his first sweet, bitter tastes of lust and love. And soon, too, of death. Jung invited four female relatives to participate in an experiment at his home outside Basel, where his father was a pastor. As the cabal gathered for its first spiritualist seance, the Reverend Paul Jung lay mortally ill in bed like the longsuffering King Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal. By autumn he would take to his bed for the last time. Unlike Amfortas, Paul Jung never received the healing touch of a savior knight and, on January 28, 1896, he finally expired. Six months earlier, in September 1895, also after a period of illness, death came to Rudolph Preiswerk, the protective older brother of Jung's mother. Uncle Rudolph was the father of two of the young participants in the seances. The lingering deaths of Rudolph Preiswerk and Paul Jung were omens that presaged the dissolution of the thin barrier that separates the living from the dead.

Perhaps it was the impending demises of Rudolph Preiswerk and Paul Jung that motivated the group to experiment with spiritualism at that time, or maybe it was simply the fact that the table-tipping fad had piqued the curiosity of a group of people who already believed in the immortal soul and in a world of spirits and then sought direct proof of its existence. Certainly, the members of this particular group were ripe for such experiments, and Jung was eager to show them the way.

By the age of nineteen, as Jung claims in MDR, he had experienced remarkable divisions within his own subjective sense of self, knowing -- or guessing -- that in addition to his everyday nominal "self" or "number one personality," a deeper, older, indeed ancient, personality lay within him. This wiser and older "number two personality" was somehow connected with the ancestors, with the Dead, and with spiritual mysteries. Was it a part of his present self, a previous incarnation, or the spirit of a deceased man who possessed him? Jung was intrigued by his inner experiences of multiplicity and conquered his fears of them by earnestly seeking answers, first through books, then through his own spiritualist practices.

At forty-seven, the oldest member of the seance circle was Carl Jung's mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, whom Jung said had at least two distinct personalities. When Emilie met Paul Jung, the Preiswerks, like the Jungs, were among the most prominent families in Basel. Unlike the Jungs, who had been in Switzerland only since 1821, the Preiswerks could boast of roots going back five centuries. Yet Carl Jung's German cultural identity superseded the civilizing influences of his Swiss and Christian upbringing. [3] In an age when heredity was destiny, he was biologically guided to fulfill his karmic fate as a descendant of an important German family and as a member of the Volk. But however prominent the inherited legacy of his male ancestors, it was through the rejected mother-world, through his Swiss mother and relatives, that Jung believed he was granted the gift of second sight. From the Preiswerks he learned the techniques for his own form of mediumship, a practice he would legitimize in Zurich in 1916 with the term "active imagination."

Jung's maternal grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Preiswerk, was a man of many talents. [4] He was chief of the Protestant clergy of Basel, a professor of Old Testament exegesis and oriental languages at the Evangelical Institution in Geneva, an acclaimed Hebrew scholar, a poet, a composer of religious hymns, and a man who regularly spoke to spirits. The spirits of the Dead were everywhere among the living and could be addressed, but only if one knew their language. He believed that Hebrew was the language of heaven (he was not alone in this regard!), and he fully expected to speak to the Old Testament prophets and his savior in their divine tongue. In order to fulfill biblical prophecy, Samuel Preiswerk actively sought the return of the Jews to a homeland of their own in Palestine, and Theodor Herzl acknowledged him as an early Zionist. According to the family legends, he would talk to the spirit of his deceased first wife in weekly seances while locked in his study, much to the dismay of his second wife and the fascination of his children, including his favorite, Emilie. He taught her and his other children to stand behind him and chase away the spirits when he gave his sermons, for he and the family earnestly believed that the air around them was crowded with the chattering masses of the Dead. Emilie believed herself to have second sight, and throughout her life had precognitive dreams and other paranormal experiences that she attributed to messages from the Dead. She kept a diary, now in the possession of the Jung family, of these clairvoyant episodes. [5] Carl Jung never made any secret of the fact that, in addition to being a hysteric, his mother was also a psychic, and a good one at that.

Emilie was the youngest of the twelve children of Samuel Preiswerk's second wife, Augusta Faber, a clairvoyant and spirit-seer in her own right, whose psychic abilities appeared at the age of twenty after a dissociative crisis in which she lay for thirty-six hours in a deathlike cataleptic trance. Consistent with the treatment methods of that time, she awoke from her absent state when the tip of a red-hot iron poker was applied to the crown of her head. Upon waking, she was said to immediately begin babbling prophecies. This pattern of falling into trance and then awakening to reveal information from the world beyond was repeated throughout her life. Carl Jung believed that his mother and his daughter Agathe had inherited their psychic abilities from his grandmother Augusta.

Emilie Preiswerk Jung was closest to her brother Rudolph, and he became the official godfather of Carl Gustav Jung, Emilie's first surviving child. Rudolph himself spawned children in the double digits, including two daughters who were members of Jung's spiritualist circle: Louise (nicknamed "Luggy"), who was twenty-one when the first seance was held, and Helene, who was thirteen and a half.

Helene Preiswerk -- known throughout her life as "Helly" -- was born in 1881, the eleventh of Rudolph's fifteen children. It was apparent to everyone that she was somehow different from the lot. She was a dreamy child, difficult at times, detached yet canny. High-strung and spritelike, she had large, captivating brown eyes that held the gaze of others with an almost hypnotic urgency. Given the magical atmosphere created by the grandparents, it is not surprising that many within the Preiswerk family would have an interest in the spiritualism fad that had begun in the 1850s. Helly's encounter with spiritualism changed her life.

"We have a gifted medium in our midst"

In her 1975 book, C. G. Jung's Medium, Stephanie Zumstein-Preiswerk -- Helly's niece -- combines information from unpublished family documents with the reminiscences of her father (Helly's older brother), her mother (a school friend of Helly) and others in the Preiswerk and Jung families to construct a semifictional narrative of her aunt's career as C. G. Jung's Trilby to his Svengali. The essential information in the book fits with what we know about the histories of the Preiswerk and Jung families and seems to be a more reliable account of Jung's life between 1895 and 1903 than has previously been reported; in fact, it is more consistent with the known facts than any of Jung's own published remarks on this episode in his life.

On that fateful night in June 1895, the first seance proved more remarkable than anyone could have dreamed. Jung sat in the ring of women around the large, round wooden table, presiding nervously. As was the custom in table-tipping groups, he placed a water glass in the center. It would be disturbed if, any minute, imperceptible levitation of the table occurred. He instructed everyone to rest their hands gently on the table, and hold hands by lightly touching fingertips. After a few moments in complete silence, the air suddenly felt thick, electric. Without warning, the water glass on the table began to shake violently. Despite himself, Jung was as terrified as the rest. With great difficulty he exclaimed, "We have a gifted medium in our midst." [6] At that point, young Helly blanched and slumped back in her chair. To everyone's amazement, she began to speak.

"Grandfather visits us," she said eerily, as if she were a stranger to herself and those around her. "I must set off on a journey. Ask where he sends me. It is my place to accept." Her body then went slack, and she fell to the floor. Scared out of their wits, Jung and Luggy lifted her up and placed her on a sofa.

Jung was the first to come to his senses. "Where's Helly?" he asked the entranced girl. "Answer me, you spirit, you kidnapped her!"

Suddenly the girl sat up. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she began to respond. But her voice sounded like that of an old man. "Don't be afraid!" huskily commanded the voice. "I am with you every day, your father Samuel, who lives with God. Pray to the Lord and ask him to please make sure my grandchild reaches her goal, as she finds herself now over the North Pole in icy heights. That is the shortest way to America." Grandfather Preiswerk, the old reverend, now possessed the thirteen-year-old body of his granddaughter. Grandfather Preiswerk would be the primary spokesman during each of the first three 1895 seances, acting as a sort of spirit guide or "control" for Helly.

"Why America?" asked Jung in all seriousness. The answer he received made it apparent that, like the shamans of old, Helly's soul had left her body and had embarked on a "magical flight" in order to save the soul of another.

"Soon Helly will reach Sao Paulo. She is now flying over the Isthmus of Panama. She is to stop the Blacks (the Mestizos) from taking hold of Bertha [the older sister of Emilie and the aunt of Jung, Helly, and Luggy]."

But it was too late. Helly's soul didn't reach Brazil in time to help Bertha. In a deep voice, Grandfather Preiswerk urged them all to pray for Bertha because she had already "given birth to a little nigger" ("Berthi hat soeber ein kleines Negerlein geboren"). In 1893, Bertha had emigrated to Brazil and had, in fact, given birth to a black baby after marrying a man of mixed race. Allegedly, Helly had no knowledge of any of this prior to her first trance.

Although two Jung-Preiswerk patriarchs were fatally ill, the possible birth of "a little nigger" to Bertha -- the introduction of a "degenerate" strain into the family line -- appeared to be the greater family trauma. Now, Grandfather Preiswerk, a good Christian soldier even beyond the grave, returned on that first evening to urge those there to pray for God to forgive his fallen daughter.

A second seance was held in July. To prevent Helly from entering another deep trance in which her soul would once again fly far from her body, Jung changed the technique. This time he devised a kind of a letter board, much like the Ouija boards of today. An empty water glass would act as a planchette, moving from the center of the table onto the surrounding circle of little slips of papers containing letters and numbers. Words were spelled out letter by letter until the message became clear. Helly warned Jung that, for the second experiment, "I no longer want to travel so far." She had been exhausted after the initial seance, and this time when "Grandfather" appeared, she wanted the others to make her wishes clear to him. Helly was afraid that she would die during one of these trances if the thin thread that connected her soul to her body snapped inadvertently.

This time Helly planted two fingers of her right hand on the overturned container. The glass suddenly began to dance across the table, moving quickly from letter to letter as Jung transcribed. Once again, Grandfather Preiswerk introduced himself and told them not to be afraid. This time he brought along "Carl's grandfather, Professor Jung," who remained silent throughout the proceedings.

Following this last message, Helly sank back in her chair in a semiconscious state. Jung moved her to the sofa, where he took the pale medium's pulse. After a while she told everyone in her own voice that she had seen Grandfather Preiswerk and Grandfather Jung arm in arm in conversation like two old friends. Jung was provoked to remark, "I thought these two spirits couldn't stand one another when they were alive and that they barely knew one another."

Helly then began a bizarre narrative about seeing spirits all around her, including one that placed roses in her hands. Then she woke up fully, miffed, telling Jung he should leave, and that "He doesn't deserve the flowers." The second seance was finished. On the whole it had been much less dramatic than the first, but following Jung's urging, the group agreed to meet again.

A week later, on a hot Saturday evening in July, the spiritualist circle once again congregated around the old wooden table at the parsonage in Kleinhiiningen that had belonged to Grandfather Preiswerk. At this sitting Helly almost immediately fell -- literally -- into a trance. Jung put her on the sofa. Soon she lifted her head and said that he should leave the room. "I must report something which is not meant for his ears."

Not wishing to give in totally to her demands, Jung removed himself from the room but stood just near the door, out of sight. Helly stood up and, accompanied by vivid gesturing, claimed that her older sister Dini (Celestine) had sinned mightily and had fallen deeply from grace. (She had recently married but was about to give birth to a child scandalously soon after the ceremony.) Having made this pronouncement, Helly began to lose consciousness. With a sigh she fell into a deep sleep, lying rigidly on the sofa after becoming cadaverously pale. But she wasn't done.

"Will you forgive your sister?" intoned Helly in the voice that everyone now recognized as that of Grandfather Preiswerk. "Her body has sinned, not her spirit." Helly's grandfather then made an awful prophecy: "But the child must die. I can't save it." This proved to be uncannily true (at least according to the family legend), for near the end of August 1895 Dini gave birth to a physically defective child who died soon after birth. After a second such tragedy the following year, it was revealed that Dini had syphilis. Unable to accept this, Dini insisted that she had been bewitched by her mother-in-law.

This third seance would prove to be the last for the next two years. After Helly's father died in September, her uncle Samuel (the first child of the old reverend) had learned of Jung's experiments and forbade Helly's participation. The excuse was Helly's religious instruction for confirmation, a long process in those days. During the typical two-year period that climaxed with the reception of first communion, piety was expected to replace youthful frivolity, and special religious instruction precluded simple entertainment, let alone acting as a medium at a seance. Helly received this instruction from Samuel, who was a strict Pietist. He was also violently opposed to dabbling in spookery and did not share the fascination with contacting the dead that occupied most of his family and his disagreeable nephew, Carl.

Jung was furious. He had carefully planned the strategy of the seances and had been keeping detailed notes. To have his experiments cut off in midstream seemed tremendously unfair. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact that his father was a pastor, Jung rarely attended Sunday church services himself and instead spent the day of rest reading. But his choice of reading material was, as we shall see, highly unorthodox.

Mostly, Jung read the literature of spiritualism and of psychical research (the British Society for Psychical Research had existed since 1882 to promote the scientific study of such phenomena). Using this literature as his model, Jung's practice of scrupulously documenting the seances with Helly points to his intention to use or publish the material. The interruption of the seances compromised this long-term goal.

Helly, for her part, had wanted to continue the sessions with Jung and in the long interim found herself prone to quasi-trance states and intuitive pronouncements about poltergeists in the Jung household. To feed the flames of their interest in spiritualism, Jung sent Helly and Luggy many books on the subject, inscribing them with the date and with encouraging messages. Jung wasn't going to let go of his cousins too soon. Helly he needed as his medium; Luggy he had fallen in love with. But as she was his first cousin, this was one flower that could not fully bloom.

Other events, however, eclipsed these setbacks.? Jung began attending medical-school classes and Zofingia fraternity meetings in the latter half of 1895. In January 1896, his father died, leaving him, his mother, and his young sister without any source of income. Although he never acknowledged it in MDR, he received significant financial support for medical school from the Preiswerk family, who made sure he had opportunities to make money -- such as selling off one Preiswerk's antiques -- to pay back what they had loaned him. When a new pastor was found in April to replace Paul Jung, the family had to leave the parsonage of Kleinhuningen. Eduard Preiswerk, himself a pastor in St. Leonhard, saved the family from homelessness by placing them in a house he owned at Bottminger Mill. The Jungs lived there with Emilie's sister Auguste, Jung's "Aunt Gusteli," who was said to be like a second mother to him. Jung remained there until he moved to Zurich in December 1900.

Reading philosophy, seeking spirits

There is no doubt that during his medical-school years Jung believed in the potential of human beings to communicate with discarnate or otherworldly entities. Yet the usual grounding of spiritualist practices in Christian beliefs left him cold. His disillusionment with Christian dogma and ritual fueled his skepticism about the veracity of the all-too-Christian messages that were usually sent from beyond the grave. Could there be a non- Christian spirit world? And if so, what would this say about the true nature of religion and its place in the everyday lives of human beings? How could the monotheism of his own Judeo-Christian civilization be reconciled with evidence of a polydaemonic spirit world? And what would the greater implications of such evidence be for the nature of individual human existence? His relentless curiosity about these questions in his early twenties led him along some unusual paths.

Jung realized that he needed to put the mediumistic phenomena of Helly into a wider intellectual context outside traditional Christian thought. He began to read ravenously on a variety of subjects that were clearly far beyond the medical texts he was required to study. Particularly after the death of his father in January 1896, Jung read widely in the traditional Protestant theology of his day, heterodox theological works (David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan on the "historical Jesus"), Christian mysticism (Meister Eckhardt, Jakob Boehme, Nicholas Cusanus, the eighteenth-century spiritualist theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, the romantic mysticism of Gustav Fechner), Pietist autobiographies (Jung- Stilling), philosophy (Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Plato, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and, by 1898, Friedrich Nietzsche), German Romantic natural philosophy (Goethe, Carl Gustav Carus, Josef Goerres, F.W.J. Schelling), and evolutionary biology (Lamarck, Darwin, Ernst Haeckel).

Psychiatric texts -- especially the works of French alienists of the "dissociationist" school who studied hypnosis, hysteria, and multiple personalities, men such as J. M. Charcot, Pierre Janet, Theodule Ribot, Alfred Binet, and Theodore Flournoy -- were a small part of his extracurricular reading. Of course, they became a special area of focus after December 1900, when Jung's psychiatric career formally began at the time he assumed a position in Zurich at the Burgholzli hospital for mental disorders.

Jung's most extensive readings, however, were in occultism, mesmerism, psychical research, and spiritualism, all areas that touched upon deep personal concerns. The existence of the human soul and its survival after death were open questions that still required answers, and during his medical-school days his heroes were psychical researchers who approached this problem scientifically, such as William Crookes, J.C.F. Zoellner, Cesare Lombroso, F.W.H. Myers, and William James. [8] All of them speculated about a medium outside of the known constraints of time, three-dimensional space, and causality that would account for such phenomena as thought transference and precognition. Some argued that evidence for such phenomena also supported the hypothesis of postmortem survival or the existence of other realities coexistent with our own. Zoellner, for example, in Transcendental Physics (1879), hypothesized the existence of a "fourth dimension" of reality as a place from which "four dimensional beings" occasionally entered our experiential world through the filter of the symbolic contents of our own memories and mind, an idea that Jung reworked again and again throughout a lifetime of speculation on parapsychological phenomena. [9] Indeed, we can only conclude that Jung's encounter with his spiritual guru Philemon during the First World War derived from his youthful desire to communicate with the sorts of fourth-dimensional beings that Zoellner claimed were likely to exist.

Jung was single-minded in his pursuit of a particular kind of knowledge. It appears that even his extensive readings in philosophy were guided primarily by his quest for a true understanding of the human soul and the conditions under which postmortem survival was possible. Jung felt that the opinions of respected philosophers legitimized the unconventional obsessions that set him apart from many of his fellow students and from the majority of the scientific community. Although he claimed throughout his life that Kant and Schopenhauer were major influences on his ideas about the nature of the unconscious mind, it is primarily their writings on the spirit world that he had in mind, not their major works that are traditionally studied. Jung was never a very sophisticated student of philosophy, and most of his philosophical knowledge was absorbed secondarily and only as it pertained to the survival of the human soul beyond the body and the three dimensions of conscious human experience.

Kant's analysis of the prophetic experiences of the Swedish clairvoyant Emanuel Swedenborg, a little book entitled Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), [10] was a particular favorite of Jung's during these years, and he mentioned it in his Zofingia lectures and in his earliest publications. Kant's discussion of how experiences of the future can be obtained in the present even though they violate the known a priori categories of experience of space, time, and causality became the basis of all subsequent discussions of paranormal phenomena throughout the nineteenth century. As for Schopenhauer, the one work that Jung seemed to be most familiar with was his Essay on Spirit-Seeing (1851), which affirmed the validity of hypnotic phenomena and clairvoyance. Schopenhauer offers the theory that all visions of future events are "allegorical or symbolical" [11] -- that is, they are filtered through the personal memories and symbolic system of the individual clairvoyant. Furthermore, according to Schopenhauer, all visions of the Dead are merely clairvoyant visions of a "past reality," an ability he calls "retrospective second sight," and are not to be regarded as proof of a living spirit world. [12] Yet based on evidence that the "will" operates independently of time and space and can affect others at a distance, Schopenhauer leaves open the possibility of a spiritual existence not dependent on the body.

Jung-Stilling, animal magnetism, and the spirit world

The theory of animal magnetism and the practice of trance induction and of magnetic healings and exorcisms flourished in the popular culture of France and Germany at this time. Many early nineteenth-century German natural philosophers, often physicians by training, experimented with mesmerism to learn about the forces of nature and the cosmos without embracing the spiritualist uses of such techniques. However, the more widely read researchers did explore the spirit world through mesmerism, and this literature was familiar to Jung during his student years. As we know from his own published statements and the recollections of colleagues from that time, two books from this genre were of singular importance to him.

The first of these was written by Johann Heinrich Jung, the Pietist, under his pseudonym Heinrich Jung-Stilling, and appeared in 1808 as Theorie der Geister-Kunde (roughly, The theory of spiritualism). [13] It is a curious book, blending Christian dogma and speculations about the spirit world in a way that echoes the works of Swedenborg. Anecdotal, almost folkloric, fully three quarters of it is filled with wondrous tales of second sight, prophecies that came true, precognitive dreams, and, especially, ghost stories. The rest focuses on his own encounter with animal magnetism, and fifty-five propositions that he derived from his researches. [14]

Jung-Stilling reports on his experiments with animal magnetism, putting subjects into trances and observing the resulting phenomena. For Jung-Stilling, a Pietist and an old hand at the psychological techniques of directing his attention to his internal fantasy world, the "magnetic visions" induced through mesmerist procedures had the ring of familiarity. Many still considered animal magnetism a viable scientific theory to explain certain psychophysical phenomena that fit with new knowledge about galvanism, electricity, magnetism, and the luminiferous ether that excited the scientific community. As Carl Jung would also argue in an 1897 lecture, Jung-Stilling points to the scientific evidence of mesmeric and paranormal phenomena as evidence that the human soul could exist independent of the body. Proposition nine of Jung-Stilling's grand theory states that "Animal Magnetism undeniably proves that we have an inward man, a soul, which is constituted of the divine spark, the immortal spirit possessing reason and will, and of a luminous body which is inseparable from it." [15] In proposition thirteen he assures his readers that all of his propositions are scientific because they are derived from "certain inferences which I have drawn from experiments with animal magnetism." Furthermore, "these most important experiments undeniably show that the soul does not require the organs of sense in order to see, hear, smell, taste and feel, in a much more perfect state; but with this great difference, that in such a state, it stands in much nearer connexion with the spiritual than the material world." [16] Human experience, even of the transcendent, is mediated through our psychic reality of the five senses, according to Jung-Stilling, and so spirits and other extramundane "beings" of "the created world" do not appear to us in their true state (as they are "organized" differently), but reflect our own psychophysical "organization" of reality. However, Jung-Stilling did warn in propositions twenty-three and twenty-four that it was a sin to use these trances to foretell the future or to communicate with spirits, even though such trances made this possible. By the time he began his own experiments with spiritualism, its alleged "sinfulness" would have been no real concern to Carl Jung.

Jung-Stilling distinguishes the "real" experience of apparitions of the Dead from mere "visions," which are waking dreams that exist only in the imagination and hence are "unreal." However, as Jung would also argue a century later, there are some people who are predisposed to visions, but their inclination also opens a door to other dimensions of reality that allow them to see apparitions and divine the future. "Hysterical and hypochondriacal persons are inclined to visions," Jung-Stilling wrote. "They have them either with or without fits ... [They] develop their faculty of presentiment, so that they easily come into connexion with the invisible world. Every thing is then jumbled together, and much knowledge and experience is necessary to distinguish a vision from a real apparition." [17]

When psychiatrists and psychologists began to study spiritualist mediums at the end of the nineteenth century within the prevailing medical theories, terms such as "hysteria," "hypnosis," "dissociation," and "doubling of personality" were used to explain the pathological basis of the mediums' personalities and trances. Even Jung, who in 1902 devoted his doctoral dissertation to this issue, believed that spiritualist mediums may or may not have genuine psychic abilities, but they all share an affliction with hysteria. It is clear that Jung had made these connections between hypnosis, hysteria, and spiritualism long before he ever read a single psychiatric textbook.

The Seeress of Prevorst

Jung-Stilling's long-forgotten book is an important clue to Jung's earliest beliefs about the nature of personal reality. Yet of the vast, strange literature on spiritualism it was Justinius Kerner's extensive case history of a young clairvoyant woman in the German town of Prevorst that became Jung's model for his very first publication as an alienist. This book, Die Seherin von Prevorst (1829), also became Helly's training manual for mature trance mediumship. [18] Jung had given it to his cousin for her fifteenth birthday in 1896. Although not much of a reader, Helly reread Kerner's account of the most famous medium of the early nineteenth century many times.

It is not hard to see why Carl Jung and his cousin were so fascinated by this book. Kerner employs language that has a psychological ring to it. In his detailed descriptions of the "inner world" of the Seeress and her "inner eyes" or "spiritual eyes" that allowed her to witness apparitions, we find precursors to Jung's later attempts to reductively psychologize paranormal experiences in public statements, while in private pursuing the possibility of communication with the Dead. Many of Jung's later paradoxical opinions concerning the tension between the nature of "psychic reality" (our experienced psychological reality) and the actual reality of spirits and the spirit world can be traced directly to this book, although its contents are virtually unknown to most people interested in Jung and his ideas.

Justinius Kerner, the impresario of the seeress, was the appointed city physician of the town of Weinsberg in the German state of Wurttemberg. He was also a minor Romantic poet and the host of a salon that brought philosophers, theologians, writers, poets, and even royalty to his home for stimulating conversations. As part of his medical therapies he on occasion "magnetized" his patients and, if they were deemed to be spiritually possessed, he performed his own exorcisms.

On November 25, 1826, a twenty-five-year-old married woman, Frau Friedericke Hauffe, was brought to Kerner at his home, gravely ill: skeletal, pale, barely breathing, and wrapped in a white gown like that of a nun. He had treated her once before in her own town of Prevorst, but with no real success. For the previous five years she had suffered from a multitude of physical and psychological complaints of unknown cause: intermittent headaches and other bodily pains, paroxysmal "spasms" of writhing in her bed, fevers, night sweats, diarrhea, crying fits, gums that bled to the point that she lost all her teeth, reclusiveness, and, most mysteriously, somnambulisms or trancelike episodes. During these latter "magnetic" episodes of illness she would regularly see the spirits of the Dead near her, particularly family members and people from her village. Sometimes she had visions that presaged the deaths of others, in one instance seeing an image of a coffin with her paternal grandfather in it six weeks before his death. She foretold her own death in a similar vision three weeks before it happened. The "magnetic passes" of the hands of local physicians over her body and trials of homeopathic remedies calmed her for a while, but then misfortune intervened. In February 1823, she gave birth to her first child, but it died in August, plunging her into a depression that rendered her almost comatose, indeed being "so much afflicted, that she became cold and stiff as a corpse." Bathing and other standard treatments of the day helped to revive her, but, according to Kerner, "she always lay as in a dream." [19]

In the three-year period just prior to being brought to Kerner, Hauffe began to develop the talents that would eventually evolve into the later manifestations that made her famous as the Seeress of Prevorst. For example, as she lay in bed in her home she claimed that "she heard and felt what happened at a distance," and since she had become "so sensible to magnetic influences" the nails in the walls of her room had to be removed because they irritated her. She also became hypersensitive to light and avoided it at all costs, traveling only in enclosed carriages. It was also during this period that she developed the gift of ghost-seeing, and "for the first time, she began to see another person behind the one she was looking at," often viewing the Dead in the company of the living in the roles of guardians or "protecting spirits." [20] She claimed to have no organic strength of her own but instead survived only by "magnetically" drawing life force from others through her eyes and fingertips. "She admitted that she gained most strength from the eyes of powerful men." [21] Others felt themselves being drained of energy in her presence, as if they were victims of a psychic vampire.

After other physicians treated her "magnetically" and gave her special powders and amulets -- all to no avail -- Kerner was finally summoned. Suspicious of all the previous medical attempts, especially magnetic ones, he immediately ordered that such methods be stopped until he could observe her at length. He had come reluctantly to Prevorst because he had long heard the gossip about her and doubted that he could help her, as he believed she was a hopeless malingerer. "I had never seen her," Kerner wrote, "but I had heard many false and perverted accounts of her; and I must confess that I shared the world's opinions, and gave credit to its lies." [22] Kerner came and went, leaving instructions with a local physician for a new regimen of treatments. It soon became clear that the special tonics he had ordered were not working. Her friends attempted their own exorcism of the "demoniacal influence" through long prayer vigils. Finally, said Kerner, "much against my will, they brought her to Weinsberg to see if anything could be done for her there."

Friedericke Hauffe remained at Kerner's consulting room for almost three years. No one could have predicted the curious therapeutic relationship that developed between the doctor and his patient, an experience that transformed both healer and patient and made them two of the most famous people of the nineteenth century.

The story of their celebrated collaboration began with a therapeutic innovation by Kerner that later became a standard psychotherapeutic technique: allowing the patient to express her own thoughts and needs. One day when Hauffe had lapsed into a dissociative trance state, Kerner suspected that he could communicate with an intelligent source within the patient despite the deep disturbance in her sense of self. Simply, he asked her what course of treatment she thought might be helpful, and thus began the pattern of the Seeress prescribing her own treatments. Not surprisingly, she often recommended mesmeric treatments, which then seemed to lead to a recovery of strength the next day. Kerner carefully recorded her reactions to various materials, such as magnetized and unmagnetized water, a spider's web, metals, laurel leaves, minerals, plants, precious gems, and even animal parts thought to have healing properties, such as the hoof of an elephant (which produced an epileptic fit in her), the nipples of a horse, and the tooth of a wooly mammoth.

The few details we know about Hauffe's personal history do not provide many clues to the origins of her later career. Kerner tells us that she was the daughter of a gamekeeper in Prevorst. She had little formal education other than what she gleaned from her Bible and psalm book. Kerner points this out because the Seeress's sophisticated prophecies and verse compositions are seemingly inconsistent with this lack of significant formal education. To Kerner and others this seemed compelling evidence for the ability of trance states to give people access to ancient spiritual mys teries or to higher forms of knowledge. (Jung made similar, if less plausible, disclaimers about his own patients' lack of formal education or prior exposure to occult symbolism or mythological themes when arguing for the existence of an impersonal or collective unconscious that he believed was the true source of such symbols.)

Hauffe's strange ability to diagnose the physical conditions of others by looking into their left eye and then to prescribe successful courses of treatment brought a steady stream of people to her for consultations. Although practically bedridden, she enjoyed the repeated visits of the theologians David Friedrich Strauss and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as well as meetings with philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling, Josef Goerres, Franz von Baader, Adam Carl August von Eschenmayer, and Gotthilf von Schubert. Many of these visitors later wrote about their impressions of the Seeress and, accepting her phenomena as genuine, several contributed their own theories on the origins and significance of what they observed. Jung read, and in most cases owned, these commentaries.

One of the more interesting psychological theories put forth by the Seeress herself was the notion that subjective emotional states could be externalized and perceived, symbolically, as apparitions. Hauffe insisted that everyone had a "protecting spirit" who stood behind them at all times-in her case, her deceased grandmother. However, when she saw apparitions hovering around another person, "sometimes this appeared to be his protecting spirit, and at others the image of his inner self." [23] Later, in his formal public statements, Jung always adopted a "psychological" explanation for ghosts and apparitions and seemingly clairvoyant visions. But in private Jung spoke quite differently.

Among the most mysterious pronouncements of the Seeress of Prevorst were her decidedly unorthodox metaphysical theories about the spiritual nature of human beings. Borrowing a compass from Kerner one day, she drew a series of elaborately designed concentric circles to represent the shades of spiritual existence and the passage of time. Of these were eight idiosyncratic "sun circles" and one "life circle," which represented her own life. The rings of the circles corresponded, in part, to areas of "magnetic" influence over the body. In many respects they resembled diagrams of the planetary orbits of the solar system, or cross-sections of the Earth. These diagrams made a powerful impression on both Helly Preiswerk and her older cousin, and similar illustrations appeared in Jung's publications throughout the next sixty years.

On August 5, 1829, after failing to recover from one of her many physical crises, the Seeress of Prevorst died. The following night, Justinius Kerner saw her and two other female forms in a dream, relieved that in the spirit world she had "apparently perfectly recovered." [24] An autopsy revealed abnormalities in the heart, liver, and gall bladder, but Kerner was quick to emphasize to his readers that the postmortem found absolutely no abnormalities in her brain or nervous system.

Kerner's descriptions of the extraordinary states of consciousness of the Seeress -- states of mind that seemed to offer the promise of direct contact with the Dead or, perhaps, access to genius -- tempted the curious and the bored, believers and doubters, to open the same doors of perception. [25] Some -- like Helly Preiswerk and Carl Jung -- opened doors that they quickly discovered they could never close again.

A return to the "border zones"

In autumn 1897, the spirits returned to the Jung household.

Confirmed as a Christian in good standing, Helly was able to resume the most important role of her young life. She was especially eager to once again be the center of Jung's attention. She didn't hesitate when he approached her about resuming the seances, although there was considerable pressure from her uncle and her mother to keep away from such things. This time additional deception was required. According to her niece, Helly used the excuse that she was going to the Jung home to work in the garden. [26]

Although the early trials were experimental, exploratory, Jung had mastered the spiritualist literature and had received just enough scientific training to see the greater possibilities inherent in this project. In fact, Jung had already given two lectures to the Zofingia fraternity that demonstrated his budding theoretical views on spiritualist phenomena. [27] He felt confident enough in the reality of spiritualist phenomena and in his opinions about their great religious and scientific significance that he zealously defended such ideas in a community of his peers. Jung turned the seances from a parlor game into a more serious affair, at times inviting his medical-student colleagues to witness Helly's phenomena and to make their own judgments.

In the new series of seances, Helly's trances took on an entirely new character. Grandfather Preiswerk receded in importance as Helly's "control" spirit, and instead a crowd of deceased personages took turns speaking to the group. Some of these were based on actual historical persons, others claimed to be barons and baronesses who seemed to have fictitious names. At one point, Helly mediumistically produced the greatgrandmother of Jung' s who had been seduced by Goethe.

Over and above this flood of new contacts, the spirit known as "Ivenes" eventually took over Helly's trances. Ivenes was described as a small, sensitive, dark-haired Jewish woman who was morally pure ("snow white"), a wise, mature personality. A novel feature of these new communications from Ivenes was the theory of reincarnation. Ivenes, through Helly, claimed to be the Seeress of Prevorst, as well as a fifteenth-century woman who she said was burned at the stake as a witch, a female Christian martyr executed in Rome during the reign of Nero, and a paramour of King David. She claimed to have had numerous children in all of these incarnations, and in her "romances," as Jung later called them, she created detailed genealogies and marvelous tales of her past lives. Ivenes even claimed that she traveled between the stars and had visited Mars, and she described in great detail the Martians and their highly developed civilization. Helly now began to arouse Jung's suspicions.

A popular book of the 1890s was Camille Flammarion's pseudoscientific speculations on the Martian civilization that had created the famous canals that many astronomers claimed to see on the red planet's surface. [28] When Jung realized that Helly was concocting her romances from things she had heard or read, everything he had believed about the spirit world through the seances was thrown into confusion.

Jung realized that much of the personality of Ivenes was based on the figure of the Seeress of Prevorst in Kerner's book. By giving Helly a copy of the book, Jung had inadvertently created Ivenes. He learned a valuable lesson about the power of "hidden memories" and textual material to reemerge in an entirely novel form in consciousness. In fact, material that one has "forgotten" can reappear in thoughts, fantasies, or dreams and have all of the emotional force and visual clarity of actual memories. At the turn of the century, this quite normal phenomenon was called "cryptomnesia," literally "hidden memories." With Helly, Jung saw for the first time that amalgams of forgotten memories can, under certain circumstances, be reorganized into alternate personalities that seem to have an authentic life of their own independent of the ego of an individual. Despite his awareness of the influence of cryptomnesia on Helly's performances while he observed them, however, he did not use such psychological terminology to characterize them until he completed his medical training. More significant, he was later to deny seemingly clear cases of cryptomnesia that if acknowledged would threaten his most central theories.

Miraculous explosions, acts of love, acts of fraud

In the autumn of 1898, the table around which Jung and Helly led their spiritualist seances suddenly cracked down the middle. [29] Within weeks, a bread knife, inherited by Jung's mother from her father, suddenly exploded into four pieces. Jung later mounted these pieces and kept them in a safe in his home as a lifelong reminder of the powerful forces he and his kin had summoned during their seances.

The seances came to an abrupt halt for several reasons. First, according to Jung, Helly had fallen in love with him, and it became clear to him that she was faking many of the manifestations of her trances in order to keep him interested in her. [30] Second, Jung's own increasing sophistication in the natural sciences was leading him to reevaluate his extreme antimaterialism. In nineteenth-century concepts such as a "vital force," he began to see a more biologically based starting point for his own thinking about spirituality. [31] But third, and most important, after one of these final seances Helly's mother was startled at her daughter's exhaustion and feared for her health. She accused Jung and his mother of harming Helly. After a period of depression, Helly left Basel to learn dressmaking in Montpellier, France, and then in Paris. Although Jung spent time with Helly in Paris in 1902, he would never completely patch up his relationships with the Preiswerks and later wrote derisively of them.

Helly died of tuberculosis a few days before her thirtieth birthday, in November 1911. Although Jung later claimed that in the last few months of her illness her mind slowly disintegrated, regressing her to the level of a two-year-old, the Preiswerks denied this. According to her niece Stephanie Zumstein-Preiswerk, "she died of a broken heart" [32] -- a heart that Carl Jung broke, as we shall see, in more ways than one.

***

What, then, are we to make of this early spiritualist period in the life of Carl Jung? Some things seem abundantly clear.

Jung took these spiritualist experiments so seriously that the ideas from them held sway over him longer than most of the instruction he received in medical school. Unquestionably, he felt that through Helly's mediumistic trances he was receiving knowledge from an intelligent source beyond Helly herself. Whenever they appeared, Jung acknowledged the various personalities that emerged during Helly's performances as real and always attempted to engage them in dialogue. At least for a time, Jung regarded some of these experiences as authentic contact with discarnate entities. [33] Eventually, he realized that much of this may have been merely the cryptomnesiac products of Helly's own mind. But Jung's very personal approach to Helly's personifications or splinter personalities -- or spirits -- later characterized his conception of the unconscious human mind. Whereas Freud approached the products of the unconscious mind as hieroglyphs to be deciphered, Jung always regarded them as the starting point for a dialogue. For Jung the unconscious would always be a source of higher knowledge beyond the confines of time and three-dimensional space, and one could establish a personal relationship with the voices and images of one's unconscious, one's inner Land of the Dead.

But long before the First World War, when Jung again led others into the Land of the Dead, he endured several years of scientific doubt and relative skepticism about the reality of spirits. During these first years of Jung's psychiatric career, a career cruelly built on the sacrifice of Helly's social reputation, the spirits were transformed. Jung renamed them. The spirits became "complexes," and the spirit world became "the unconscious." Until when, in Zurich in 1916, once again the unconscious became the home of the ancestors, the inner fatherland, the realm of the gods.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

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Chapter 3: Hidden Memories

Die Kunst bluht, die Kunst ist an der Herrschaft,
die Kunst streckt ihr rosenumwundenes Zepter
uber die Stadt hin und lachelt. ...
Munchen leuchtete.

Art blossomed, art reigned, art extended its
rose-covered scepter over the city, and smiled.
. . . Munich was radiant.
-- Thomas Mann, "Gladius Dei," 1902


Early December in Munich is always brisk. The royal blue Bavarian sky never seems more open. But the skies were gray and drizzling during the first days of December 1900, when Doctor Carl Gustav Jung emerged from his sleepy Gasthaus with the excitement of being in the most bohemian cultural metropolis in the Germanic world west of Vienna. [1]

For only the second time in his life Carl Jung was in a foreign country. (Once, as a gymnasium schoolboy, he had hiked the Alsatian countryside of France, making a special effort to see the military fortification at Belfort designed by Vauban.) [2] But when he stepped off the train in Munich, fresh from passing his state medical exams, he entered a brief but pivotal liminal period, a juncture between two lives.

Up to now he had merely been a student in provincial Basel, living with his mother and sister on the brink of poverty, surviving only by the grace of the Preiswerks' charity. Now, he was in cosmopolitan Munich, away from his old existence, completely a new man. He enjoyed registering as a doctor at his humble lodgings and thrilled at being addressed as such by the proprietor. He looked forward to the tenth of December, when he would be expected to assume his first real job as an alienist at the famous Burgholzli research hospital for mental disorders in Zurich. But first, in Munich, he wanted to indulge his passions for art and archeology.

Then, as now, the traditional heart of Munich lay along the grand Ludwigstrasse, which is lined with the yellow and tan imperial structures built throughout the nineteenth century by the kings of Bavaria: the royal library, the various royal offices of state, and the university. The upper end of Ludwigstrasse was capped by the Siegestor, the "Victory Arch" that mirrored the design of the Arch of Constantine in Rome. To the north and to the west of the Siegestor was the infamous "artistic" district of Schwabing, filled with young painters and poets and novelists and adventurers who were creating new artistic styles in their studios and hatching utopian schemes in their coffeehouses. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Paul Klee and Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George lived there, just blocks from Russian expatriates such as Wassily Kandinsky and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov -- Lenin -- who sometimes could be seen with a cue stick in hand at the old billiards salon on Schellingstrasse. The twenty-five-year-old Jung, a mildly talented illustrator and painter of watercolor landscapes in his own right, was naturally attracted to Schwabing. [3]

Ludwigstrasse ends at Odeonsplatz, next to the royal palace. In the Odeonsplatz is a monument known as the Feldherrnhalle or "Gallery of the Marshalls," a large Florentine arched gallery that encases the statues of two Bavarian military heroes. When Jung visited Munich that winter, among the grandest shows in the city were the military parades, with marching bands, held at noontime thrice weekly in front of the Feldherrnhalle. Fascinated with military fortifications and with the ceremonialism of martial rituals since childhood, Jung's periodic military training in the Swiss army had only increased his love of military parades and music. At the Feldherrnhalle he could see the imperial military prowess of the Kaiser and the relatively new nation of Germany on vivid, muscular display.

West of the Feldherrnhalle sits the cluster of museums at Koenigsplatz. Here, in an edifice resembling an ancient Roman temple, stands the Glyptothek, the world-famous museum that drew Jung so far from home. There Jung was in the presence of the gods.4 Fantastic, alluring, frightening statues, reliefs, and busts of Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman divinities filled every one of the marbled rooms. He recognized some of them from books on archeology he had read since childhood and from the illustrations he had been forced to copy in drawing class as a schoolboy. These were the ancient ones invoked by Goethe and Schiller, Heine and Nietzsche. Yet the old gods had never seemed so real, so possible.

In the Hall of Bacchus he saw the famous Greek statue known as the Barberini Faun and compelling hermaphroditic figures and images of Dionysian orgies in which the god led swooning, dancing young madwomen known as maenads in flowing, processional revelry. Here, too, were images of satyrs and the great satyr-god Pan, upon which Christian images of the devil were based. Jung, with his small-town Protestant upbringing, could not but have felt that he was in the presence of something a bit obscene and forbidden -- something Nietzschean. [5]

Next, Jung walked north along Arcisstrasse to the art museums known as the Alte Pinothek and the Neue Pinothek. In the Alte Pinothek he saw many famous paintings and drawings by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Holbein, Raphael, and da Vinci that he had read about. Here, too, he saw the woodcuts and paintings of the revered German artist Albrecht Durer, including his famous self-portrait of 1500 in which he resembles familiar images of Christ.

In the Neue Pinothek, Jung studied many examples of the contemporary art nouveau, known in Germany as Jugendstil or "youth-style" (so named because the Munich cultural journal Jugend had popularized it). Here, too, were representative works of some members of the artistic community known as the Munich Secession, whose fantastic and erotic themes signaled a conscious reaction against the traditional Roman Catholic social milieu of Bavaria that had kept freedom of artistic expression to a minimum. [6] The leader of this movement, whose images would long influence Jung, was the Munich painter and sculptor Franz Stuck. [7]

Stuck stunned the public in the 1890s with his decorative Symbolist paintings of mythological themes, many of which were frankly erotic. He played with traditional religious motifs and made them more consonant with the neoromantic and neopagan spirit of the times. In 1891, in a painting called Pieta (not at the Neue Pinothek in 1900), Stuck added a Volkish twist to the famous image of the grief-stricken Mary standing next to the body of Jesus by depicting him, like Wagner's Siegfried, with blond hair and beard. [8] In 1898 he built a large neo-Classical house (known as Villa Stuck) on the Prinzregentstrasse. Here, in this spiritual container, he lived and loved and gave form to his fantasies. He created his own universe of the imagination, as he termed it, filling the ceilings and walls with his own murals and erecting a marble structure adorned with his art that he called his "Sin Altar." The centerpiece of this pagan altar was a copy of a painting of his that had been the main attraction at the Neue Pinothek in December 1900, the chillingly erotic work entitled Die Sunde (Sin).

Bought and displayed by the museum just after he painted it in 1893, Die Sunde depicts the shadowy nude upper torso of a woman who gazes out at us, but who is partly obscured by a thick black and green snake that has wrapped itself around her body. Jung mentioned this painting early in the first part of his famous WandJungen und Symbole der Libido, [9] and the Christian lapsarian themes of Stuck's painting reappear in a series of trans formative visions Jung experienced in December 1913. This painting, which could only be seen in Munich, had a profound effect on him.

These were the images that later fueled Jung's fantasies as he traveled to Zurich to begin a new life: a phantasmagoria of gods, nymphs, satyrs, and sin.

But for a brief time-a very brief time-he forgot them.

"The monastery of the world"

Jung began his career at the Burgholzli clinic as an asylum psychiatrist on December 10, 1900, and left in the spring of 1909. [10] During this time he lived in an apartment in the large hospital (his new wife, Emma, joining him there in 1903), as did the other four or five physicians on staff there, including the noted chief, Eugen Bleuler, who would first publish the term "schizophrenia" in 1908. [11] Throughout Jung's tenure, foreign physicians rotated through the Burgholzli to learn the latest scientific techniques in psychiatry; these included many exiled Russian doctors and many German, Austrian, Hungarian, British, and American physicians, some of whom became prominent in the psychoanalytic movement in the decades to follow.

Jung assisted Bleuler with the pioneering clinical research at the Burgholzli on dementia praecox (later called schizophrenia), manic-depressive illness, alcoholism, and, later, hysteria. Among the patients were a fair number suffering from something called the "general paralysis of the insane," the psychotic and vegetative disorder caused by the tertiary stages of syphilis. It was here, among the inpatient population of the largest asylum in Switzerland, that Carl Jung received his training in the diagnosis and, later, treatment of mental disorders.

Since many, if not most, mental disorders were considered at that time to be diseases caused in part by hereditary degeneration, Jung and his colleagues were cloistered in a veritable hothouse of human degeneracy twenty-four hours a day. New physicians at such asylums saw things few outsiders could even imagine. Constant exposure to the bizarre delusions and hallucinations of psychotic individuals, to the flotsam and jetsam of human existence, to the sight of raw sexual acts and overt seductions, and to irrational responses to reasonable questions could only have a subtle but seductive destabilizing effect on the rigid, intellectualizing, bourgeois young men who were the standard-bearers in Western European civilization's war against degeneracy. To preserve their virtue and sanity, the clinical staff took vows of abstinence from alcohol and focused their minds on their scientific work in what Jung called "the monastery of the world." Although the transition was difficult, he joined them in "a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal." [12] Such dedication would make the experimental psychiatric research at the Burgholzli world renowned in the years following Jung's arrival, and, by 1906, by age thirty-one, Jung himself would be famous throughout Europe, England, and America as a promising young scientist.

The central topic that obsessed the researchers at the Burgholzli was human memory. Specifically, they were interested in how certain disorders of memory could be measured through experimental means. After analyzing patterns in the data, they applied this knowledge to the development of techniques for the differential diagnosis of mental disorders. They were on the right track. As so much of modern research in cognitive neuroscience has suggested, the laws governing the processes of human memory are also the keys to unlocking the mysteries of human consciousness. Our conscious experience of a self that is continuous through time is dependent on our memory processes, and any disruption of the normal functioning of human memory may also disrupt our normal sense of identity or self. Since such disruptions were common in all mental disorders, it made perfect sense to focus on them.

Memory was also seen as the central problem of heredity and evolutionary biology. Why do children look like their parents? And why are they also different from them? Biologically, what is "remembered" from one generation to the next? The problem of evolution soon became the problem of distortion in biological memory. Richard Semon, an associate of Jung's at the Burgholzli, began to examine the problem of inherited memories (through a vehicle called the "mneme," akin to our modern notions of a "memory trace") and published his theories in 1904 and 1909. [13] Like Ernst Haeckel and many others, including Freud and Jung, Semon was a Lamarckian who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He believed that human memory and hereditary mechanisms were two aspects of an underlying process of "organic memory," first theorized in 1870 by the German psychophysiologist Ewald Hering. [14] The common acceptance of the theoretical construct of a gene as the biological unit of hereditary transmission in the nucleus of each cell did not take hold until 1909 or so, and since DNA did not enter the picture until the 1950s, the biological mechanism for the transmission of hereditary information from one generation to another was largely a mystery for most of Jung's life. Jung's speculations about the organic or genetic or hereditary basis of his theories-even that of the collective unconscious (1916) -- were thus worked out within the conceptual framework provided by Richard Semon and Ewald Hering.

Within hours after Jung had been met at the train station on December 10, 1900, by Bleuler, he was given the task of learning to use a psychological test that had been employed for at least a decade. This was the famous word-association test in which a subject was asked to give unrehearsed, spontaneous one-word responses to stimulus words. [15] A third person, sometimes a trusted patient, kept notes of the reaction time to each stimulus word with the use of a stopwatch. Additional data were collected by hooking subjects up to devices that measured galvanic skin response (electrical activity on the skin) and breath and heart rates -- all assumed to be physiological measures of anxiety and arousal. It was thought -- and Jung pioneered some of this research -- that such tests could have forensic applications, and indeed our modern polygraph tests are based on the technology that was fine-tuned at the Burgholzli. From 1901 until 1909, Jung conducted the program of experimental research using the word-association test, sometimes using himself and his colleagues as "normal" subjects in the published accounts of the experiments.

Jung's research on the disorders of human memory eventually led him back to the experiences with his cousin Helly and the lost world of the spirits.

"So-called" occult phenomena

Before Jung could achieve his new goal of becoming a university professor he needed to write, and have Bleuler approve, a doctoral dissertation. After discussion with his chief, Jung decided to write an analysis of the personality of his cousin Helly as a case study of a spiritualist medium. Since Bleuler himself had a lifelong interest in spiritualism (and, with Jung, was investigating mediums at the Burgholzli), and in light of the interest of many of the major figures in French psychiatry in the "dissociation" of the personalities of many spiritualist mediums, he gave his young assistant his blessing. [16] But while this project eventually became Jung's first publication and helped launch his psychiatric career, it proved disastrous for his cousin.

Jung's dissertation, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena," [17] which appeared in 1902, changed many of the details of the spiritualist seances that he held with Helly, but perhaps the most striking aspect of the work is Jung' s devaluing clinical dissection of the so- called pathological personality of the medium "S.W.," the pseudonym for Helly. In this case history she is pictured as suffering from hysteria. Jung interprets all the phenomena of her mediumship -- her trances, her changes in voice and character, her fainting spells (which he calls "hysterical attacks"), her "automatisms," and her distortions of identity and memory -- as symptoms of a dissociative process, a "splitting" of the normal river of consciousness into several distinct streams. In this regard he compares her ability to assume alternate spirit identities in her trances -- particularly the entity known as Ivenes -- with the clinical phenomenon of the "dual" or "multiple personality" that was a fad at the end of the last century among French researchers such as Pierre Janet, Theodule Ribot, Alfred Binet, and especially Theodore Flournoy. Jung decided, however, against any analogy with cases of "double consciousness." Instead, he believed that a less serious clinical phenomenon was in evidence with Helly/lvenes, and that "the mournful features, the attachment to sorrow, her mysterious fate, lead us to the historic prototype of Ivenes-Justinius Kerner's 'Prophetess of Prevorst.'" [18]

According to Jung, "[Helly] pours her own soul into the role of the prophetess, thus seeking to create an ideal of virtue and perfection .... She incarnates in Ivenes what she wishes to be in twenty years-the assured, influential, wise, gracious, pious lady. . . . [Helly] builds up a person beyond herself. It cannot be said that 'she deceives herself' but that 'she dreams herself into the higher ideal state." Here, in his first publication, Jung introduced the idea that the unconscious mind has a prospective and, at times, prophetic function that can give hints to the conscious mind and its ego about what mental organizations should or will be on the horizon. Jung accepted the opinion that the unconscious mind could have such precognitive power, as did such figures as Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and many distinguished international authorities on psychical research.

Although his experiences with Helly corresponded with those of Justinius Kerner with the Seeress of Prevorst, and it is clear Jung fancied himself in Kerner's role (he is mentioned throughout the dissertation), psychiatry as we know it did not exist in Kerner's day. Since Jung had to produce a medical treatise based on the current state of psychiatric knowledge, he based the technical analyses in his dissertation on the example provided by Flournoy in his own exhaustive study of a spiritualist medium.

Des Indes a la planete Mars was a clinical case analysis of the fanciful stories and ersatz languages produced during the trances of a medium Flournoy pseudonymously named "Helene Smith." [19] During her spiritualist seances the medium reported a series of past lives on Earth (as a noble personage from India) and on Mars. At times she spoke in a strange lan guage, which she said was "Martian" but which Flournoy termed "glossolalia" (a phenomenon commonly called "speaking in tongues"). The key to Flournoy's compelling analysis was that he was able to reasonably argue that much of the content of these productions could be traced to "hidden memories." These were memories of information that the medium had previously heard or read but had, in the meantime, "forgotten." Hence, when they reappeared during the seances, these stories seemed quite novel to the medium. She had literally forgotten that she knew this material; in today's terms, she had "source amnesia."

This "cryptomnesia" is today more broadly termed "implicit memory" and is implicated in such contemporary issues as "false memory syndrome" in cases of alleged child abuse, alleged "ritual abuse" at the hands of covens of Satanists, and alleged kidnapping and torture by extraterrestrials. [20]

From 1902 onward, in his professional publications Jung referred to spirits as "unconscious personalities," "splinter personalities," or "complexes." In other words, spirits and other paranormal phenomena became only "so-called," not at all genuine. Since complexes operate unconsciously, the "spirit world" of the mediums is given a new place-name: "the unconscious."

By the term "complex" Jung referred to a cluster of images, affects, and ideas organized around a thematic core that, under certain circumstances, could have a sliver of consciousness all its own and act like an alternate personality, as in cases of multiple personality. In these early years there was nothing transcendent, hereditary, or supernatural about complexes -- they comprised the personal experiences of a single individual. His word-association experiments quantitatively documented the phenomena of complexes in the operation of human memory. For example, if a stimulus word triggered a highly charged emotion in a person -- perhaps a hidden memory unavailable to consciousness -- the psychophysiological instruments attached to the subject would measure changes that correlated with a subjective feeling of anxiety, and the person's reaction time to that particular word would be longer. Such complexes were thought to be quite common in all humans and accounted for the remarkable range of behaviors and attitudes in a single individual. Indeed, the ego itself was thought by Jung and his colleagues to be the most important complex of all. In normal individuals, it was at the core of the field of consciousness and was centered upon body memories and on the personal identity that had developed since birth. The interplay of alternate complexes with the ego was what made each individual human personality dynamic and unique.

Given that this prevailing model of the normal human mind was based on the idea that we were all, down deep, highly integrated multiple personalities, it is not surprising that it would attract Jung, who had experienced tangible divisions between "number one" and "number two" personalities in himself, his mother, and Helly. Although he would diagnose both women as hysterics, he reserved such fears about himself for his private musings. But clearly his choice of clinical pursuits had relevance to searching for the secrets of his own personality.

Scandal and cryptomnesia

For Helly the publication of Jung's thesis was disastrous. It quickly made the rounds in the small circle of "German Mandarins" in Basel, creating a minor scandal that embarrassed and enraged the venerable Preiswerk family. Given that mental illnesses such as hysteria were thought to be the result of "bad blood" in a degenerate family, Helly and her younger relatives were suddenly ostracized. [21] It is said that after a potential marriage prospect for Helly read Jung's case history of her, any talk of marriage was swiftly withdrawn. She never did marry.

We can only speculate on what Helly thought about Jung's dissertation, or what she may have said to him about it. When they met again in Paris after it had been published, their relations were cordial. [22] We have no idea, no unambiguous historical record, as to why Jung exposed her to such trials. For now, his motivations must remain a mystery.

The influence of hidden memories of past experience on present behavior continued to fascinate Jung throughout his years at the Burgholzli. After leaving in 1909, he developed a new theory about the nature of unconscious memories, a theory whose basic assumptions flatly contradicted, indeed discounted, all of his previous research on this process of human memory. But the problem of cryptomnesia would shadow him for the rest of his career.

Despite its obvious role in the production of the content of "spirit communications" by mediums and in the symptoms of hysteria and psychosis, Jung also recognized the powerful contribution of cryptomnesia to creativity. In a 1905 essay, "Cryptomnesia," he argued that much creative work of writers, poets, artists, and so on, was the end product of the unconscious processing of previously learned information. [23] No creative act -- even works of genius-appears "out of nothing." A genius, like a hysteric, puts ideas together in unconventional patterns. New combinations of memories of previously experienced events or previously learned material are the wellsprings of creativity. However, even a true genius mistakes his or her novelty as creation and forgets its true source. In essence, Jung proposes that cryptomnesia is the root of all genius.

Cryptomnesia is also responsible for another phenomenon: unconscious plagiarism. In the final section of his dissertation Jung juxtaposes lengthy passages from Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra and an essay by Justinius Kerner to show their striking similarities. Jung reports that he contacted Nietzsche's sister to find out if he had ever read Kerner, and the sister reported that he had in his youth. Jung thus persuasively demonstrates the powerful influence of memories of things read or heard on our thoughts even decades later, long after we have forgotten the original source of the material. Within just a few years Jung himself would "forget" this argument.

"A religious sect, a scientific hypothesis"

Jung's monastic immersion in the world of scientific experimentation at the Burgholzli led him to a new, more mature, skepticism about spiritualism. During these years, with Bleuler' s permission, he applied his new scientific rigor to the subject. As he told an audience at the Bernoullianum in his Basel "homecoming" on February 5, 1905, "In the past few years I have investigated eight mediums, six of them women and two of them men." Given the Preiswerk family scandal caused by the publication of his case history of Helly, Jung didn't help matters by adding that "mediums as a rule are slightly abnormal mentally," and that seven of his eight subjects showed "slight" symptoms of hysteria. However, he explained to his audience, he learned virtually nothing from this exercise. He witnessed no magical levitations or clairvoyant demonstrations -- indeed, nothing paranormal or supernatural at all. Speaking with the conviction of a skeptical man of science, the twenty-nine-year-old Jung told his audience, "Everything that may be considered a scientifically established fact belongs to the domain of the mental and cerebral processes and is fully explicable in terms of the laws already known to science."

Yet despite all this, the body of Jung's address was a discussion of reports of the extraordinary phenomena of animal magnetism, clairvoyance, precognition, and visions that took these accounts seriously. To Jung, spiritualist phenomena were still a legitimate area for research. Jung maintained this unshakable belief throughout his life, and he was particularly gratified when, in 1934, the American researcher J. B. Rhine published the results of experiments at Duke University supporting the hypothesis of extrasensory perception (ESP). [24]

Spiritualism, however, was unique in human history, Jung explained to his Basel audience. The "sect" of spiritualism was based on a "religious belief in the actual and tangible intervention of the spirit world in our world." The religious practice of this sect then becomes the "practice of communicating with the spirits." Pointing to the vast body of literature purporting to document the reality of communications with the spirit world, the spiritualist sect claims that its religious practice is based on science. Jung says that the sect of spiritualism is unique because of its dual nature: "on the one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis." [25]

The lessons learned from studying an influential mass movement, a religious sect whose success derived from its claim of being based on a scientific hypothesis, would not be lost on him.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

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Chapter 4: Religion Can Only Be Replaced by Religion

Of all the remarkable persons that he met during his years at the Burgholzli, none is more closely linked to Jung than Sigmund Freud. Jung became aware of the work of Freud shortly after arriving at the Burgholzli in 1900. Jung read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) during his first year as a clinician, but claimed he didn't understand it. [1] In 1904, he encountered a new patient suffering from hysteria -- a young Jewish woman from Russia by the name of Sabina Spielrein -- and began experimenting with the methods of "psychoanalysis" as he interpreted them from Freud's descriptions. On September 25, 1905, he wrote his first letter to Freud with a case summary of this patient, referring the case to him for further treatment. The patient's mother never delivered this letter to Freud. [2] The first official contact between the two men, by letter, was in 1906, and they met for the first time in Freud's flat in Vienna on March 3, 1907. By January 1913 they had exchanged letters agreeing to cease their personal relations.

The mythic tale of Freud and Jung is one of the best known of the twentieth century. Most people know the skeleton, if not the flesh, of the truth: that Freud and Jung were famous psychoanalysts; that Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, anointed Jung as his heir apparent; that Jung, perhaps like an ungrateful son, rejected his mentor and went his own way after a terrible clash. Jungians reframe the story by claiming that Jung could not accept Freud's exclusively sexual theory of life and broke with him to fashion a theory that took into account the essential religious or spiritual nature of people. For those who tend toward the view of history constructed by Freud's disciples, Jung's defection was an apostasy, a rejection of the science of psychoanalysis marked by Jung's lapse into narcissism, psychosis, mysticism, and anti-Semitism. There are elements of truth in all these versions.

It would be impossible to do full justice to the Freud/Jung myth here. This relationship has been discussed in so many other volumes, and usually with more than an ounce of partisanship, that I could not even begin to summarize the viewpoints and sift the evidence, pro and con, for the arguments therein. My personal, idiosyncratic view of the Freud/Jung myth is this: I believe it is time to step out of this important but very limiting intellectual context and free both men from being bound together in history. I believe that this approach is especially important to understand Jung. His psychoanalytic years are best viewed as a transition period, not the central source of his later ideas, as so many have erroneously argued. The period from 1907 to 1913 was an interlude during which issues and concerns that predated his interest in Freud -- especially spiritualism, the spirituality of pagan antiquity, and the dissociation psychology of Janet and Flournoy -- were briefly syncretized with psychoanalytic thought. After 1913, these issues reemerged with a new vitality that resulted in the theories for which Jung is best known: psychological types (1913, 1921), the collective unconscious (1916), its "dominants" (1916-17) or "archetypes" (1919), and individuation (1916).

As this period in Jung's life marks a transition, so will this chapter break from the narrative history in order to put the foundations of Jung's later career in focus.

I believe that Jung initially became attracted to Freudian psychoanalysis for its clinical utility. After meeting Freud and championing him and the cause of psychoanalysis at professional conferences at a time when Freud's sexual theories were met with great skepticism, psychoanalysis began to take on the function of a Weltanschauung, or totalizing worldview, for Jung. Not only the secrets of psychopathology, but of the human personality, of human culture and history -- of life itself -- were unlocked with the keys Freud provided. In his final years with the psychoanalytic movement, Jung -- like so many others -- began to see it as a powerful vehicle for social change, for cultural revitalization in a fin-de-siecle world of degeneration and decay.

I believe that this latter interpretation of the psychoanalytic movement best registers its true historical significance in the twentieth century. Jung, however, could not abide by its secular claims: in the psychoanalytic movement he envisioned, for a brief time, a scientific religion of the future.

In the presence of genius

Throughout his life -- in autobiographical accounts, seminars, letters, and in filmed interviews in the 1950s -- Jung always acknowledged Sigmund Freud's greatness. In many respects, Freud was Jung's first encounter with someone he considered a living genius. There are unmistakable parallels here with Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner. In the presence of genius, both Nietzsche and Jung wisely observed, absorbed, and imitated. It is the traditional nature of a genius to be inconstant and mercurial, and after repeated exposure to the genius and his ever-changing ideas, the luster of divinity soon fades. It was the repeated personal contact with Wagner, which reached a climax in the cultlike atmosphere the Meister encouraged in his entourage, that drove Nietzsche to leave in disgust. For Jung, who only had intermittent personal contact with Freud in 1907 and 1908, the seven weeks he spent with Freud traveling to and from America in the autumn of 1909 were enough to begin to sour his worship of the sage from Vienna. [3] But, of course, once he recognized the spark of genius in himself, there was no longer any need to remain a disciple.

Why was Jung attracted to Freud and his ideas for eight years, and with such devotion? Other than his obvious attraction to Freud's charisma as a genius, there are several alternatives that are rarely discussed.

Jung was intrigued by the therapeutic possibilities of the psychoanalytic method. Psychoanalysis became a way to circumvent or overcome the stigmata of hereditary degeneration in his institutionalized patients -- and perhaps in himself. (He reported in MDR that during his early years at the Burgholzli he secretly kept "hereditary" statistics on his colleagues in order to understand the "psychiatric mentality," including, no doubt, his own family's incidence of hysteria. [4])

As the historian of psychiatry Sander Gilman has noted, Freud "repudiated the model of degeneracy" in his theories. [5] This was an advantage of Freud's theory that Jung recognized: it shifted emphasis from hereditary biological factors (such as degeneracy) to psychodynamic ones. "Bad blood" in one's family therefore did not condemn one to a lifetime of disease and suffering. In fact, psychoanalytic treatment promised relief and renewal. This made psychoanalysis especially attractive to those considered "tainted" by their ethnicity, such as Jews.

The Burgholzli was, like other mental hospitals then and now, a place where far too many cases needed constant care and supervision and never seemed to improve. Although with advances in psychopharmacology conditions have improved somewhat, in Jung's day more time was spent making diagnoses than carrying out treatments because so few of them were effective. As a staff physician, Jung ordered treatments such as extended baths, electrotherapy, work therapy, opiates, and barbiturates. Physical restraints were sometimes necessary, such as wrapping patients in wet sheets, or restraining their hands in muffs or their arms in straitjackets.

At the turn of the century, such hospitals were storerooms of human degeneration. Freud's claims about the therapeutic success of his psychoanalytic method must have seemed like a ray of hope to compassionate physicians like Jung who felt as confined to the back wards of the asylums as the patients. Jung is best remembered for his philosophical and theoretical inclinations, but it is often forgotten how determined he was to find practical applications of such ideas in the form of psychotherapeutic intervention. Anything that offered hope for the treatment of dementia praecox (defined as a progressively degenerative disorder), [6] an area of clinical interest for Jung, was considered with great seriousness.

Interestingly, during 1904 and 1905, when Jung was experimenting with psychoanalysis on a female patient who would later become his lover, there was very little in Freud's writings about how to actually do it. Jung and his colleagues had to read between the lines somewhat to practice their own version of what Freud was up to in Vienna. From the very start, the method seemed to be fully understood only by its maker. Bleuler and his staff found themselves increasingly intrigued. In 1904, they began to correspond with Freud, often seeking his advice for the treatment of patients. This only added to the mystery of psychoanalysis and its inventor.

From medical treatment to cultural movement

From the start, Freud conceived of psychoanalysis as a new form of medical treatment that promised a better existence (freedom from symptoms, self-knowledge) for those who were successfully analyzed. The key to such revitalization was full access to memory, encompassing the infantile, the sexual, and, above all, the personal. Hysterics, said Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer in their 1895 book Studies on Hysteria, suffered from "reminiscences." [7] Psychoanalysis, as Freud began to develop it starting in 1896, provided a magical vocabulary to contain the power of such affectively charged memories when they were unchained from their unconscious moorings.

Freud has loomed so large during the twentieth century that we tend to forget just how little known he was for most of his early career. Before the First World War, the common citizen of Austria-Hungary would probably not have known his name. (Today in Austria his image appears on a unit of paper currency). For the most part, until 1902, Freud worked in his "splendid isolation" and essentially was the psychoanalytic movement. In that pivotal year, four Viennese Jewish physicians (primarily internists) met at Freud's flat as the famous Psychological Wednesday Evening Circle. They were Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolph Reitler. By the time Freud and Jung began their correspondence, the Wednesday Circle had grown to seventeen participants. Two years later, in 1908, forty participants from six countries attended the first congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Salzburg.

The conversion of the Swiss contingent at the Burgholzli legitimized the psychoanalytic movement in Europe. Previously seen as only a Jewish affair, that psychoanalysis aroused the interest of Bleuler and his largely Swiss, Christian staff was a major coup for Freud and broadened its appeal.

Jung was a major organizer of the movement, and when the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910, he became its first president. He seems to have been attracted to psychoanalysis as an agent of cultural revitalization through its promotion of core Nietzschean themes of uncovering, the breaking of bonds, irrationality, and sexuality. He was not alone.

It was Franz Riklin, Jung's colleague at the Burgholzli, who would inaugurate the transformation of the psychoanalytic movement into a world view . In 1908, in a publication that he also presented at the Salzburg congress, Riklin used psychoanalytic theory to interpret fairy tales.8 Remarkably, this was the first time material from patients was not the main focus of analysis. Soon, other works followed that analyzed Wagnerian opera, myths, legends, painters and their paintings, and so on. Psychoanalysis's claim to being a science rested on the application of the method in clinical settings, where analytic hypotheses could be tested against the free associations of living persons. When the theory was applied to fairy tales and other cultural creations, psychoanalysis quickly developed into a world view through which all of human history could be understood. Art, religion, and music, like the free associations of patients in analysis, became products of the unconscious and therefore were fair game for reinterpretation. After this point more and more individuals involved in the humanities began to take an active interest in psychoanalysis, leading to its chic image among those in literature and in the arts, including Lou Andreas-Salome, who became a lifelong friend of Freud's.

The problem, of course, in this application of psychoanalytic theory was that the inert material could not talk back. Clinical hypotheses could not be tested as they could in the give-and-take between psychoanalyst and patient. A work of art, a fairy tale, a hero myth, or a Wagnerian opera had only the new, "real" meaning given to it by the psychoanalyst who wrote about it. Any pretense about the verifiability of psychoanalytic judgments broke down irretrievably. For difficulties like this, contemporary critics of psychoanalysis such as Frederick Crews can claim with justification that it has produced more converts than cures.

Psychoanalysis: an uncanny religion?

Right from the start, many American psychologists voiced concerns about the scientific claims of Freud, Jung, and psychoanalysis. They also expressed alarm at the secretive social structure of analytic training and the buoyant, charismatic nature of the movement. To many Americans, no strangers to such things, it seemed like a religious revivalist movement, or even a cult or pseudoscientific religion. John B. Watson, who later revolutionized American psychology with his system of "behaviorism," said in 1912 that psychoanalysis was a "new cult" whose "devotees" failed "to maintain an intellectual freedom in their system" and therefore "have hindered the scientific studies of the methods of Freud and Jung." Although Watson was hopeful that psychoanalysis might prove to further "medical practice, psychology and legal procedure," he nonetheless charged: "The psycho-analyst is using methods in a very crude and unsatisfactory way. He is building an enormous structure without looking carefully at the foundations." [9] Robert Woodworth, the eminent experimental psychologist from Columbia University, charged that Freudian psychoanalysis was an "uncanny religion." [10] Knight Dunlap, another famous psychologist, argued that "psychoanalysis attempts to creep in wearing the uniform of science, and to strangle it from the inside." [11] The atheistic, the materialistic, and, to many, the Jewish nature of Freudian psychoanalysis made it particularly unpalatable.

Just as spiritualism provided Jung with certain hypotheses about an alternative or transcendent reality and methods for contacting it, his experience with Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement provided him with a model of socialization that he adopted after 1913 when founding a movement of his own. Jung's own movement was overtly religious in nature, [12] but before we can even approach Jung's attempts to sacralize psychoanalysis we must ask: Other than Jung, were there any other major figures in Freud's charismatic movement that were self-consciously at- tuned to its religious or cultlike nature? If psychoanalysis is not a science, in the modern sense of that word, is it -- or was it -- a religion?

These are intriguing questions that have long been the subject of debate, most notably (and eloquently) in Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and the fascinating study by Richard Webster, provocatively entitled Why Freud Was Wrong, which appeared in 1995. [13] Of the two, Webster faces this difficult question head-on and comes to some surprising conclusions. Webster scoured the autobiographical literature of the early psychoanalysts and found evidence of religious metaphors used to describe the fervor these men felt from their participation in Freud's movement. Given the fact that Freud's Viennese circle was composed almost exclusively of assimilated, agnostic, or atheist physicians of Jewish ethnicity, their borrowed use of the Christian metaphors of the dominant Austro-Hungarian population is understandable, if still surprising. Max Graf (who, like many others, was driven out of the movement as a "heretic," a word Freud employed in 1924 to refer to Jung and Adler) [14] painted the following sectlike image of the Wednesday evening meetings:

The gatherings followed a definite ritual. First, one of the members would present a paper. ... After a social quarter of an hour the discussion would begin. The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial. Freud's pupils-all inspired and convinced-were his apostles .... However, after the first dreamy period and the unquestioning faith of the first group of apostles, the time came when the church was founded. Freud began to organize the church with great energy. He was serious and strict in the demands he made of his pupils; he permitted no deviations from his orthodox teachings. [15]


For Webster, Freud was quite consciously a "messianic" figure, and he refers to psychoanalysis as a "messianic cult" or as "quintessentially a religion" that "should be treated as such." [16] The power that bound these men together, according to him, came from the fact that Freud and the other analysts at the top of the social structure simply knew too many of the very personal, sexual, and at times sordid details of the others' personal lives. They not unreasonably feared "excommunication" from the movement because it could lead to the public disclosure of such information. It was well known within Freudian circles that several analysts had shared sexual intimacies with their female patients, and such "confidential" information appears regularly as gossip in the letters of Freud, Jung, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, and others in the inner ring of adepts. The history of the psychoanalytic movement is littered with suicides, and this pressure-cooker atmosphere of implicit blackmail may have played a role in some of them.

Freud's "analytic hour" is referred to as a "confessional ritual" by Webster, drawing a deliberate comparison to the rite used to maintain power relations within the ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic church. It was during the analytic session that potentially scandalous information was collected and noted by those analysts who served as direct conduits to Freud. Webster is blunt in his assessment of the shadow side of the underlying dynamics of "the psychoanalytic church":

In placing what was, in effect, a confessional ritual at the very heart of the psychoanalytic movement, it seems clear that Freud was not, as he himself believed, engaging in a form of scientific innovation. Rather, he was unconsciously institutionalizing his own profound religious traditionalism at the same time that he was creating for himself a ritual stage on which he could play out his own "God complex" in relation to patients he regarded as inferior and in need of redemption. Just as, through his history of infantile sexuality, he had revised in disguised technical form the doctrine of Original Sin, so he also brought back to life, under a clinical disguise, the most important ecclesiastical ritual which had traditionally helped to sustain that doctrine, and to create psychological dependency among those who burdened themselves in the secrecy of the confessional. [17]


The religious or cultlike social structure and interaction patterns of the psychoanalytic movement from its very inception have been commented on by several psychoanalytic scholars, sociologists, and both proponents and opponents of the movement. Sociologist George Weisz has noted that the fundamental characteristics of the psychoanalytic movement as a social organization "were the group's elitism and sense of exclusiveness, combined with an extreme mistrust of and hostility toward the outside world; an eschatological vision of reality which made adherence to the group an experience approaching religious conversion; and, more important, an exaggerated reverence for the founder which transcended the normal bounds of scientific authoritarianism." [18]

An important Darwin and Freud scholar, Frank Sulloway, notes, "Few theories in science have spawned a following that can compare with the psychoanalytic movement in its cultlike manifestations, in its militancy, and in the aura of a religion that has permeated it." He goes on to charge that, "the discipline of psychoanalysis, which has always tapped considerable religious fervor among its adherents, has increasingly come to resemble a religion in its social organization" with its "secular priesthood of soul doctors." [19]

The sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, who pioneered the study of new religious movements and cults worldwide, note that "Cults are particularly likely to emerge wherever large numbers of people seek help for intractable personal problems. The broad fields of psychotherapy, rehabilitation, and personal development have been especially fertile for cults." [20] They go on to say, "A number of psychotherapy services have evolved into cult movements, including those created by some of Freud's immediate followers," including Jung. Later, in a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis, they define it as a "client cult":

Freud and his followers frequently suggested that all religion was a mass delusion, a communal neurosis, or even a shared psychosis .... Of course, Freud's circle consisted of well-educated, highly secular persons who prided themselves on their scientific attitudes. But we suggest that the main reason for this hostility to conventional religion was the fact that Psychoanalysis itself was a client cult, struggling to establish itself at the very border of religion. Surely, it offered a package of compensators, some of which were very general, totally outside the prevailing Christian culture. In attacking conventional religions, Psychoanalysis explicitly sought to replace them. For many of Freud's followers, indeed, for an embarrassingly prominent set of his most famous disciples, Psychoanalysis did develop into a religious cult. [21]


I cite these critics of the psychoanalytic movement not to mount an argument against Freud and his direct descendants (although I share the concerns) but to indicate how easy it would be for someone like the parson's son C. G. Jung -- gripped since childhood with existential questions -- to generalize the basic model of the psychoanalytic movement to one that. was more explicitly religious or spiritualist. Indeed, when compared to the multiyear socialization process to an organization such as Freud's psychoanalytic movement, it becomes easier to understand how Jung could see the need for the prevailing Judeo-Christian orthodox religious to be replaced by something else, something more alive, that was also religious at its very core.

A "religious crush"

After Jung met with Freud in March 1907, his veneration for the older man gradually blossomed into something that even Jung recognized as a kind of falling in love. Jung, as a budding psychoanalyst, was quick to note the sexual basis of such feelings. But what is interesting is that Jung additionally placed this feeling of veneration within a religious context, acknowledging Freud as a godlike figure or spiritual guru.

Jung made this explicit in an often-cited letter to Freud of October 28, 1907. In it, Jung confessed to Freud that, "my veneration for you has something of the character of a 'religious crush.' " This statement alone conveys how Jung cognitively framed his participation in the psychoanalytic movement, but he then revealed to Freud: "Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault of a man I once worshipped." [22]

Jung's remarkable admission has unfortunately been the source of misleading speculation by some commentators who base their interpretations of this incident on hearsay. Specifically, Jung has been said to have been an adolescent when this sexual encounter occurred and that, considering Jung's impressive physical size and strength, he willingly submitted to a homosexual "seduction." [23] But at least at present, there is no other corroborative evidence from Jung himself that can more accurately determine the true circumstances of this event.

Without direct citation, these commentators are using as a source an interview with Jolande Jacobi, one of his closest disciples and primary pupils in the late 1930s, conducted by the C. G. Jung Biographical Archives Project, a program funded by a now defunct foundation that interviewed and transcribed the reminiscences of 143 persons who knew Jung personally. Jacobi's interview in Zurich in 1969 is without a doubt the most revelatory document in the entire collection.

A large part of the early interview involves a discussion of Jacobi's flirtations with Jung after meeting him in 1927 and includes a long digression into his long-noted inability to form lasting, trusting relationships with other men. In one passage from this interview Jacobi states:

JJ: I discovered why Jung was at the same time afraid of men; to accept men as best friends or as his best pupils. He told me one day that when he was eighteen years old one of the best friends of his family was also his best friend -- a man of about fifty, and he was eighteen. He was very proud of this friendship and had the feeling that he had -- you know that Jung had difficulties with his father -- in this man a fatherly friend with whom he could discuss everything until one day ... [he] tried a homosexual approach with him. He was so disgusted and so afraid that he immediately broke the relationship. When Freud wanted him to be so near (Freud was twenty years older than Jung), he had the same feeling, "Don't let yourself be caught." I think that all this had a great influence because he repressed it and it influenced also the development of his relationships with men. [24]


In November 1912, Freud confronted Jung with this very fact. After Jung attempted to apologize for accusing him of treachery (the famous "Kreuzlingen gesture" incident), Freud told Sandor Ferenczi in a letter of November 26 that

I spared him nothing at all, told him calmly that a friendship with him couldn't be maintained, that he himself gave rise to the intimacy that he so cruelly broke off; that things were not at all in order in his relations with men, not just with me but with others as well. He repels them all after a while. All those who are now with me have turned away from him because he threw them out. His referring to his sad experience with Honegger [who had committed suicide in 1911] reminded me of homosexuals or anti- emites who become manifest after a disappointment with a woman or a Jew. [25]


Jacobi states that Jung told her the story of this "homosexual approach" because she often asked his advice about how to interpret the characters of her homosexual patients. According to her, "Jung always rejected" her requests for help with these patients.

JJ: ... One day he told me this story, which I told you [the interviewer, Gene Nameche] just now. And he also explained to me, when Freud wanted to make him his son and his successor, he had the same feeling, "No, no, no, I don't want to belong to anybody. I don't want to be embraced." That is very interesting because I think that it throws a very strong light on Jung's problem with men, which was for him, maybe, more unconscious than conscious. If it had been conscious, he would never have talked about it. It was the first time he did so with me because of my interest in homosexuality ....

INT: Eighteen, and the man was fifty?

JJ: Around that -- he told me, I think, between forty and fifty.

INT: Yes, yes. That's quite ...

JJ: So he must have been a friend of his father. ·He didn't tell me the name -- nothing. [26]


After establishing that this event probably took place while Jung was still a student, Jacobi repeats: "And he said he trusted in this man and felt so friendly towards him and it was a terrible shock for him because he had never known about homosexuality at all. You can imagine so in such a pious family." [27]

Jacobi's testimony, which corroborates Jung's letter to Freud, hardly describes a seduction, at least not a sexual one. However, as the remainder of the correspondence between Freud and Jung makes clear, psycho analysis, for a time, held out to Jung the temptations of a spiritual seduction- temptations that he ultimately could not resist.

"We must ... infiltrate into people from many centers"

The 1974 publication of the letters between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung was a huge event. Scholars, long curious about the true relationship between these two giants, suddenly found themselves confronted with an abundance of new evidence to sift, interpret, and argue over. John Gedo and Peter Homans were two of many who immediately recognized that in several of Jung's letters to Freud, beginning in 1910, Jung clearly expressed a desire to transform psychoanalysis into something like a religious movement that would liberate an entire culture with its powerful insights. [28] The psychoanalytic historian John Kerr has likewise documented this "spiritualizing" trend in Jung and in the Swiss contingent of the psychoanalytic movement, a development that eventually led to the resignation of many Swiss -- including Jung, Riklin, and Bleuler -- from a movement increasingly dominated by Freud's energetic and very vocal Viennese Jewish contingent. [29] F. X. Charet has amply documented that the tension in the Freud-Jung relationship was, in part, rooted in Jung's continuing interest in spiritualism and paranormal phenomena and Freud's disdain for Jung's macabre fascination with the dead and "occultism." [30] I have documented at length in The Jung Cult that Jung did indeed have such intentions and over time succeeded in fashioning a charismatic religious cult centered on his own personality and teachings, offering modern individuals the promise of redeeming themselves "spiritually" -- a process he called "individuation" -- and offering them the opportunity to become part of a select spiritual elite.

Volumes have been written about the evidence in the Freud-Jung correspondence pointing to Jung's religion-building proclivities. For our purposes, two letters by Jung stand out. Only a little over four months after immersing himself in the study of mythology and archeological sites and texts, on February 11, 1910, Jung responded to a query by Freud. In a letter to Jung on January 13, Freud mentioned that he had received an invitation to join the International Order for Ethics and Culture, which its founder, Albert Knapp, proposed as a forum for making pragmatic changes in human society. It was to be a secular organization designed to fill the ethical and cultural vacuum caused by the demise of the superstitious world view promoted by Judeo-Christian religions. Freud told Jung that he thought psychoanalysis might benefit from such an association and asked Jung's opinion. Freud could never have anticipated the response he received.

Jung wrote that he, too, had received such an invitation, but that the project appalled him. He complained that Knapp's organization would be an "artificial one," since "religion can only be replaced by religion." [31]

"Is there a new savior in [it]?" he asked. "What sort of new myth does it hand out for us to live by? Only the wise are ethical from sheer intellectual presumption, the rest of us need the eternal truth of myth."

Jung's meaning here is clear: even psychoanalysis can only be authentic if it offers the "eternal truth of myth" to others. Further, Jung believed that the mythic sexual insights of psychoanalysis could be the catalyst for cultural redemption and rebirth, a vivifying replacement for Christianity. "The ethical problem of sexual freedom is really enormous and worth the sweat of all noble souls. But 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent, an 'irresistible mass movement.'"

Such a mass movement would, of course, be the new religion of modernity: psychoanalysis.

Jung wrote:

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were -- a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.


Had the letter ended there, it would have been stunning enough. But Jung insisted that a biologically and evolutionarily correct ethical development must arise from within Christianity and "must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god, the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper -- only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion." He ended this letter by expressing his desire "to affiliate [psychoanalysis] with everything that is dynamic and alive. One can only let this kind of thing grow."

If we could point to the very moment when Freud should have begun to have grave doubts about Jung as his son and heir apparent, it would have to be shortly after he read this letter. This explosive effusion of Christian and Dionysian imagery and visions of psychoanalysis as an "irresistible mass movement" and as a living replacement for orthodox Christianity could only have reminded Freud of certain Nietzschean, Wagnerian, Volkish neopagan cultural themes that would appeal primarily to Germanic Christians -- Aryans.

Freud's response was a reprimand. Jung's zealotry was clearly off-putting. "But you mustn't regard me as the founder of a religion," Freud said. "My intentions are not so far-reaching .... I am not thinking of a substitute for religion. This need must be sublimated." [32]

Jung quickly responded on February 20, 1910, asking Freud's forgiveness for "another of those rampages of fantasy I indulge in from time to time." [33] Within the year, however, he returned to his fantasies about turning psychoanalysis into a new religion. In August 1910, he wrote to Freud that the enemies of the psychoanalytic movement were "saying some very remarkable things which ought to open our eyes in several ways." [34] These critics charged that the psychoanalytic movement was more a mystical sect or cult, or a secret society with levels of initiation like the Freemasons, than a medical or scientific program. Jung did not refute these charges. "All these mutterings about sectarianism, mysticism, arcane jargon, initiation, etc., mean something." He agreed that the critics were aiming their criticisms at something that did indeed have "all the trappings of a religion." Rather than deny these charges of cultism, Jung offered a defense of the movement's secret-society social structure.

"[Psychoanalysis] thrives only in a very tight enclave of minds," Jung wrote. "Seclusion is like a warm rain. One should therefore barricade this territory against the ambitions of the public for a long time to come." Only a specially chosen elite who are initiated into the mysteries of psychoanalysis -- the analysts themselves -- should have full knowledge of its secrets. In Jung's view, the psychoanalytic movement should operate outside the conventional sphere of society, holding out to the public little more than the promise of revitalization or rebirth if they submitted to treatment. As in the Freemasons, where special knowledge exclusive to the Illuminati is only hinted at, Jung argued that "psychoanalysis is too great a truth to be publicly acknowledged as yet. Generously adulterated extracts and thin dilutions of it should first be handed around." Then, after fantasizing about the infiltration of proponents of psychoanalysis into major universities, he exuberantly proclaimed, "thereupon the Golden Age will dawn."

But within less than two years Jung and Freud were not even on speaking terms. And the "irresistible mass movement" that was to unite Viennese and Swiss, Jews and Aryans, shattered into several centers of gravity.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:19 pm

PART 1 OF 2

PART TWO: Mysteria

Shall we write about the things not to be spoken of?
Shall we divulge the things not to be divulged?
Shall we pronounce the things not to be pronounced?
-- Julian, Hymn to the Mother of the Gods (fourth century C.E.)


Image
Fidus, "Betender Knabe" ("Worshiping Lad"), 1916. This is an example of Fidus's signature icon: "Lichtgebet" ("Prayer to the Light"), the famous image of Aryan sun worship.

Chapter 5: Polygamy

There is no doubt that Jung had good reason to be satisfied with his life as he approached his thirty-second birthday in 1907. He had risen to Oberarzt at the Burgholzli clinic, just behind Bleuler. His experimental researches using the word-association method had been hailed as a major new advancement, helping to place psychiatry onto a scientific footing. These same experimental reports had been translated into major English, French, and Italian scientific journals, making him world renowned within the field of psychiatry. He had established a relationship with the controversial Sigmund Freud and brought the movement to such prominence that it could no longer be ignored. As confirmed later by vote of its membership, Jung was clearly second in command of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud made it clear to the jealous Viennese that he had extended the right of charismatic succession to Jung if he wanted it. We all know now that he didn't.

By all outward appearances, the spring of 1908 brought a continuation of joyous triumphs in his personal life. He marked his fifth wedding anniversary with his wife, the former Emma Rauschenbach of Schaffhausen, and their two children, Agathe and Gret, in their living quarters at the Burgholzli. By the late spring of 1908, Emma was pregnant again, and their only son, Franz Karl, was born in early December. [1] Jung made occasional trips to Munich to confer with Ernst Fiechter, an architect who was designing a new home for them in Kusnacht on the shore of Lake Zurich. Others would look at the Jung family and see an enviable model of youthful vigor, domestic fulfillment, and financial promise.

Jung, it was true, had successfully created the bourgeois existence that he had been trained to do as a "German Mandarin" and a blood member of the German educated middle class. Yet all was not as it appeared. The events of 1908 would threaten the embourgeoisement of Jung's psyche like no other and force him onto a path that would profoundly change his outlook on life. Many of the ideas that would later distinguish him from Freud and others had their roots in this year. And the apparent bourgeois tranquillity of his personal life would soon be in utter chaos.

Most histories traditionally -- and mistakenly -- point to Freud as the single most influential person in Jung's life. As the new material that has emerged from archives has shown, that honor could go to anyone of three individuals who were all patients and colleagues of Jung: Otto Gross, Sabina Spielrein, and Antonia ("Toni") Wolff. Gross was Jung's colleague in the psychoanalytic movement before he became his patient at the Burgholzli in the spring of 1908. Spielrein and Wolff were his patients before becoming his lovers and collaborators. It was Jung's experience with Gross in 1908 that crucially twisted his fate -- and thereby also the destinies of Spielrein, whom he knew at the time, and later Wolff.

Together they consciously sought a formula to unleash, like a chemical reaction, the unconscious forces of creativity and even genius within them. They succeeded. This quaternity synthesized every idea we call "Jungian" today from the elements of their personal experience.

Their catalyst was polygamy.

Otto Gross

By all accounts, Otto Gross was one of the most dangerous men of his generation -- a threat to the bourgeois-Christian universe of German Europe. [2] He was never violent; indeed, quite the opposite. But he had an uncanny capacity to inspire others to act on wanton, instinctual impulse. Gross was the great breaker of bonds, the loosener, the beloved of an army of women he had driven mad -- if just for a short time. He coaxed one lover/patient to suicide, and then another patient died under similar circumstances. His contemporaries described him as brilliant, creative, charismatic, and troubled. He was a Neitzschean physician, a Freudian psychoanalyst, an anarchist, the high priest of sexual liberation, a master of orgies, the enemy of patriarchy, and a dissolute cocaine and morphine addict. He was loved and hated with equal passion, an infectious agent to some, a healing touch to others. He was a strawberry-blond Dionysus.

Sigmund Freud thought him a genius. To Jung he once said, "You really are the only one capable of making an original contribution; except perhaps for O. Gross, but unfortunately his health is poor." [3] Ernest Jones met with him in 1907 and 1908 in Munich to receive his first instruction in the methods of psychoanalysis. To him, Gross was "the nearest approach to the romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met, and he also illustrated the supposed resemblance of genius to madness, for he was suffering from an unmistakable form of insanity that before my very eyes culminated in murder, asylum, and suicide." [4] To Jung he was so much more, but neither Jung nor his followers have acknowledged his importance. As he revised his published works over the course of his life, Jung carefully removed references to colleagues who fell prey to scandal or suicide. Otto Gross was certainly one of them. Nevertheless, Jung' s cataclysmic encounter with Gross is a critical episode in the secret history of his life.

The criminal mind

No story of Otto Gross can be told without reference to his antithesis, his father Hans, famous in his own time around the world as the father of modem scientific criminology. Trained as a lawyer, he was for many years a powerful examining magistrate who traveled all over Austria investigating and analyzing criminal evidence. His practical experience hunting criminals taught him the value of the modem scientific techniques offered by chemists, biologists, bacteriologists, toxicologists, physicians (especially psychiatrists), engineers, and firearms experts. He recognized the importance of Jung's work with the word-association test for examining potential criminals and liars. He was a professor of criminal law at Czernowitz, Prague, and Graz. He authored the first modem textbook on the science of crime detection and set up the first multipurpose, multidisciplinary laboratory for analyzing evidence from the scenes of crimes.

At his famous Criminalistic Institute he kept a collection of items of educational value to the modem crime fighter, including an unforgettable display of the skulls of murdered men. He also kept cabinets of deadly poisons, firearms and bullets, sword canes and rifle canes, as well as the dream books, love potions, astrological charts, and magical verses that provided clues to the superstitious criminal mind. Occult interests, Hans Gross believed, were the behavioral stigmata of degeneracy, especially among Gypsies. He spent considerable effort in drawing this public-health issue to the attention of the lay public, and the Romany and Sinti Gypsy populations of Austria-Hungary did not fare well under his recommendations for a more hygienic, civilized society. A Roman Catholic tempered by a scientific education, he investigated the belief that Jews were kidnapping and ritually murdering Christian babies. But his legal handling of such cases raised questions about his impartiality. [5]

In 1914, Hans Gross told a reporter for McClure's magazine that the criminalist must be a polymath:

He should be a linguist and a draftsman .... He should know what a physician can tell him, what he should ask him; he must know the wiles of the poacher as well as those of the stock speculator; he should discern how a will was forged, and what was the sequence of events in a railway accident; he must know how professional gamblers cheated, and how a boiler exploded ... he must understand the jargon of the underworld, must be capable of translating cipher messages, and must know the methods and tools of all artisans. [6]


Footprints, bloodstains, fingerprints, and the tricks of photography should also all be the business of the criminalist, he said.

Hans Gross proselytized his vision for a better world. In it, science should serve as an instrument of power with whose help the state and society could create and maintain law and order. [7]

To many in the years before the First World War this father-son dyad symbolized a grand tension of opposites in the Central European culture. It became a titanic and very public clash between acknowledged leaders of bourgeois-Christian and bohemian worlds, between the ideals of patriarchy and matriarchy, and between the forces of repression and liberation, both sexual and political. Both Freud and Jung entered this fray on the side of the father.

Michael Raub, an expert on the life and work of Otto Gross, has pointed out that in his early career as a physician Otto Gross was very much his father's son. His first book was a straightforward medical manual, and a year later an essay on the "phylogenetic" basis of ethics proposed an evolutionary explanation for what he termed the "anticriminal impulse," the revulsion felt by most normal human beings toward antisocial or criminal activities. [8]

Although Otto Gross rejected his father's views just a few years later, this essay demonstrates an important aspect of his style of thought that dominated much of his later philosophy: the evolutionary basis of most present human behaviors. Neither spiritual nor intellectual existence is dependent upon the free will of the individual, he argued, but both are the results of the phylogenetic development of the instincts. Gross utilized evolutionary theory as an apologia for bourgeois social conventions, and he later appealed to the logic of evolutionary theory and the call of the ancestral blood to cast off such mechanisms of repression, promising both physical and psychological liberation for those who followed his new ethics. Scientific insights, especially those of Nietzsche and Freud, were to be the new instruments of power through which the patriarchal state and society could be overthrown.

Since 1898, Gross had been experimenting with psychoactive substances. [9] On a sea voyage to South America in 1900 and 1901, the boredom was lessened by the drugs he brought with him as the ship's doctor. At first he ingested small amounts of opium and morphine, but by the beginning of 1902 he was taking higher doses of morphine, and by April he needed it at least twice a day just to perform his duties in a psychiatric clinic in Graz. Soon he could not even perform the most basic of duties. He spent his days at a coffeehouse, where he sat and thought and wrote. Through the efforts of his father, Gross was sent to Switzerland for treatment, and by the end of April he was admitted to the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich. Although Jung was there at the time and must have known of his admission, the records do not indicate who the treating physician was.

At the Burgholzli, Gross was monitored as he withdrew from morphine. According to the existing hospital records, he claimed upon admission that the "cause of his bout of morphinism was unhappy love." [10] His diagnosis was "Morphinism." After observing him for a few months, an unknown member of the medical staff administered a final diagnosis of "severe psychopathy." By July he was discharged.

Soon he was back in the coffeehouses, thinking, writing.

"Dr. Askonas"

Otto Gross developed an interest in the works of Freud as early as 1904. In 1907, after a brief stint in Emil Kraepelin's famous clinic in Munich, he published a book comparing and contrasting Freud's ideas with Kraepelin's concept of "manic-depressive insanity." [11] Gross's small book was favorable to Freud, and he soon found himself being courted by the Viennese psychoanalytic circle. Freud in particular saw Gross as a prime catch, famous and, like Jung, an Aryan.

In 1906, Gross moved to Munich with his wife, Frieda, whom he had married in 1903. In the years to follow, he sank deeper into chronic morphinism and cocaine addiction. Like many of that fin-de-siecle generation, he absorbed the works of Nietzsche and became interested in finding practical methods to change not only the repressed individuals he treated but the entire pathogenic, patriarchal authority structure of society as a whole. For Gross, Nietzsche provided the metaphors, and Freud provided the technique.

In Schwabing, Otto Gross met the writers, artists, and revolutionaries who remembered him even decades later. His "place" -- the Cafe Stefanie -- was a nexus of cultural history in those years, and for a time Gross ruled bohemia from his small table in the back, enveloped in the thick ectoplasmic fog of tobacco smoke. Richard Seewald recalled that so many would-be geniuses from all over Europe gathered there in the years before the First World War that it was popularly called "Cafe Grossenwahn" -- "Cafe Megalomania." [12] Here Seewald met future Dadaists Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball, Henri Bing (the cartoonist for the avant-garde journals Jugend and Simplicissimus), the writers Johannes Becher, Erich Muhsam, and Gustav Meyrink, and "the unhappy Dr. Gross, son of the famous criminal psychologist, his waistcoat sprinkled with cocaine." [13]

Leonhard Frank, who was Gross's friend for many years, said that "The Cafe Stefanie was his university ... and [Gross] was a Professor with an academic Chair at a table near the stove." [14] Frank remembered that Gross knew all of Nietzsche by heart. At the Cafe Stefanie, Gross led nocturnal discussions about the implications of the works of Freud and Nietzsche for the world, as he believed they had paved the way for a new type of human being. Frank remembers that the overthrow of the existing political and social structure, the utopian restoration of prehistoric matriarchy, and the necessity of sexual freedom were frequently discussed at any table that Gross occupied. Gross gave impromptu all-night psychoanalytic sessions, holding his audiences spellbound. Commanding his "patients" with his blue eyes, he relentlessly insisted, "Nichts verdraengen!" -- "Repress nothing!"

They obeyed.

Erich Muhsam, the archetypal bohemian, writer, anarchist, revolutionary, Asconan orgiast, and bisexual, did not fully overthrow the repressions instilled by a bourgeois upbringing in Lubeck until Gross analyzed him daily for six straight weeks. Muhsam was so thrilled with his experience that he wrote to Freud to thank him for inventing psychoanalysis. [15] Muhsam marveled to Freud that he experienced relief by tracing his symptoms back to their original causes, claiming, "I was able to observe how sometime through a question of the physician and the consequent answer with its associations, suddenly an entire crust of disease fell off." Outside of his sessions, Muhsam said the method he had learned from Gross worked "automatically." Although originally fearing a loss of his creative ability through analysis, the exact opposite happened: his poetry and writ ing actually improved. His description of his experience in analysis gives us insight into Gross's unorthodox -- but apparently effective -- clinical style:

For me as a writer, the functioning of your system was of course of particular interest. I found its value especially in the fact that the task of the physician would be mainly to make the patient himself the physician. The patient is induced to diagnose his illness. On the basis of the diagnosis discovered by himself, he therefore carries out his own cure. He is brought to the point where he is no longer interested in himself as a sufferer but in the suffering itself. He objectifies his condition. He does not put the importance anymore upon himself as a pitiable patient, as the emotionally martyred, as a hysteric seeking cure, but as a physician, as someone who does not feel the sickness anymore but perceives it. The transformation of the subjective sensations into objective values is the process of cure.


Ernest Jones remembered watching Gross in action at the Cafe Passage, "where the analytic treatments were all carried out." [16] Late in life Jones could recall the man's magic: "But such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again, nor is it a matter that lends itself to description."

Gross soon joined the great migratory circuit of fin-de-siecle bohemian life from Schwabing to Zurich to Ascona, a village in the Italian part of Switzerland that became a spiritual epicenter for the counterculture. [17] Between 1906 and 1913, Gross divided most of his time between it and Schwabing. His activities during these years brought him into contact with writers who would later immortalize him as a character in their novels and short stories. In one by Max Brod, he is portrayed, albeit negatively, in the dictatorial character known as "Dr. Askonas." [18]

***

Through Otto Gross, psychoanalysis first leapt from the bourgeoisie to the bohemian counterculture, beginning a literary and artistic fascination with Freudian theory that continues to this day. But in 1908, when Jung first became intimate with Gross and his domain, this was a foreign world that was highly objectionable to the bourgeois sentiments of men like Freud and Jung. Freud was not happy about the "crazy artists" and others of "that kind" whom Gross brought into the psychoanalytic fold. Hans Gross went even further, believing that such alternative lifestyles promoted degeneracy and were a greater threat to the survival of a good and just society than criminality. By 1908, he increasingly looked upon his only child, Otto, with these damning eyes.

"Exclusiveness of sexual community is a lie"

The sociologist Max Weber and his wife, Marianne, personally witnessed Gross's charismatic effect on others and were equally repulsed by the theory of cultural revitalization through sexual liberation that he espoused. "It was a delusion to build up certain psychiatric insights into a world-redeeming prophecy," [19] the Webers warned their friends -- unsuccessfully -- as they watched marriages bend and break around them.

In 1907, Gross traveled to Heidelberg, where the circle around Max Weber was one of the most vibrant intellectual centers in Germany. Weber was a living model of bourgeois-Christian respectability and regarded by many as one of the best minds in Europe.

Gross usually stayed with Weber's close associate, Edgar Jaffe. (Jaffe's wife, Else, and her sister, Frieda Weekly, are better known to us as the von Richthofen sisters.) [20] Gross established intimate relationships with several people in that circle, some of whom he had met at the Cafe Stefanie. By this time Gross was preaching a gospel of sexual liberation that he claimed was based on the insights of Nietzsche and Freud. Psychoanalysis -- at least in the "wild" manner that Gross conducted it -- would remove the chains of repression that an unnatural "civilized" society had imposed on individuals. As products of a long evolutionary process, humans were not adapted for civilized life and social conventions. The creative life-force -- sexuality -- suffered the most in the artificial environment of the civilized world. The most detailed description of Gross's philosophy is in the memoirs of Marianne Weber:

A young psychiatrist, a disciple of S. Freud with the magic of a brilliant mind and heart, had gained considerable influence. He interpreted the new insights of the master in his own fashion, drew radical conclusions from them, and proclaimed a sexual communism compared with which the so-called "new ethics" appeared quite harmless. In outline his doctrine went something like this: The life-enhancing value of eroticism is so great that it must remain free from extraneous considerations and laws, and, above all, from any integration into everyday life. If, for the time being, marriage continues to exist as a provision for women and children, love ought to celebrate its ecstasies outside this realm. Husbands and wives should not begrudge each other whatever erotic stimuli may present themselves. Jealousy is something mean. Just as one has several people as friends, one can also have sexual union with several people at any given period and be "faithful" to each one. But any belief in the permanence of feeling for a single human being is an illusion, and therefore exclusiveness of sexual community is a lie. The power of love is necessarily weakened by being constantly directed to the same person. The sexuality on which it is founded requires many-sided satisfaction. Its monogamous limitation "represses" the natural drives and endangers emotional health. Therefore, away with the fetters that prevent a person from fulfilling himself in new experiences; free love will save the world.


Weber sadly recalls, "The Freudian was successful and his message found believers. Under his influence both men and women dared to risk their own and their companions' spiritual well-being." [21]

What Marianne Weber didn't report in her memoirs was the extent to which Gross personally converted her friends to the practice of polygamy. He had affairs with both von Richthofen sisters, impregnating Else. Frieda was so profoundly changed by her liaison with Gross that she kept his love letters to her and practiced his doctrine of free love throughout the rest of her life, even during her long, nomadic marriage to D. H. Lawrence. Gross's love letters were awash in his Nietzschean life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie): "You know my faith," he wrote, "that it is always out of decadence that a new harmony in life creates itself." [22] In 1907, both Frieda Gross and Else Jaffe gave birth to sons sired by Otto Gross. Both mothers named their sons Peter.

Although shocked and bewildered by the seemingly mad behavior of their close friends, the Webers did not condemn them for following Gross's destructive "psychiatric ethos." "Indeed," Marianne Weber admits, "we had to admire the courage of those who risked themselves by sinning and then overcame the sin." [23] One who undertook the risk -- and thereby underwent a tremendous personal conversion -- was C. G. Jung.

Saving psychoanalysis by civilizing Otto Gross

In the spring of 1908, Hans Gross wrote to Bleuler and Jung to beg them to again commit his son to the Burgholzli for treatment. Hans Gross had been communicating with Otto's wife, Frieda, and was greatly concerned about what was happening in Munich. Because he now had a grandson, he feared Otto would ruin this child's life as well. On April 4, he wrote again to Bleuler, reporting that his daughter-in-law had told him that Otto would submit to treatment -- meaning psychoanalysis -- but not for his addictions; Otto clearly resented Frieda for colluding with his father. Hans Gross asked Bleuler to keep a place reserved for Otto. Bleuler relayed these messages to Jung. [24]

For a while, Jung put him off. And for a good reason: He did not like Otto Gross very much.

They had met in Amsterdam in September 1907 at the Congress for Neuro-Psychiatry, where Jung gave his first public defense of Freud. Afterward, he wrote a letter to Freud that contained some revelatory, if perhaps contradictory, observations on polygamy. Jung first told Freud that he envied the "uninhibited abreaction of the polygamous instinct" of the psychoanalyst and "gasbag" Max Eitington, who was also at the conference. Then Jung turned his attention to Otto Gross.

"Dr. Gross tells me," wrote Jung, "the truly healthy state for the neurotic is sexual immorality. Hence he associates you with Nietzsche." Jung clearly disagreed. As a man who at least nominally considered himself a Christian in 1907 and 1908, and as a physician and politically conservative member of the bourgeoisie, at this point in his life he still regarded civilization as a largely positive process. This soon changed. But at the time, he told Freud: "It seems to me, however, that sexual repression is a very important and indispensable civilizing factor, even if pathogenic for many inferior people. Still, there must always be a few flies in the world's ointment. What else is civilization but the fruit of adversity? I feel Gross is going along too far with the vogue for the sexual short-circuit, which is neither intelligent, nor in good taste, but merely convenient, and therefore anything but a civilizing factor." [25]

Others in the psychoanalytic movement knew of Jung's ill will toward Gross. After he eventually agreed to treat Gross at the Burgholzli, and Gross concurred, Ernest Jones wrote to Freud on May 13, 1908, expressing his concern. Jones at this time was still very fond of Gross. "I hear Jung is going to treat him psychically," he reported, "and naturally feel a little uneasy about that for Jung does not find it easy to conceal his feelings, and he has a pretty strong dislike to Gross; in addition, there are some fundamental differences of opinion between them on moral questions. However, we must hope for the best." [26]

Freud had been urging Jung to cooperate with Hans Gross. They recognized Otto's intellectual gifts and realized the importance of having Hans Gross's son in the psychoanalytic movement. The very first congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association was about to take place in Salzburg. Extraordinary methods to save Otto Gross suddenly became a priority.

Freud convinced Jung to admit Gross to allow him to withdraw from opium and cocaine. Jung could then proceed with an initial psychoanalysis. Freud urged Jung to keep Gross incarcerated until October, when he could be transferred to Vienna, where Freud would handle the deeper psychoanalysis himself.

At the Salzburg congress, Freud and Jung persuaded Otto to enter treatment. Looking thin and a bit unkempt, and probably under the influence of cocaine, Otto Gross nonetheless gave a short talk that everyone agreed was brilliant. Wilhelm Stekel remembered later that, "in his inspiring speech [Gross] compared Freud to Nietzsche and hailed him as a destroyer of old prejudices, an enlarger of psychological horizons, and a scientific revolutionary." [27] Stekel was the only one of Gross's former colleagues to write an appreciation of him after his lonely death on the streets of Berlin in 1920.

On May 11, 1908, Jung reported to Freud that Gross had arrived in Zurich with his wife. He looked terrible. Jung immediately began the gradual process of diluting his opium intake and comforting him during the painful withdrawal phase.

Jung's notes on the patient Otto Gross

Jung interviewed Frieda Gross at length to obtain a detailed medical history of Otto. [28] In the medical history report of "Frau Dr. Gross," Jung recorded that Frieda and Otto had married shortly after his 1902 discharge from the Burgholzli. Not long after the wedding, he began once again to use morphine. In 1904, Frieda wanted to have a child, so Otto went to Ascon a and successfully weaned himself off all drugs. After a successful conception (the fate of the child is not mentioned in Jung's report), his use of narcotics resumed. From morphine he went on to opium and cocaine. He snorted a concoction of an anesthetic and cocaine every day and ingested up to fifteen grams of pure opium. His sleep patterns were extremely irregular. Sometimes he would sleep for sixteen hours at a time, and sometimes he wouldn't be able to sleep at all. He could never sit still for very long and often needed to get up and pace about. The worst thing for Frieda was his "incessant theorizing" and his constant questioning. He insisted on analyzing her, but she resisted him, very often proposing her own counterhypotheses. Frustrated, he claimed these were symptoms of her "complex-resistances." In his darker moments he threatened to commit suicide. She left him for weeks at a time just so she could regain her strength.

Frieda complained bitterly about Otto's affair in the past year with the "Jewess" Regina Ullman. Ullman was a writer, and Gross was convinced that he could "liberate her genius through analysis." Frieda resisted the affair vigorously, and it was eventually terminated. At that time he took vast quantities of opium. During his administration of this "treatment" he was always in the greatest excitement. The analysis often lasted throughout the night and he insisted that his entire destiny depended on it. He blamed Frieda for his lack of interest and desire in scientific work. She said that all of his energy went into the nightly coffeehouse sessions, where he analyzed losers (Declasses) of all kinds. Finally, Otto promised her that he would seek treatment in an institution. Jung ended his report with the compassionate statement that Otto's decision to enter the hospital for treatment "cost the wife a heroic expenditure of her energy."

Jung's own notes on the course of treatment are sparse but still revealing. [29] We see here already the beginning of Jung's interest in how a patient's artistic productions provide information about the unconscious mind. By 1916, Jung required this therapeutic technique of all his patients.

On May 18, after the initial week of treatment, Jung reported in his first note that, "Until now the opium was kept at a maximum of 6.0 [grams] per day. On the very first night the patient made a great scene when he was told that he could not have any light at night. Then he said he must be going and should be let out immediately. With the greatest meanness he said that someone had locked him in here .... Daily many hours of analysis." On May 23, Jung noted that the level of opium had been reduced to three grams per day "without any remarkable withdrawal symptoms" and "with continuing analysis." Furthermore, "only with daily reminders does he wash his hands at least once a day and does not continue to stain his clothes with food and cigarette ashes. Outside of analysis he does nothing but make infantile drawings. He draws 'movement' not wholly indecently, but certainly like a dilettante." To Jung, Gross seemed completely unaware of the low artistic quality of his productions.

The note continued: "He insists he has a great talent for drawing. Inscribes the walls with associations and other notes. Always lies in bed with his clothes and shoes on, and, despite the warm weather, he wears thick underpants and 5-6 undershirts. Snorts cocaine and anaesthesin [an anesthetic] continuously. In his room the greatest disorder always rules. Throws all matches, cigarettes, etc. on the floor. Leaves his intimate personal letters around for anyone to see." Although ideas about treating addictions were certainly different at the turn of the century, the fact that Gross was allowed to continue to snort cocaine and an anesthetic during this time still raises some difficult questions about Jung's judgment in this case.

Jung reported on May 28 that the "opium was discontinued entirely." Jung's letters to Freud during the treatment period always stressed that Gross "voluntarily" agreed to the reduction and eventual discontinuation of doses of opium during the withdrawal. The clinical notes tell a different story. Gross, it seems, wanted opium slipped to him on the side, even if it meant threatening or blackmailing the assistant physician. Jung wrote simply, "No insight that this is impossible in a psychoanalytic relationship."

Jung ended the progress note for this day by adding other details that never appeared in his reports to Freud: "In recent days another terrible outburst, constantly demanded attention, roared like an animal if one didn't come immediately, rolled himself on the ground. The worst withdrawal symptoms often disappeared during conversation and without renewed 'Opiumdosis.' Opium restored with Codein, 4.0 [grams] per day. Once, while in a rage, broke a chair."

From May 28 until June 12, Jung gradually reduced the codeine, producing typical withdrawal symptoms along the way. Gross strongly protested further reduction in his dosage, but to no avail. By June 12, Gross was free of all drugs and feeling much better. Although Jung's letters to Freud during these weeks painted a rich and optimistic picture of his analysis with Gross as an intellectually stimulating engagement between two colleagues, his short clinical notes concerning the analysis provide a more realistic impression of a desperately ill man withdrawing from powerful narcotics. Psychoanalysis is mentioned in the clinical-progress notes as being "administered" to Otto Gross as if it were a powerful therapeutic drug itself.

The relationship between the two men intensified. During these warm June days Jung became more and more intrigued with Otto Gross and at times held around-the-clock analytic sessions with him. "I have sacrificed days and nights to him," he later told Freud." [30] Something was happening to him as well.

"After intensive analysis of complexes [Komplex-analyse] the patient accepted the knowledge of his own progressive deterioration," Jung noted on June 2. One week later, Jung triumphantly recorded his first therapeutic success: "Under continual analysis [his] condition has improved markedly. The infantile tantrums [Aufregungen] with childish complaints and impulses have now stopped." But his first drug-free days were still difficult. Jung wrote on June 12: "Healthy without withdrawal. Amiable but very labile, cries very easily, and when he speaks or laughs it is with a whining voice. Quick to anger. He is totally convinced that he is cured. Makes the most optimistic plans for the future: a Munich apartment with 4 rooms and a servant, rented in the vicinity of Kraepelin's clinic, 'Dr. Gross, Austrian certified physician, Psychotherapist.' Exhibits infantile delight until financial difficulties are discussed." Jung clearly thought Gross was bordering on grandiosity, and there was an obvious avoidance of the demands of reality. Jung continued: "Illustrated the outer-side of the door to his room with peculiar drawings. If he isn't walking .around, he spends the entire day sitting or lying in bed in just about any position imaginable, for example, his head under the pillow or his feet on it. Never productive."

Jung then made an interesting revelation about his own interests at the time: "Returned a thick book on mythology, claimed to have read it." Jung must have loaned him the book, and given that doctor and patient were also colleagues we must assume that Jung saw some relevance of mythology to the understanding of the unconscious mind. This new evidence places his interest in such a connection more than a year earlier than has previously been thought.

However, despite Gross's insistence that he was cured, Jung's notes make it clear that Gross still suffered from severe cognitive impairment and a lack of psychological insight. "He writes all the time, but never a letter. Despite numerous requests, he is in no condition to put the results of his analysis in writing. Only once was he able to formulate a couple of sentences with psychological content." Jung again commented on the dirtiness and disorderliness of Gross's room and his disheveled appearance.

On June 14, Frieda Gross visited her husband. "At first he conducted himself in a calm and kindly manner." Soon, however, he became agitated, childish. Efforts were made to prevent a more serious outburst. Frieda visited him again on the following day, but Gross caused "a great scene" because his wife had refused to have him immediately discharged from the hospital. Jung wrote that Gross "considered himself completely cured and said he would develop an anxiety neurosis if he wasn't immediately discharged. He conducted himself like a small child. Finally said to his wife: he hates her, and from now on they are separated." Soon, he calmed down.

By the following day, Gross's mood had swung to the opposite pole: "Today," Jung wrote, "he is of one heart and soul with his wife. He is completely convinced that he can change his wife's mind through analysis." Gross maintained that his wife considered herself to be just fine and replied to his attempts to analyze her with a few responses of an "insignificant nature." Jung reported that Gross's mood had picked up, that indeed he was radiant because Gross felt "he had completed an invaluable analysis, had won back his wife, and that now everything was going to be fine." Jung's notes, however, expressed skepticism about this sudden flight into health.

The morning of the seventeenth began with the usual analytic session. Jung reported that Gross "expressed a desire to go on a long journey with a female friend of his after discharge. The proposal that he again spend a half year as a ship's doctor was not accepted. He maintains that he has so much to do and that his head is so full of ideas that such a journey was not possible. Now he must return to work because he is full of productive energy and is in a creative mood. [His mood is] always very labile, speaks with emotion in a shaky voice." This was the last conversation these two men would ever have.

Feeling and looking better, Otto Gross was allowed to take an un supervised walk on the enclosed hospital grounds. This proved to be a mistake. "At 4 o'clock this afternoon he escaped from the A-2 garden over the wall," Jung wrote. "He had been granted free access to the garden. Has no money with him."

Two days later, Jung received a letter from him. He was in Zurich, and he wanted Jung to send him some money. Jung sent a telegraph to Frieda informing her of the escape, but no further steps were taken. She reported that Otto turned to his female friend for money and that he was most likely heading toward Munich or Heidelberg. We can only surmise that Frieda thought he was off to Munich to visit his bohemian friends or to Heidelberg to link up with Else Jaffe.

Jung's last note, on June 19, 1908, ended simply, "Aufenthalt unbekannt" -- "Whereabouts unknown." [31]

But not to Ernest Jones. Jones was in Munich in May and June 1908 to train with Kraepelin -- who despised psychoanalysis and had fired the irresponsible Gross. He made the following report to Freud on June 27:

I don't know how much you know of the Gross affair. He escaped from Burgholzli last week over the wall and came back here this week. I saw him yesterday. He seems to be much worse, quite paranoiac -- shut off from the outside world -- and had already started taking cocaine again. He wants to provoke a lawsuit to prove the value of psycho-analysis, to drag Kraepelin in and expose his ignorance before the world! He is extremely euphorisch und aufregregt [agitated]. It is a bad business altogether. I believe his wife is going to Graz next week. [32]
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

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PART 2 OF 2

"In Gross I discovered many aspects of my true nature"

It is clear from Jung's clinical notes that his experience in treating Otto Gross was not always pleasant. Here was a man he did not like in the first place who, while withdrawing from an addiction to powerful narcotics, was behaving in a highly unstable and, at times, hostile manner. Even his personal hygiene was appalling. To make matters worse, the analysis clearly ended in failure as soon as Otto Gross fled. Jung was supposed to save his soul for Freud and the future of psychoanalysis. He failed. Jung's final diagnosis of Gross was dementia praecox -- a severely stigmatizing diagnosis that seems based more on spite than clinical acumen. [33]

At any rate, it was Jung, not Gross, who was most transformed by the analysis, as a remarkable reversal in Jung's attitude toward Gross took place. The analysis was not a one-way street. In effect, as we know from Jung's letters to Freud in May and June 1908, the two men analyzed each other for many hours at a stretch, sometimes until they were both nodding off from exhaustion.

Jung was intent on pushing the limits of the psychoanalytic method to bring about a quick cure. He needed to impress Freud with his great personal healing powers. In the end, Jung's zeal to erode all of Gross's resistances only exacerbated his anxiety -- as Gross himself tried to warn Jung. At best, Gross was unaffected by Jung's treatment; at worst, Jung may have pushed his patient to the brink of destruction.

Jung, however, was never the same again. "Whenever I got stuck, he analyzed me," Jung told Freud on May 25, quite early in his treatment. [34] "In this way my own psychic health has benefitted." Jung's optimism during this first week seemed unbounded. "[Gross] is an extraordinarily decent fellow with whom you can hit it off at once provided you can get your own complexes out of the way." Amazingly, Jung then told Freud that "I finished the analysis yesterday," and that there were only "minor obsessions of a secondary importance" to be cleaned up. The Burgholzli progress notes indicate none of this and instead depict Gross as a rather degenerate individual teetering at the point of no return.

Jung admitted that his experience treating Gross was "one of the harshest of my life," but also that something inside him had profoundly changed. "In spite of everything, he is my friend," Jung told Freud in a letter dated June 19, "for at bottom he is a very good and fine man with an unusual mind ... for in Gross I discovered many aspects of my true nature, so that he often seemed like my twin brother-except for the dementia praecox." [35]

From bourgeois-Christian to modern consciousness

Knowing what kind of person Otto Gross was, and keeping in mind Marianne Weber's summary of his worldview, we can construct a likely scenario of his historic conversations with Jung. Gross captivated Jung with his theories of sexual liberation, his Nietzscheanism, and his utopian dreams of transforming the world through psychoanalysis. Jung must have heard stories about a world that he had been too afraid to venture into, a bohemian realm that was antithetical to everything he thought he valued. During these long hours he learned of Gross's sexual escapades in Heidelberg. He heard of the seductions of the von Richthofen sisters, of illegitimate children, of vegetarianism and opium and orgies. He learned of the Schwabing-to-Zurich-to-Ascona countercultural circuit and listened, amazed, as Gross informed him of neopagans, Theosophists, and sun worshipers who had formed their own colonies in Jung's Switzerland.

And then, of course, there was Otto Gross's own brilliant theorizing. We know from his early psychiatric publications that Gross had an interest in the relationship between biological evolution, cultural evolution, and present experience. In the years just prior to his encounter with Jung, Gross had become quite interested in Johann Jakob Bachofen's theory that our distant ancestors had lived freely, instinctively, polygamously, in small nomadic bands that tended to be matriarchal. Bachofen, who claimed to have archeological evidence for his theories, came to have a profound effect on both Gross and Jung. [36]

In the 1850s, Bachofen visited collections of Greco-Roman antiquities in Italy and began to notice certain patterns in the symbolism that no one had addressed. He became convinced he saw evidence of a lost period of human experience that predated all known civilization in Europe. After spending years deciphering the hidden message behind the signs and symbols on funerary monuments and other items, he outlined his theory in a book published in 1861. Entitled Das Mutterrecht (The law of mothers), it had only minimal success and was not well known until it was reprinted in the 1890s. These later printings caught the attention of the bohemians of Schwabing and Ascona. Ludwig Klages, a Nietzschean philosopher and graphologist, read Bachofen' s book in 1899 and introduced it to his friends in the so-called Cosmic Circle of disciples that surrounded the German poet Stefan George in Munich. Gross knew several of the members of the circle and probably developed his interest in matriarchy and Bachofen through them.

The nineteenth century was the great era of "stage models" of cultural evolution. Friedrich Engels, for example, developed a theory based on Bachofen's work that proposed that the earliest human societies were matriarchal in structure and only evolved later into patriarchy. [37] Bachofen himself hypothesized that the human race passed through at least three stages of cultural evolution:

The first stage was known as "hetairism." Humans in this period of prehistory lived in small nomadic, communist, and norm-free groups. Polygamy (both polyandry and polygyny) was the rule. Both sexes lived instinctively and freely, but also, by modern standards, savagely. There was no agriculture, no marriage or other social institutions, and females did not know who the fathers of their children were. Bachofen called this stage of human history the "tellurian" period and claimed that it was characterized by earth symbolism.

The second stage was known as the authentic phase of matriarchy, or Mutterrecht. During this period, agriculture and the domestication of animals appeared, and along with these innovations came the first rudimentary social institutions. The society of these early humans was based on egalitarian values and a worship of Mother Earth, and the worst crime one could commit was matricide. This was an age in which the human body was glorified. Bachofen thought that the famous Eleusinian mysteries of Greece had come about during these times, and that Demeter was a later incarnation of the original earth-mother goddess.

The third stage of human history -- in which we live -- is characterized by patriarchy. (Bachofen thought that a very brief transitional phase between matriarchy and patriarchy involved the bisexual god Dionysus.) In the period of dominant patriarchy, the intellect and the rule of society by law were exalted. The sun became the dominant symbol, evinced in Greek culture by the form of Apollo. Bachofen believed that once patriarchy was established, all signs of the prior matriarchal period were systematically eliminated. Enough evidence, however, survived to allow Bachofen to divine the actual truth of the matter -- or so he believed.

Such theories were quite popular in the counterculture of German Europe at the turn of the century. Within the tenets of a prehistoric matriarchal society that was egalitarian and possibly even polygamous, many saw the basis of a critique of the patriarchal structure of civilized life. Many who fled to Switzerland -- and especially to Ascona -- to escape conscription dreamed of an egalitarian and pacifist society. It seemed only logical that the reigning patriarchy should be replaced with matriarchy if it meant a return to a more humane existence.

Gross and Jung came to see the justification for Bachofen's theory in evolutionary biology. If it was true that our earliest human ancestors lived in small nomadic and polygamous bands for tens of thousands of years, then modern humans could not possibly have developed all the necessary adaptations to live in urban, industrialized environments. Since adaptations develop only gradually over time, the last five thousand years or so of recorded civilization were insufficient for natural selection to change the entire world's population. Like contemporary sociobiologists and "evolutionary psychologists," both Gross and Jung believed that, when it came to reproductive strategies, humans were biologically still quite primitive.

Polygamy was therefore to be considered a strong ancestral impulse that ruled even modern human beings. Civilization, despite its many wonderful qualities, tended to injure humans by creating social conventions that required them to repress their true savage nature. To restore human beings to physical and psychological health, the compromises they must make to societal norms must be kept to a minimum. Instinctual, creative energy that was lost to the repressive influence of society could be regained by breaking the rules of society, especially when it came to the "creative life-force" of sexuality. The shackles of family, society, and Deity must be broken. To love freely, instinctively, guiltlessly, generously -- to live polygamously -- would unleash the ancient creative energies of the body and the unconscious mind and bring humans to a new level of being.

This is what Gross believed and Jung abhorred when they began to analyze each other in the Burgholzli in May and June 1908. This is what both believed by the end of the treatment and what both actively tried to bring about in the years to follow. Gross tried to do so by becoming an anarchist and, in the last years of his life, a kind of communist. Jung did so by founding a spiritualist mystery cult of renewal and rebirth -- and by advocating polygamy for the rest of his life.

With historical hindsight, we can see that fundamental aspects of Jung's personal life and his professional life changed after this encounter. He recognized attitudes and impulses in himself that he had previously associated with bohemians, not a professional man, a Christian, and head of a family such as himself. During the course of their time together Gross offered Jung forbidden fruit. After a period of tormented consideration, Jung finally bit. Jung's conception of what constituted a "sin" changed: "doing evil" could have a beneficial effect on the personality by freeing one from "one-sidedness" and putting one back in touch with an Edenic instinctual being. Jung came to believe that not giving in to a strong sexual impulse could result in illness or even death. These are all ideas that everyone who knew Jung for any length of time would hear him urge on others.

Once Jung submitted to the temptations Gross offered, profound alterations in his concepts of the places of sexuality and religion in life took place. Because they denigrated the body and sexual activity -- especially outside of holy matrimony -- the repressive orthodoxies of Christianity now seemed to him to be the true enemies of life. Sexuality had to be brought back into spirituality. By 1912, Jung found another model -- the spirituality of pagan antiquity -- that held sex sacred. Although Gross did not share Jung's fascination with spiritualism or the occult, his "religion" was finding ways to rejuvenate and indeed redeem humankind through the sacrament of uninhibited sex. Jung soon learned of the spiritual sacredness of sex through personal experience and implored others to consider the call of the flesh.

Jung is also indebted to Otto Gross for the concepts of extraversion and introversion. These are the fundamental ideas of his theory of "psychological types," which he first began to develop in 1913 after his break with Freud, and they are terms that are familiar even today. [38] These concepts are also the basis of a hypothesized trait -- "extraversion-introversion" -- that is the most scientifically valid of all the "Big Five" personality traits thought to be the basis of all human personalities; whenever the genetic basis of personality is evaluated, the bulk of the evidence points to extraversion-introversion as the most genetically based. Understandably, contemporary textbooks on behavioral genetics usually credit Jung for these ideas, but, arguably, they belong to Gross. [39]

Jung said so himself. In his 1921 book, Psychological Types, Jung discusses at length a 1902 book by Gross entitled Die Cerebrale Sekundarfunktion (The cerebral secondary function), in which the core concepts that Jung later called extraversion and introversion are described. Jung generously concludes, "Even my terms 'extraversion' and 'introversion' are justified in light of his conceptions." [40] Leonhard Frank later claimed that Jung stole Gross's ideas, although this is not entirely supported by the evidence. Still, 1921 was the last time Jung ever publicly referred to Otto Gross in any significant way. As he became increasingly famous for his theory of psychological types, Jung allowed the memory of the contributions of Otto Gross to recede further and further into obscurity.

Gross never did quit using narcotics. His father succeeded in having him arrested in Berlin on December 9, 1913, and forced into an Austrian asylum for treatment. The resulting scandal shook bohemia and made Otto Gross into a kind of martyr. A Viennese cultural society distributed ten thousand leaflets in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, and elsewhere, urging, "Free Otto Gross!" Newspapers and political journals commented on the war between the bourgeois father and the bohemian son. Hans Gross, with the help of Frieda Gross (and possibly even Max Weber), successfully found a way to legally become the guardian of Otto's son Peter.

After agreeing to psychoanalytic treatment by Wilhelm Stekel, Gross was released in 1914. During the First World War he served as a physician in the Austro-Hungarian army. Little is known of this period in his life, although in a letter to Freud dated February 5-9, 1918, Sandor Ferenczi indicates that Gross did not let the war stop his sociosexual revolution:

A young colleague brought me his wife, whom I naturally was unable to accept. He came to psychoanalysis by way of Dr. Otto Gross. Dr. Gross is supposed to
have worked in the hospital for infectious diseases in Ungvar as a physician attached to the Home Guard regiment. Naturally, he also made his circle of disciples there, who, among other things, had the duty without exception to enter into sexual relations with Dr. Gross's lover, named "Mieze." They supposedly classified the young colleague, who found that repugnant, as "morally unreliable" for that reason. Incidentally, the young colleague had some time ago received news of Dr. Gross's death, which has, however, not been substantiated. He will still pop up here and there as a "Golem." [41]


Ferenczi was right to dismiss the report of Gross's death. He was soon spotted in Prague, where he made the acquaintance of Max Brod and Franz Kafka (who had taken law courses with Hans Gross in Prague), and in Berlin, where he wrote anarchist and unorthodox communist articles for political publications and befriended many in the Berlin Dada movement. But one day he was found alone and ill in an abandoned warehouse in Berlin. He died in a sanitorium in Pankow, north of Berlin -- probably of pneumonia -- on March 13, 1920.

Sabina Spielrein

Jung's personal life had been in turmoil for quite some time before Gross arrived at the Burgholzli. He had become erotically obsessed with a small, dark twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman, an exile from Russia. She was scintillatingly brilliant, extraordinarily sensitive, and sexually preoccupied. She was deeply in love with Jung, and she didn't care if he had a wife. She had been his patient at the Burgholzli, a hysteric, his "first success" as a psychoanalyst, and now she was a medical student. They shared a love for the music of Richard Wagner. She fantasized about having a Jewish-Aryan child by him, a Wagnerian hero-genius whom she would name Siegfried. When Otto Gross skipped over the wall in June 1908, she was there to comfort Jung. And, in fact, Gross had delivered him to her.

At some point in late 1908 or 1909, Spielrein wrote (probably to Freud): "I sat there waiting in deep depression. Now he arrives, beaming with pleasure, and tells me with strong emotion about Gross, about the great insight he has just received [i.e., about polygamy]; he no longer wants to suppress his feeling for me, he admitted that I was his first, dearest woman friend, etc., etc. (his wife of course excepted), and that he wanted to tell me everything about himself." [42]

Whether Jung and Spielrein had engaged in a sexual relationship prior to this time is unknown. But this independent confirmation of Jung's conversion to the life-philosophy of Otto Gross increases the likelihood of such a possibility. The affair was certainly over by 1912. Sabina Spielrein left Zurich by then and married an exiled Russian physician, even though some evidence suggests she may still have been in love with Jung.

Almost all of what we know about Sabina Spielrein comes from a cache of her personal papers that were found in 1977 in the cellar of the Palais Wilson in Geneva. [43] In recent years, more material on Spielrein has emerged. Perhaps the most significant find has been Jung's original clinical case notes from his initial treatment of her in the Burgholzli in 1904 and 1905, as well as a previously unknown letter to Freud in which he summarized her treatment. In this letter dated September 25, 1905, Jung claimed, "I have fairly completely analyzed her illness using your method," and with "very favorable success." [44]

Jung referred Spielrein to Freud for treatment at the insistence of her mother, who realized that Spielrein had fallen in love with Jung and feared the consequences. Jung does inform Freud that "During the treatment the patient had the misfortune to fall in love with me," and had revealed this to her mother. But in this letter Jung also claims that both the "father and the mother are hysterical, especially the mother," which may explain why Frau Spielrein never passed this letter on to Freud.

No new information about the on-again, off-again affair between Jung and Spielrein appears in these documents. It is clear, however, in his letters to Freud, that after his encounter with Gross, polygamy was very much on Jung's mind. In quite a reversal from the disgust with which he initially greeted Gross's ideas, in a letter to Freud dated March 7, 1909, Jung discussed the Spielrein affair and admitted to his own "polygamous components." [45] He told Freud that he hoped his brush with scandal with Spielrein had secured him "moral qualities which will be the greatest advantage to me in later life." He assured Freud that his relationship with Emma "has gained enormously in assurance and depth." However, by January 3, 1910, he told Freud that his wife was "staging jealous scenes, groundlessly" and that "the prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is a license to be unfaithful. I in my turn have learned a great deal." [46] Spielrein was still very much on his mind, and soon other female patients and colleagues were as well.

After 1912, Jung exchanged a few letters with Spielrein, but there is no evidence that they ever saw each other after the start of the First World War. As with Gross, he soon stopped talking about her and ceased citing her publications in his own. [47] By 1969 and 1970, out of the 143 persons who were interviewed by Gene Nameche for the C. G. Jung Biographical Archives Project, not one mentioned her. She had apparently disappeared from the oral traditions of the Jungians, lost from memory. [48]

Rx: Polygamy

As the correspondence demonstrates, Jung tended to mislead Freud about the realities of his personal life. Given his need to preserve his bourgeois- Christian persona at this time and his desire to stay in Freud's good graces, Jung's inclination to sweeten the truth is quite understandable. As we now know, Jung's "polygamous components" eventually won out in his personality. From the time he decided to indulge these impulses with Sabina Spielrein, he would practice polygamy for the rest of his life. Yet as we have learned from the discrepancy between his letters to Freud and his clinical notes on Otto Gross, he also tended to mislead Freud about what he actually said and did with his patients. From at least 1909 onward, he explicitly recommended the central tenet of Gross's philosophy -- polygamy -- to his male patients.

The first indication of this comes from the case of a patient that Jung mentions in the same fateful letter to Freud of March 7, 1909, in which he admits to his own "polygamous components." After describing his affair with Spielrein, he told Freud: "Fate, which evidently loves crazy games, had just at this time deposited on my doorstep a well-known American (friend of Roosevelt and Taft, proprietor of several big newspapers, etc.) as a patient. Naturally he has the same conflicts I have just overcome, so I could be of great help to him, which is gratifying in more respects than one. It was like balm on my aching wound. This case has interested me so passionately in the last fortnight that I have forgotten my other duties." [49]

This American patient was Medill McCormick, of the prominent McCormick family of Chicago. McCormick's immediate family owned the Chicago Tribune. He was treated unsuccessfully by Jung in Zurich in late 1908 and in March 1909. He saw Jung again in September 1909 for a brief consultation in New York City when Jung was attending the Clark University Conference with Freud. McCormick suffered from severe bouts of alcoholism and depression, for which Jung prescribed polygamy as a way of overcoming his despair and saving his soul.

After his later consultation with Jung, McCormick wrote to his wife, Ruth Hanna McCormick, on September 21, 1909: "Jung warned me against being too good and asked particularly if I felt free. He rather recommended a little flirting and told me to bear in mind that it might be advisable for me to have mistresses -- that I was a very dangerous and savage man, that I must not forget my heredity and my infantile influences and lose my soul -- if women would save it." [50]

Otto Gross couldn't have said it any better.

Jung may have imparted this advice to many of his male patients and analytic trainees. For example, Aline Valangin, a young woman who was having a relationship problem with an older man whom she did not want to marry, had a few sessions with Jung in 1915 and wrote to him when he was on military assignment. Jung soon farmed her out to an assistant, Dr. Herbert Oczeret, who immediately told her to stop writing to Jung. He wanted her transference all to himself. She left treatment with Oczeret after a few years because he "started to analyze in a really impossible way. At that time he set up a harem out of his women patients. Yes, that was really terrible." [51] Dr. Tina Keller, a later disciple, placed the blame on Jung himself for such actions by his disciples, explaining that when Jung "tried to break conventional bonds, he became exaggerated, and in the early times, also amongst the group around him, new freedoms were misunderstood and led to abuse." [52]

An additional example of this form of treatment can be found in the case of another American, Henry A. Murray, who met Jung in Zurich. He would become a noted psychologist and personality theorist at Harvard University. The historian Forrest Robinson has documented that in 1925 Jung recommended polygamy to Murray as an alternative to divorce. [53] Murray, quite in awe of Jung at the time, then carried on a three-way relationship with his wife and his mistress, Christiana Morgan. With Morgan he acted out a wide variety of sexual fantasies and sex-role reversals in order to develop the psychological components of their personalities. The rationale for this was Jung's theory of "psychological types," which maintained that the road to health involved developing the energies of the opposite sex that were often repressed in oneself.

In later years, mimicking Jung, Murray built his own "Tower" in Massachusetts, which he and Morgan decorated with their own mystical paintings and drawings. They believed that they were performing important spiritual work for all humankind and starting a new form of religion. They created their own new pantheon of gods, in which the sun symbolized the highest deity. They painted the sun in the center of the ceiling of the main ritual room of their tower. Besides orgies of alcohol and sex, they also indulged in detailed magical rituals that involved recitations from Jung's works. [54] In building his tower and keeping an extramarital relationship that spanned decades, Henry Murray was only performing what the "Old Man" (as he called Jung) modeled for him.

By the time Murray met them in 1925, Jung and Toni Wolff had been lovers for more than a decade. And they, too, were convinced that they had founded a new religion. They believed in a new faith in which former sins and evils became necessary for spiritual rebirth. God -- no longer One -- would emerge from individual visionary experiences and automatic writing as a multitude of natural forces or entities that were both good and evil.

It was a religion conceived through polygamy.

Toni Wolff

In 1910, a twenty-two-year-old woman from one of the oldest families in Zurich was brought by her mother to Jung for treatment, since Jung had treated the son of a family friend. Although only thirty-five, Jung seemed much older to the young woman. Each recognized something precious in the other, something that both soon coveted. In one form or another -- as patient, paramour, companion, and collaborator, as a "second wife" in a polygamous threesome -- Toni Wolff had an intimate relationship with C. G. Jung for more than forty years. It is safe to say that she knew more sides of him than anyone else ever would and was closer to him than any other friend or wife.

It is commonly thought that Toni Wolff was brought to Jung for depression that followed the death of her father in 1909. Her sister, Susanne Wolff Trub, discounts this, remembering that "from her early years Toni was a difficult child, even when she was two years old." Indeed, "she was always complicated, all the time. I don't know whether it was more or less the same, after my father's death." [55] Toni's other sister, Erna Wolff Naeff, "read Toni's diaries," according to Susanne, and "thinks she was more complicated afterward." [56]

From 1910 onward, Toni Wolff never created a life for herself outside of Jung's circle. Her sister remembered her as an intellectual person (far more so than Emma Jung or herself), but her only formal education came from Jung. She was particularly fond of Japanese art and culture. But there was something fundamentally wrong with her character, something that never changed, even after analysis with Jung. Throughout her life she had difficulty taking care of herself. "Toni was not at all a practical person," remembered Susanne Trub. "She never would have been able to live a married life .... But somehow she was never totally in life." She lived with her mother until her mother died in 1940 and then moved into an apartment in the house of her sister, where she remained until her own death in 1953. "She never had to care for herself; other people did it. And later, when she moved to the house of my sister, she took my mother's maid with her." [57]

Wolff was Jung's patient for at least two years. By the late summer of 1911, however, she had become his assistant. She conducted library research for him for the second half of his paper on "Transformations and Symbols of the Libido" (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), which was published in 1912. His affection for her seemed to grow, and emotionally he turned to her for support after the tragic deaths of his twenty-five-year-old assistant, J. J. Honegger, who committed suicide with an overdose of morphine in the spring of 1911, and his cousin Helly, who died of tuberculosis that November.

Soon Wolff was well on her way to becoming a colleague of sorts. In a letter dated August 29, 1911, Jung joyfully informed Freud that at the upcoming psychoanalytic conference in Weimar in September, "This time the feminine element will have conspicuous elements from Zurich: Sister Moltzer, Dr. Hinkle-Eastwick (an American charmer), Frl. Dr. Spielrein (!), then a new discovery of mine, Frl. Antonia Wolff, a remarkable intellect with an excellent feeling for religion and philosophy, and last but not least, my wife." [58] Sabina Spielrein did not attend the Weimar conference, but in the famous group photograph in which most of Jung's "Zurich school" is clustered to the right of Freud and Jung, we see in the front row the young Toni Wolff two seats from Emma Jung, peering out at us. Of the five women who were to make up the "feminine element" at the 1911 Weimar congress, Jung certainly had sexual relations with at least three of them and possibly four, if certain references to Maria Moltzer are accurate. Only the American, Beatrice Hinkle, did not have an affair with him.

By 1913, Wolff's formal analysis with Jung was finished. Fearing a repeat of the searing pain of his up-and-down love affair with Spielrein, he broke off all relations with her. She became depressed. He fantasized about her constantly. He desperately needed her. In December 1913, he began experimenting with a dissociative technique that he had learned from his experiences with Helly. He began to have powerful, disturbing visions, hear voices, and receive communications from unseen entities. He needed help. He needed Wolff.

At about this time, he dreamed that he and Wolff were hiking in the Alps together. They were in a rock-strewn valley. As they approached a mountain they heard the singing of elves. To his horror, she walked toward this magic mountain and disappeared into it. He woke up in a state of panic. [59]

Knowing he was taking a chance with his marriage and career and risking the delicate psychological state of his former patient, who now, too, was in love with him, he nonetheless contacted her. They began to see each other. They talked, shared the content of their dreams, and nothing more. Jung began to wonder how long he could repress his natural urges. He feared the damage that he might be doing to himself by being too "one-sided." The experience with Spielrein had been painful, but also liberating. He learned mysteries of life he might never have known, and he understood his patients better because of it. Fate had placed yet another young, dark, intellectually alluring young woman in his path, and this one was more like him: she had religious visions, knew how to read astrological charts, and was fascinated with Theosophical publications and their distillations of Western occult wisdom and Eastern philosophies. Spielrein was never like this. Spielrein was too clever, too Jewish.

In his preparatory discussions with Aniela Jaffe for MDR, Jung talked a great deal about Toni Wolff. However, despite her importance to Jung, she is never discussed in the book. But in the transcripts of Jaffe's interviews Jung reveals a story that he repeated to his closest disciples to impress upon them the "danger of one-sidedness." During a memorable private session with Dr. Tina Keller, he said:

He was swimming in the Lake of Zurich. He was an excellent swimmer. However, one day he had a cramp that made him come close to drowning. Then, in a flash of insight he knew that the cramp was the symbolic expression for an act of violence he was doing to himself. As he decided not to suppress the upsurge of life that he had tried to control by will power, the cramp left him. He drew the conclusion that there are situations in which one has no right to set artificial limitations to life's flow. [60]


The moral of Jung's oft-told tale was that if one did not follow one's inner urgings, the "unconscious" would react to this insult by threatening one's life. Jung's sexual relationship with Toni Wolff began almost immediately thereafter, and together they pushed the boundaries of sanity and sexual abandon.

In later years, Jung would tell many of his disciples that it was with Wolff that he first discovered the "mystical" or "spiritual" significance of sexuality. Sometimes, even with new acquaintances, he would be a bit more graphic. John Layard, a British anthropologist who was for a time a disciple of Jung's, told Gene Nameche that Jung talked frankly about Wolff during his very first analytic sessions with him:

INT: What did he tell you about Toni? In your first meetings he talked about her all the time?

JL: Just how marvelous she had been in bed.

INT: Is that right?

JL: Largely, and how splendid she was. I can't remember everything because I was longing to get on with my analysis, and was only passively listening. [61]


Toni Wolff was at Jung's side during the crucial years when he developed all the concepts we now think of as "Jungian": his famous theories of individuation, the collective unconscious and its dominants, which he later called archetypes. It was during these years that the special Jungian vocabulary still used today was developed, terms such as "shadow," "anima," "animus," "persona." She was deeply involved in the development of his personality typology and in the writing of Psychological Types, which appeared in 1921.

Wolff had become indispensable to his creative work. She, too, was soon allowed by Jung to analyze others, and she brought the fruit of her labors into their collaboration. They believed they were discovering hidden dimensions of the human spirit. She assisted him with the founding of the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1916, which Jung would later call their "silent experiment in group psychology." In later years, as disciples came from all over the world to be involved in Jung's special initiatory brand of analysis, Wolff called him by her nickname for him, "the Bishop." [62]

Emma Jung, however, fared less well during these years. Her husband was unreachable, emotionally labile, difficult to talk to. Susanne Trub, who had become her friend, remembered years later, "It was difficult for her in the beginning to understand all of Jung' s work on the collective unconscious. It was difficult for her to take part in that. And it is very difficult for a woman with small children." Echoing the folklore that has been passed down in Jungian circles since those early days Trub added: "And while Jung was working on the collective unconscious, my sister Toni was so important for him. She had an understanding for it. She perhaps was able to encourage him and so gave him the faith. Frau Jung wasn't able to do it. It is impossible when you have five children." [63] Emma Jung did not choose polygamy freely. The situation was presented to her by her husband. At best, she freely chose to adapt to it.

Somehow Jung, Emma, and Wolff came to a mutual understanding that allowed a polygamous arrangement to continue until at least the 1940s. Jung's ill health after a heart attack in 1944 gave Emma more control of her marriage, and for the rest of her life she was able to successfully limit Wolff's access to her husband. But before then, they developed a very bourgeois schedule for their very bohemian situation. Jung would visit Wolff regularly on Wednesday evenings in Zurich, and she would travel to Kusnacht on Sundays to spend the day with Jung and his family in their home. She would sometimes accompany him on short trips without Emma. After Jung built his Tower at Bollingen in the early 1920s, they would regularly spend weeks there alone every summer. Divorce was discussed by both Jung and his wife with their own confidants, but nothing was ever decided.

Throughout their relationship, Jung and Toni Wolff had tremendous arguments and separated from each other for months at a time. Sometimes this was because Jung became interested in other women. In 1925, Jung took a long voyage to Africa to visit the natives of Kenya and Uganda. He was accompanied in the field by Ruth Bailey, a young woman he had met en route. Jung, who was fifty, and Bailey, who was thirty, had a sexual relationship during the course of their safari. Embers continued to glow over the years. After Emma Jung died in 1955, Ruth Bailey moved in with the eighty-year-old Jung to take care of him. As Jung's colleague Carl A. Meier characterized it, "He had a crush for Ruth Bailey for quite a long time and when he was a very old man, well, he may have indulged in some petting or whatnot. In fact, I was told one of these stories by someone who saw it. But he was already an old man by then. Most of these stories are certainly made up by these women [around Jung] for their own prestige." [64] For her part, Toni Wolff is rumored to have only once allowed her feelings for Jung to stray. For a time she developed romantic feelings for Heinrich Steiger, who was once secretary of the Psychological Club.

Apparently there was much gossip -- some driven by envy over Wolff's intimacy with Jung -- among his disciples in his later years. John Layard reports that one female disciple (probably Jolande Jacobi), "with the natural curiosity of a Viennese" apparently "watched him bathing and said he wasn't very large." [65] It is difficult to imagine gossip like this existing in the circle around Freud.

Polygamy released not only the ancient sexual forces of nature within an individual, but also the energy of the ancestral god, the only true god, the invincible source of all light and heat and libido and life. Without a doubt, once Jung had made the decision to accept the teachings of Otto Gross, his bohemian John the Baptist, he was well along the path to his own death and resurrection.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:22 pm

Part 1 of 2

Chapter 6: Sun Worship

If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one's own vital force, the libido.
-- C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 1911

Not even the most recent scientific discoveries ... which teach us how we live, and move, and have our being in the sun, how we bum it, how we breathe it, how we feed on it -- give us any idea of what this source of light and life, this silent traveller, this majestic ruler, this departing friend or dying hero, in his daily or yearly course, was to the awakening consciousness of mankind. People wonder why so much of the old mythology, the daily talk, of the Aryans, was solar: -- what else could it have been?
-- Friedrich Max Muller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 1878

What I am now about to say I consider to be of the greatest importance for all things "that breathe and move upon the earth" ... but above all others it is of importance to myself. For I am a follower of King Helios. And of this fact I possess within me, known to myself alone, proofs more certain than I can give. But this, at least, I am permitted to say without sacrilege, that from my childhood an extraordinary longing for the rays of the god penetrated deep into my soul.
-- Julian, Emperor of Rome, "Hymn to King Helios," 362 C.E.


Who can possibly understand the true source of the archaic, rejuvenating energies that pulsed through C. G. Jung in the years following his encounters with Otto Gross and Sabina Spielrein? Not only did sexual energy surge through him with a power that frightened him, but terrifying, decidedly Wagnerian visions of Teutonic figures such as Wotan and Siegfried and of the cosmic dramas of Greek mythology dominated both his waking fantasies and his nocturnal dreams. He had been a man who prided himself on the rational control of his thoughts, of his ability to maintain composure in the face of psychosis, a man who devalued a spontaneous fantasy life as weak, sick, repulsive. But soon he found that he could not regulate the swirling modern chaos in his own psyche.

Between September 1909, when it was clear that the transformational process had begun, and September 1912, when he published his confirmation of his loss of faith in Freud and in the Judeo-Christian god, Jung's attitude toward the unconscious mind changed profoundly. At first believing the unconscious mind to be an entirely personal and individual warehouse of memories, he came to see it as the source of ancestral wishes and tendencies -- and even experiences -- that were inherited biologically through a type of vitalistic mechanism, a generalized life-force called the libido. By September 1912 he made it clear to Freud and to his own circle in Zurich that this powerful energy of life was not only the sex drive, as Freud had maintained, but should be viewed as a more generalized force of nature whose currents carried ancestral spiritual longings through biological channels.

During these three years, Jung developed the idea that the unconscious mind was the result of a long, phylogenetic, evolutionary process. Just as the human body is a living museum of evolutionary history, so too is the human psyche. And since the most potent ideas of human concern are religious ones, we should discover the spiritual symbols of our ancestors deep within the unconscious mind of each individual. That is, looking at the evolutionary development of the human species, the most recent, and therefore most powerful, influences on present human experience would be racial or tribal ones. In Jung's new view, religious needs were biologically based. The peoples of pagan antiquity, closer to our prehistoric ancestors, celebrated their sexuality in their spirituality and were therefore less plagued by neuroses and psychoses than modern Europeans. Jung forged these insights into the theory that a life could only be meaningful if one's religious beliefs and sexual practices resonated with those of one's racial ancestors.


Everything in the world is in a state of evolution, human consciousness included. Man has not always had the consciousness he now possesses; when we go back to the times of our earliest ancestors, we find a consciousness of a very different kind. At the present time man in his waking-life perceives external things through the agency of his senses and forms ideas about them. These ideas about the external world work on his blood. Everything, therefore, of which he has been the recipient as the result of sense-experience, lives and is active in his blood; his memory is stored with these experiences of his senses. Yet, on the other hand, the man of to-day is no longer conscious of what he possesses in his inward bodily life by inheritance from his ancestors. He knows naught concerning the forms of his inner organs; but in earlier times this was otherwise. There then lived within the blood not only what the senses had received from the external world, but also that which is contained within the bodily form; and as that bodily form was inherited from his ancestors, man sensed their life within himself.

If we think of a heightened form of this consciousness, we shall have some idea of how this was also expressed in a corresponding form of memory. A person experiencing no more than what he perceives by his senses, remembers no more than the events connected with those outward sense-experiences. He can only be aware of such things as he may have experienced in this way since his childhood. But with prehistoric man the case was different. Such a man sensed what was within him, and as this inner experience was the result of heredity, he passed through the experiences of his ancestors by means of his inner faculty. He remembered not only his own childhood, but also the experiences of his ancestors. This life of his ancestors was, in fact, ever present in the pictures which his blood received, for, incredible as it may seem to the materialistic ideas of the present day, there was at one time a form of consciousness by means of which men considered not only their own sense-perceptions as their own experiences, but also the experiences of their forefathers. In those times, when they said, "I have experienced such and such a thing," they alluded not only to what had happened to themselves personally, but also to the experiences of their ancestors, for they could remember them.

This earlier consciousness was, it is true, of a very dim kind, very hazy as compared to man's waking consciousness at the present day. It partook more of the nature of a vivid dream, but, on the other hand, it embraced far more than does our present consciousness. The son felt himself connected with his father and his grandfather as one "I," because he felt their experiences as if they were his own. And because man was possessed of this consciousness, because he lived not only in his own personal world, but because within him there dwelt also the consciousness of preceding generations, in naming himself he included in that name all belonging to his ancestral line: father, son, grandson, etc., designated by one name that which was common to them all, that which passed through them all; in short, a person felt himself to be merely a member of an entire line of descendants. This sensation was a true and actual one.

We must now enquire how it was that this form of consciousness was changed. It came about through a cause well known to occult history. If you go back into the past, you will find that there is one particular moment which stands out in the history of each nation. It is the moment at which a people enters on a new phase of civilisation, the moment when it ceases to have old traditions, when it ceases to possess its ancient wisdom, the wisdom which was handed down through generations by means of the blood. The nation possesses, nevertheless, a consciousness of it, and this is expressed in its legends.

In earlier times tribes held aloof from each other, and the individual members of families intermarried. You will find this to have been the case with all races and with all peoples; and it was an important moment for humanity when this principle was broken through, when foreign blood was introduced, and when marriage between relations was replaced by marriage with strangers, when endogamy gave place to exogamy. Endogamy preserves the blood of the generation; it permits of the same blood flowing in the separate members as flows for generations through the entire tribe or the entire nation. Exogamy inoculates man with new blood, and this breaking-down of the tribal principle, this mixing of blood, which sooner or later takes place among all peoples, signifies the birth of the external understanding, the birth of intellect.

The important thing to bear in mind here is, that in olden times there was a hazy clairvoyance, from which the myths and legends originated. This clairvoyance could exist in the nearly-related blood, just as our present-day consciousness comes about owing to the mingling of blood. The birth of logical thought, the birth of the intellect, was simultaneous with the advent of exogamy. Surprising as this may seem, it is nevertheless true. It is a fact which will be substantiated more and more by external investigation; indeed, the initial steps along this line have already been taken.

But this mingling of blood which comes about through exogamy is also that which at the same time obliterates the clairvoyance of earlier days, in order that humanity may evolve to a higher stage of development; and just as the person who has passed through the stages of occult development regains this clairvoyance, and transmutes it into a new form, so has our waking consciousness of the present day been evolved out of that dim and hazy clairvoyance which obtained in times of old.

At the present time everything in a man's environment is impressed upon his blood; hence the environment fashions the inner man in accordance with the outer world. In the case of primitive man it was that which was contained within the body that was more fully expressed in the blood. In those early times the recollection of ancestral experiences was inherited, and, along with this, good or evil tendencies. In the blood of the descendants were to be traced the effects of the ancestors' tendencies. But, when the blood was mixed through exogamy, this close connection with ancestors was severed, and man began to live his own personal life. He began to regulate his moral tendencies according to what he experienced in his own personal life. Thus, in an unmixed blood is expressed the power of the ancestral life, and in a mixed blood the power of personal experience.

-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf Steiner


Polygamy unblocked the rays of this inner source of light and heat that had been eclipsed by centuries of monotheism and the monogamy crushingly demanded by Judeo-Christianity. Otto Gross had taught him that, but Gross fused this knowledge of the morally corrosive effect of polygamy with efforts to bring about an associated change in political consciousness and thereby incite revolution and anarchy. What Jung desired instead were additional psychotherapeutic methods to effect spiritual rebirth. He sought potent new symbols of transformation to bring about changes of consciousness in large numbers of people. He became increasingly certain of his own destiny as the man who would deliver such redemption to humanity but was uncertain of the means of achieving it. After a dream pointed the way, he knew the secret he was looking for was buried in the accounts of pagan regeneration.

Once Jung charged down this intellectual path there was no stopping him. To be sure, a multitude of others had preceded him on this quest. In German Europe at that time legions of scientists and artists, bohemians and bourgeoisie, were fervently seeking much the same thing. And, when we listen carefully to their voices through the cacophony of historical events that took shape beginning in 1933, we can hear the faint singing of their hymns to the sun.

"I often feel I am wandering alone through a strange country"

It all began with a dream
aboard the ship that carried Jung and Freud back to Europe after they attended the Clark University Conference in September 1909. Jung found himself descending layer by layer -- spatially and temporally -- into the foundations of a large old house. As the story is told in MDR, Jung left a "rococo style salon" on the top floor for a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century dwelling on the ground floor. [1] He then descended a stone stairway that led to a room from "Roman times," and then farther down to a "low cave cut into the rock" where, at the lowest levels, he found the remnants of a primitive culture: pottery, scattered human bones, and "two human skulls."

In MDR, Jung credits this dream for giving him his first idea of a collective unconscious. In a 1925 lecture in which he gave a slightly different version of it, he told his audience that he had "a strongly impersonal feeling about the dream," indicating, at least to him, that it was less a product of his own personal unconscious than something akin to a message from the great beyond. [2] Later in life he told E. A. Bennett something different that calls into question the mystical nature of Jung's interpretation. In Bennett's account, Jung associates the supposedly "impersonal" material from the collective unconscious with some very personal thoughts: "When he reflected on it," wrote Bennett, "later the house had some associations in his mind with his uncle's very old house in Basel which was built in the old moat of the town and had two cellars; the lower one was very dark and like a cave." [3] In any event, the dream did stir something in Jung that put him on a different track entirely.

Immediately after his return home, Jung began to visit archeological sites so that he could observe ongoing excavations. He began an intensive study of mythology and Hellenistic spiritual practices in the classical scholarship of his day. "Archeology or rather mythology has got me in its grip," Jung wrote to Freud on October 14, 1909. [4] This became a familiar theme in their correspondence over the next two and a half years.

As a boy, Jung had wanted to become a classical philologist or an archeologist. His newfound project reawakened these childhood fantasies. "All my delight in archeology (buried for years) has sprung into life again," he told Freud. [5] Soon, however, his study of mythology took on an almost obsessive quality, and mythological figures began to intrude in his daily fantasies and dreams. On February 20, 1910, he told Freud, "All sorts of things are cooking in me, mythology in particular." [6] By April 17, he was afraid of the effect that his researches might have been having on his mental state: "At present I am pursuing my mythological dreams with almost autoerotic pleasure, dropping only meager hints to my friends .... I often feel I am wandering alone through a strange country, seeing wonderful things that no one else has seen before and no one needs to see .... I don't yet know what will come of it. I must just let myself be carried along, trusting to God that in the end I shall make a landfall somewhere." [7] By February 15, 1912, Jung was in a panic. "I am having grisly fights with the hydra of mythological fantasy and not all its heads are cut off yet. Sometimes I feel like calling for help when I am too hard-pressed by the welter of material. So far I have suppressed the urge." [8]

Jung's efforts were not in vain. Even as early as the end of November 1909 it was clear that he had developed a new theory for psychoanalysis that would have profound racial implications for its future.

The phylogenetic unconscious

In the spring of 1909, Jung had resigned from his post at the Burgholzli and saw patients privately in his consulting room at his new home in Kusnacht, approximately seven miles southeast of Zurich. Although not a move of great distance spatially, it was for Jung, psychologically. From his new home on Lake Zurich, in a letter to Sigmund Freud, Jung outlined for the very first time the contours of his new racial theory of the unconscious:

I feel more and more that a thorough understanding of the psyche (if possible at all) will only come through history or with its help. Just as an understanding of anatomy and ontogenesis is possible only on the basis of phylogenesis and comparative anatomy. For this reason, antiquity now appears to me in a new and significant light. What we now find in the individual psyche -- in compressed, stunted, or one-sidedly differentiated form -- may be seen spread out in all its fullness in times past. Happy is the man who can read these signs! The trouble is that our philology has been as hopelessly inept as our psychology. Each has failed the other. [9]


By Christmas, Jung had employed the assistance of one of his young psychiatrists at the Burgholzli, Johann Jakob Honegger. As he told Freud (December 25, 1909), he entrusted to Honegger everything that he knew "so that something good may come of it." By now Jung was even more convinced that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, for he was having "the most marvelous visions, glimpses of far-ranging interconnections which I am at present incapable of grasping." Again he confirmed to Freud the new direction of his thinking: "It has become quite clear to me that we shall not solve the ultimate secrets of neurosis and psychosis without mythology and the history of civilization, for embryology goes hand in hand with comparative anatomy." [10]

One of Jung's strengths -- and indeed his "genius" -- was his remarkable ability to synthesize highly complex and seemingly unrelated fields of inquiry. Early in his career, Jung attempted to use the lessons learned from his experimental researches using the word-association test to explain the phenomenon of hysterical "repressions" in psychoanalysis and the alternate personalities of "spirits" that arose during mediumistic trances. His theory that the normal human mind was made up of unconscious complexes -- semiautonomous clusters of images, thoughts, and feelings organized around a specific motif or thematic core -- was his overarching explanation for these phenomena. Later, when he first consciously identified himself with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, he tried to integrate that complex theory with psychoanalysis in a wide range of publications, his most famous being a small book on the psychology of dementia praecox. [11]

By November 1909, Jung's clinical experience had stimulated him to cast his intellectual net even wider. What Jung already saw as his intellectual "project" was nothing less than a grand synthesis of psychoanalysis with evolutionary biology, archeology, and comparative philology. If Jung found a way to integrate psychoanalysis with these esteemed sciences, so revered as the finest of German scientific contributions to the world in the late nineteenth century, it would be a coup of major proportions for the psychoanalytic movement. It would confirm Freud and Jung's claims that psychoanalysis was a science that could spur the development of insights in other disciplines. With its analysis of word associations as a method of recovering the past of an individual, the techniques of psychoanalysis perhaps most resemble those of comparative philology, which attempts to recover the original cultural and linguistic forms. And, like psychoanalysis, philologists, too, are interested in how the laws of language seem to be related -- or are identical -- with the laws governing the operation of the mind. It is no wonder that Freud encouraged Jung along these paths, but it was a project that would ultimately rend psychoanalysis -- at least in Switzerland -- along ethnic and racial lines.

Jung wasted no time. He gave his psychiatric assistants extensive reading assignments from the works of classicists, archeologists and philologists on the mythological systems of pagan antiquity. Two of them -- Spielrein and Jan Nelken -- published extensively documented articles making use of their knowledge of mythology to analyze the hallucinations and delusions of patients with dementia praecox. Honegger was the first to present his findings in public at a conference in 1910. A fourth disciple from an asylum outside Zurich, Carl Schneiter, entered the picture a bit later and published a similar vindication of Jung's views in 1914. [12]

Jung assigned his assistants to go into the back wards of their respective asylums and collect mythological material from psychotic patients, almost as if each new hallucination or delusion was an exotic new species of flora or fauna to analyze and catalog. Until Jung assigned them books on mythology, it is a safe bet that these young physicians had little formal training in mythology or archeology. Armed with their new knowledge, they entered the wards and found exactly what Jung told them to look for: ancient pagan gods in the unconscious of their patients.

And the ones they found most often in the most "regressed" psychotic patients -- just as Jung said they would -- were various pre-Christian solar deities: sun gods.


Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido

Jung's psychiatric assistants funneled new clinical material to him that confirmed the presence of pre-Christian mythological motifs in psychotic patients. Jung immediately put this wealth of evidence into his magnum opus, which would put him and psychoanalysis on the map. First published as two long articles in a psychoanalytic journal in 1911 and 1912, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and symbols of the libido) appeared as one book in the latter year. [13]

It is a strange book. It was judged so in its day and it remains so now. Without the proper keys to unlock the book's argument, the reader is hopelessly lost. However, to Jung's disciples -- and to the mystically minded from all quarters of bohemia -- it was received as a stunning revelation, a celebration of neopagan life.

Jung's book has at least two separate agendas and can be read in at least two ways: first, as an attempt to syncretize the methodology of psychoanalysis with those of the esteemed sciences of comparative philology, comparative mythology, and evolutionary biology; second, as a blending of different philosophies of regeneration or rebirth. Psychoanalysis thus became not only a science but also a path of cultural and individual revitalization -- which, indeed, it had become for Jung by the time he started the book in 1910. [14]

The writing of this book mirrored a transformation process in Jung himself, the result of which was the loss of his Christian identity and the development of a compensating new vital experience of God. Jung's starting point was a small article published by an unusual American woman, Miss Frank Miller, which contained a series of poetic musings and accounts of her personal visions. [15] She had all the gifts of a spiritualist medium, and she knew it. Many of her visions and experiences could even be interpreted as evidence of reincarnation or of a spirit world. However, after studying in Geneva for a time with Theodore Flournoy, she decided to write an article demonstrating that all of the material arising spontaneously from her "creative imagination" could be traced to things she had previously seen, read, or heard. In effect, she was writing to support Flournoy's thesis that all creative productions were the result of new combinations of previously memorized material whose source had long been forgotten -- in other words, cryptomnesia.

Jung took Frank Miller's visions and poetry and argued just the opposite: that these could not possibly have been the creation of new combinations of hidden memories but instead were evidence of a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind that could produce pre-Christian symbols from pagan antiquity. From the time the first part of Wandlungen appeared in a journal in 1911, Jung never again entertained the possibility that mythological content in his patients' dreams or psychotic symptoms were anything but evidence of a phylogenetic or "collective" unconscious layer of the human mind.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

The basic theory of Wandlungen is based on the famous formula "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," popularized at the end of the nineteenth century by the German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, who almost single-handedly introduced Darwinism to the German public. Haeckel actively promoted the notion that evolution was progressive and purposeful. His biological theories were a blend of Darwinism, Lamarckianism, and the old German Romantic biology of Goethe. Haeckel was the first to argue -- as Jung would analogously about psychoanalysis -- that biology was first and foremost a historical science, involving the historical (not experimental) methodologies of embryology, paleontology, and especially phylogeny.

Jung's favorite areas of study in medical school were comparative morphology and evolutionary theory -- areas that Haeckel dominated. Jung's fascination with Haeckel predates medical school, however. In MDR he tells of a dream in which he found a great circular pool in a forest clearing. In this pool, "half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant radiolarian, measuring about three feet across." [16] To Jung, this dream was a prophetic message from beyond, presaging a destiny as a natural scientist and physician. Haeckel's exquisite color illustrations of radiolaria had appeared in popular science books and magazines, and we know that Jung read such magazines as a teenager. He could have picked up his knowledge of radiolaria only from Haeckel. [17]

What is so unusual about this dream, however, is its incongruity with reality, never explained in MDR or in any of the scores of Jungian retellings of this magical story. A radiolarian is a tiny sea organism enclosed in an intricate spherical -- and beautiful -- exoskeleton. But it is a microscopic organism; one cannot see a radiolarian clearly with the naked eye. There are no three-foot long radiolaria as magnified in the sacred monster of Jung's dream. The inflation of a simple natural phenomenon into a giant, otherworldly spectacle is a signature stroke of Jung. His application of Haeckel' s "biogenetic law" to stages of cultural evolution and to the evolution of human consciousness is just one more example.

Haeckel's biogenetic law -- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- was derived from his historical researches in biology, and profoundly influenced not only evolutionary biology but also theories of the mind in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. The notion that the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the stages of the development of the human race from lower forms of life (phylogeny) was a compelling theory. Both Jung and Freud adopted such thinking in their own work, though they rarely referred to Haeckel.

Jung believed that changes in the libido over time could be discerned through the study of ancient religions and cultures. If he could identify certain stages of transformations of the libido over time that corresponded with the transformations of libido in a developing individual, psychoanalysis could rightly claim it had unlocked the secrets of life and of history. Jung knew he was the man to do it.

Throughout the layers of mythological references in Wandlungen, Jung eventually blends Haeckel's ideas with those of Freud and Bachofen into a new model of the human mind: Freud's stages of psychosexual development (the infantile period of polymorphous perversity; the preoedipal, incestuous period of strong attachment to the mother; the phallic stage; and then the genital stage) all seem to correspond with the descriptions of Bachofen's stages of cultural evolution (hetairism; matriarchy; the transitional Dionysian period; and then patriarchy). Haeckel's law provides the unifying biological and evolutionary key.

Having outlined the basic skeleton, Jung needed to provide evidence of symbolic content from contemporary patients and from the cultures of the past that would fit each of these stages.
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Re: THE ARYAN CHRIST: THE SECRET LIFE OF CARL JUNG

Postby admin » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:26 pm

Part 2 of 2

"Whoever has in himself God, the sun, is immortal, like the sun"

Perhaps the defining characteristic of Wandlungen is that it seems to be bursting with religious symbolism, much of which refers in one way or another to the sun. If one opens this massive tome arbitrarily, solar myths or sun-hero myths or solar-sexual interpretations are likely to spill forth. Jung viewed these ancient myths as historical records of the transformation of the libido, and maintained that the most apt metaphor for this spiritual-sexual energy or life-force is the sun. "The comparison of the libido with the sun and the fire is really analogous," he argued. [18]

• Ib. Sun-god: Shamanistic Eskimo idol, Alaska. P: From Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit, Pl. XI, fig. 1.
Veneration of the Buddha’s teachings as a sun-wheel: Stupa of Amaravati, India, 2nd century A.D. Government Museum, Madras. P Guirand, Mythologie générale, p. 330.
• Va. Veneration of the Buddha’s teachings as a sun-wheel: Stupa of Amaravati, India, 2nd century A.D. Government Museum, Madras. P Guirand, Mythologie générale, p. 330.
• VII. The winged sun-disc, above the King: Throne of Tut-Ankh-Amon, 14th century B.C. P: Courtesy of the Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
• IXa. Winged sun-moon disc and tree of life: Hittite relief, Sakjegeuzi, northern Syria. P: From Orientalische Literaturzeitung, XII (1909) : 9, Pl. II, fig-2.
• XIa. The King, attended, sacrifices to the sun-god: Stele of King Nabupaliddina, Babylon, 870 B.C. British Museum. P: Museum.
• XXXIIb. The sun-eating lion of alchemy: From a manuscript, St. Gall Bibliothek, 17th century. P: Courtesy of the Ciba Archives, Basel.
• XXXIV. Demon eating the sun: Stone, eastern Java, 15th century. Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, P: Museum.

3. The Voyage of the Sun: Late Egyptian. From Schaefer, Von ägyptischer Kunst, Pl. LIII, fig. 1.
4. Germanic sun-idol: Woodcut from Botho, Sachsisch Chronicon. P: British Museum.
5. The life-giving Sun: Amenophis IV on his throne: Relief, Egypt. Drawing from Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 74.
7. The Sun’s hands: Relief, Spitalkirche, Tübingen. Rubbing from Erich Jung, Germanische Götter und Helden, fig. 2.
24. Nut giving birth to the Sun: Relief, Egypt. Drawing from Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 101.
39. The four corners of the zodiac: sun and moon in centre: Coptic. Woodcut from Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

-- Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, by C.G. Jung


Solar references began to proliferate in part 1 of Wandlungen, in the chapter entitled "The Song of the Moth." Here Jung attempted an analysis of a short romantic poem by Miller entitled "The Moth to the Sun." Jung interpreted this poem from a religious perspective, claiming that the longing of the moth for the "star" was in reality the longing of the poetess for God. Jung followed the chain of associations that led to the conclusion that God and star and sun are indeed one, but he went further. His interpretation brought him close to an idea that clearly obsessed him from 1910 until the end of his life: that God is not the distant, transcendent, absolute god of Judeo-Christianity, but instead is the libido that lives within us all.

In the second poem where the longing is clearly exposed it is by no means the terrestrial sun. Since the longing has been turned away from the real object, its object has become, first of all, a subjective one, namely, God. Psychologically, however, God is the name of a representation-complex which is grouped around a strong feeling (the sum of libido). Properly, the feeling is what gives character and reality to the complex. The attributes and symbols of divinity must belong in a consistent manner to the feeling (longing, love libido, and so on). If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one's own vital force, the libido. It is as Seneca says: God is near you, he is with you, in you. [19]


With this passage Jung echoes the testimonial literature of Pietism. Pietists such as Count Zinzendorf (mentioned in Wandlungen) and even Schleiermacher were profoundly interested in the experience of the "god within" as a burning fire. Jung inundates the reader with a dizzying array of similar metaphors of what one would find if one looked inward, claiming that "divine vision is often merely sun or light," and making repeated references to "the inner light, the sun of the other world." Jung even says, "Whoever has in himself God, the sun, is immortal, like the sun." [20] Page after page is filled with analyses of sun-hero myths, like those of Hellenistic paganism or of Teutonic heroes such as Siegfried and Arminius, with rebirth and redemption the eternally recurring themes. Even Christ is analyzed as a sun god and is therefore "identical" with these self-sacrificing Germanic hero-gods.

Near the end of part 1, Jung provides a statement by comparative philologist Ernest Renan, a former theological student who lost his faith through his philological researches and became a celebrity after writing the shocking Vie de Jesus in 1863, in which Jesus was treated as a historical figure and not as a god-man. His philological work led him and others to take the spiritual beliefs of pre-Christian peoples quite seriously and argue that the sun worship of ancient peoples was more consistent with a modern scientific world than Judeo-Christian orthodoxies. In the passage from Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (1876) that Jung cites, Renan made the following claim: "Before religion had reached the stage of proclaiming that God must be put into the absolute and ideal, that is to say, beyond this world, one worship alone was reasonable and scientific: that was the worship of the sun." [21]

Aryans and Semites

The period between the publication of the first part of Wandlungen in the autumn of 1911 and its second part in the autumn of 1912 gave rise to tremendous pressures in the relationship between Jung and Freud. Jung's fascination with the fusion of religious and mythological impulses with the cultural and therapeutic goals of psychoanalysis -- so evident in the first part of Wandlungen -- accelerated the splitting of their union along national, religious, and racial fault lines.

There is no doubt that as an assimilated Jew and atheist living in Christian-dominated Austria-Hungary while political anti-Semitism was on the rise, Sigmund Freud could only see danger in Jung's fantasies about overtly spiritualizing the psychoanalytic movement. Jung, for his part, saw Freud's continued reticence about this -- and about issues near to his heart such as spiritualistic and paranormal phenomena -- as increasingly oppressive, dogmatic, and authoritarian.
Never one for obeying authority, he came to resent Freud and boldly differed with his master in his public statements. By the summer of 1912, a split not only between Jung and Freud but also between Zurich and Vienna was feared by all concerned. Half gestures and cautious peace offerings attempted to patch the differences between the Viennese and the Swiss; they didn't work.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate results of the split was the heightening of ethnic tensions and the charges of anti-Semitism. Such tribal prejudices exist in the Freudian and Jungian communities even today. To some degree this was to be expected of Freud and Jung. Cultural, linguistic, and -- many claimed -- biological differences between European Jews and Aryans were supported by the evidence generated by nineteenth-century comparative philology and Lamarckian evolutionary biology. At the time it was widely and firmly believed that these historical factors influenced the psychology of modern individuals. Such racialist thinking dominated the cognitive categories of educated persons and made sense in the world of the fin de siecle, lacking the Hitlerian taint such ideas have today. Volkish propagandists (not only pan-Germanists, but pan-Slavists and Zionists), it is true, perverted the scientific literature for their own ends, but no one -- Freud and Jung included -- was immune from such assumptions about human nature.

The issue of Aryan and Semitic differences is raised occasionally in the Jung-Freud correspondence. We know that they discussed the topic while on a stroll through New York City's Central Park in 1909. In the voluminous correspondence between Freud and his Jewish colleagues, such as Karl Abraham and Sandor Ferenczi, he reminds them continually that they need the Swiss Christians to further the movement, and that, in any case, he believes Jung to be the man of the future. But it is only after the breach between Jung and Freud seems certain that the psychoanalytic movement begins to be polarized between Christian and Jew, Aryan and Semite.

By July 1912, Freud was becoming aware of how dangerous and divisive Jung's phylogenetic hypothesis had become. By this time Jung had converted most of his Swiss-German and Christian colleagues to the notion that organic memories of ancestral impulses were more important than individual memories. "They are now doubting the influence of infantile complexes and are at the point of already appealing to racial differences in order to explain the theoretical disparity," Freud complained to Sandor Ferenczi on July 28, 1912.
"Jung must now be in a florid neurosis. However this turns out, my intention of amalgamating Jews and goyim in the service of [psychoanalysis] seems now to have gone awry. They are separating like oil and water." [22]

Whether neurosis or psychosis was the true culprit, there is no doubt that the writing of Wandlungen resulted in a personal and spiritual change in Jung that he had not foreseen. When he finished part 2 in 1912 he was no longer a Freudian. Nor was he a Christian or a monotheist.

This was the beginning of an Aryan science of psychoanalysis in Zurich. It was the beginning of Jung's return to his Volk, and to the inner fatherland.

***

In September 1912, Jung gave a series of lectures at Fordham University in New York City in which he publicly distanced himself from Freud's exclusively sexual libido theory. At the same time, part 2 of Wandlungen appeared in a psychoanalytic journal. Freud read it, aghast. Here was not only proof of Jung's defection from the movement, but for the first time Freud began to realize that Jung's development of a theory of the unconscious based on racial or phylogenetic factors had swept him directly into some very dangerous cultural currents.

Part 2 begins innocently enough. Jung picks up the argument exactly where he had left off: solar mythology and sun worship. The prose here is even more expansive, exuberant, mystical. Something has clearly happened. Forgetting for a moment the psychoanalytic nature of the work, he waxes poetic on the first page in the language of a prophet or a religious mystic. And his reference to the sun as a symbol of the "visible god" of this world echoes the "Hymn to King Helios" of Julian the Apostate, using an image borrowed by pantheists -- including Giordano Bruno, Goethe, and Haeckel -- for centuries thereafter. Jung wrote:

The sun is, as Renen remarked, really the only rational representation of God, whether we take the point of view of the barbarians of other ages or that of the modern physical sciences .... [T]he sun is adapted as is nothing else to represent the visible God of this world. That is to say, that driving strength of our own soul, which we call libido .... That this comparison is no mere play of words is taught to us by the mystics. When by looking inwards (introversion) and going down into the depths of their own being they find "in their heart" the image of the Sun, they find their own love or libido, which with reason, I might say with physical reason, is called the Sun; for our source of energy and life is the Sun. Thus our life substance, as an energic process, is entirely Sun. [23]


To whom was Jung speaking when he used language like this?

In Wandlungen, Jung reflects his mastery of the nineteenth-century literatures on comparative philology and classical archeology. These interlocking disciplines were considered the jewels of German science. They were also the academic disciplines that legitimized the argument that there was scientific evidence for the vast cultural, linguistic, and biological differences between the Aryan and Semitic races.

It is from the science of comparative philology that the familiar cognitive categories of Indo-Aryan (now Indo-European) and Semitic arose. [24] In the first half of the nineteenth century, before the great advances in the experimental methods of the physical and biological sciences, the systematizing methods of philosophy and, in particular, philology were the models for all other sciences. Philology arose to prominence in Germany as a consequence of the intense cultural fascination that Germans had with all things Greek. As a politically fractured nation united only by Kultur, Germans looked to the culture of the ancient Greeks as the crowning achievement of the Aryan peoples and aspired to be their heirs. This Graecophilia, or "tyranny of Greece over Germany" (as scholars have termed it), provided a wealth of pagan "guiding fantasies" to the German Romantics and others throughout German culture. [25] Schoolchildren had to learn the sagas of Greek and Roman mythology as well as ancient German mythology before they could understand the poems of Goethe or Schiller that they had to memorize.

In MDR, Jung remembers being "forced to copy prints of Greek gods with sightless eyes" in drawing class. [26] Like thousands of others, Jung struggled through a classical education in which Greek and Latin played a significant role. Ernest Jones confessed in his memoirs, with no small embarrassment, that what struck him most about his initial contacts with Jung and Freud was their frequent and spontaneous quoting of "Latin and Greek passages by memory during their conversations and being astonished at my blank response." [27] The pagan gods resided in the unconsciousnesses of many educated Germans.

In the scientific search for the ultimate origins of the human race, comparative philologists played a central role in the decades before Darwin and Haeckel shifted the focus of this quest to evolutionary biology and ethnology. It was thought that by comparing and analyzing the similarities and the differences between languages that the original families of humankind could be identified. The Indo-Aryan group and the Semitic group were the most researched linguistic and cultural families in the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, comparative philologists such as Renan and Friedrich Max Muller -- the two men most responsible for bringing the cultural and linguistic (but not biological) differences between Aryans and Semites to scientific respectability -- believed that the very thoughts, feelings, and cultural (especially religious) beliefs of prehistoric groups could be determined through philological analysis. Philologists believed that everyday language contained living relics from our ancestors, as if the image of an event that happened millennia ago could still be fresh today if one could find the linguistic key to unlock the secret code to peer into the past.


Muller claimed to have found this key to wisdom. Jung borrowed it and applied it to the hallucinations and delusions and fantasies and dreams of his contemporaries. "When I finished [Wandlungen], I had a peculiarly lucid moment in which I surveyed my path as far as I had come," Jung recalled in 1925. "I thought: 'Now you have the key to mythology and you have the power to unlock all doors.'" [28] There is no way for us now to fully understand Jung's strange book or the basis of the racialist thought it is based on unless we first understand Jung's reliance on the works of Muller and his "solar mythologists."

From 1856 until his death, Muller and his solar mythologists developed a theory -- indeed, a "science" -- of mythology that dominated late-nineteenth-century thought. [29] As with Freudian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, Muller's solar mythology was a totalizing world view and system of interpretation that claimed to find the ancient pagan gods of the sky and the sun alive and well in the very words we speak. "Why, every time we say 'Good morning' we commit a solar myth," said Muller. [30] He and his colleagues argued that the appearance and the disappearance of the sun and its worship as a source of life was the true basis of all mythological systems of the past, but particularly that of the Aryans, the race that they had studied most. Sun worship was the original natural religion of the ancient Aryan peoples. Since the Aryan races had occupied and dominated Europe for the past several thousand years, all native European pre-Christian religions could be traced back to the worship of the sun. This was true even in the Iranian, Indian, Greek, Roman, and Germanic civilizations that predated the first Aryan ones -- the "mythopoetic age," as Muller called it.

"Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?" Muller asked in a famous passage. "This question I had asked many times before it was addressed to me by others ... but I am bound to say that my own researches lead me again and again to the dawn and the sun as the chief burden of myths of the Aryan race." [31] To Muller, the sun god of the ancient Aryans was in the languages of their descendants.


To Jung, God was in the blood, and this was his rationale for seeking and finding solar myths in the symptoms of psychotic patients at the Burgholzli and in Miss Frank Miller, whom he regarded on the verge of psychosis even though he had never met her. In highly disturbed patients a biologically based disease process eroded the normal covering of repressive defense mechanisms, some of which he thought were biologically inherited in a quasi-Lamarckian fashion from centuries of civilization and Christianity. The erosion of the thick mask of defense mechanisms released archaic material from the deepest strata of the unconscious mind. Given that Jung and most of his patients were of Aryan stock -- a group, unlike the older and more "civilized" Semites, who had practiced their natural religion of the sun and the sky until Christianized only one thousand years ago -- it is no surprise that symbols of the sun arise again and again. This fact was consistent with the science of philology as he knew it from the books of Renan and Muller. It was also consistent with biology and race.

"He seems to be Christ himself"

Ernest Jones complained to Freud in December 1912 that "Jung is going to save the world, another Christ (with certainly anti-Semitism combined)." [32] Freud concurred. "I thank you for your very just remarks about Jung. In fact, he behaves like a perfect fool, he seems to be Christ himself, and in the particular things he says and does there is always something of the [rascal]." [33]

After the formal break in personal relations between the two men in January 1913, Zurich and Vienna never seemed so far apart. On June 8, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, "You are right. Our dear Swiss have gone crazy." Then, confirming that the source of tension in the movement emanated from a complex fusion of religion and racialism, he observed:

On the matter of Semitism: there are certainly great differences from the Aryan spirit. We can become convinced of that every day. Hence, there will surely be different worldviews and art here and there. But there should not be a particular Aryan or Jewish science. The results must be identical, and only their presentations may vary. Certainly my remark about the Interpretation of Dreams should be taken in this way. If these differences occur in conceptualizing the objective relations in science, then something is wrong. It was our desire not to interfere with their more distant world view and religion, but we considered ours to be quite favorable for conducting science. You had heard that Jung had declared in America that [psychoanalysis] was not a science but a religion. That would certainly illuminate the whole difference. But there the Jewish spirit regretted not being able to join in. [34]


By the end of 1913, however, Jung did not share Freud's enlightened opinion that there should not be a specifically Aryan or Jewish science. Psychoanalysis had to raise the consciousness of humanity to a higher level through a religious outlook. The only problem was that such a conception of psychoanalysis could no longer have a place for Jews.

The beginnings of an Aryan psychoanalysis

The last psychoanalytic congress that Jung attended -- the fourth, in 1913 in Munich, at which he was reelected president of the international movement -- confirmed the disintegration of old personal relationships and the birth of new alliances. One personal relationship that ended was the torrid extramarital affair between Lou Andreas-Salome and the Swedish physician and psychoanalyst Poul Carl Bjerre. They had met through a mutual friend during a visit to Sweden in 1911. Comparing him to her former lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Andreas-Salome noted in her private journal, "Both blonde haired, with sensuous mouths, splendid brows, otherwise rather different." [35]

Freud met Bjerre in January 1911 and reported to Jung that the Swede "is rather dry and laconic, but ... a thorough and serious thinker." [36] By 1916, in a book on the history of psychoanalysis and its techniques, Bjerre openly criticized Freud for exaggerating the importance of sexuality. [37] Although Bjerre helped to found the first Swedish psychoanalytic society, he nonetheless became persona non grata to Freud and the Viennese. Today his works have been forgotten everywhere but in Sweden.

After Bjerre confirmed that he was sympathetic to Jung's side in the war against Freud and the Viennese, their personal relationship heated up. On November 10, 1913, Jung wrote to Bjerre, complaining that Freud had recently attempted to discredit him. [38] Although we do not know exactly what Freud said to Maeder, Jung had sent a sharp letter of complaint to Freud about it on October 27. [39] Jung continued to complain to Bjerre about being accused of partisanship against the Viennese at the Munich congress and emphasized his wish to raise his efforts to a new level for the benefit of all. Yet the Viennese continue to be a sore point with him.

Near the end of the letter, Jung made a statement that reveals his inner thoughts and sets the tone for much of the way he conducted his own movement in the years that followed, years in which his movement took on the nature of an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth. This is the first piece of hard evidence to surface regarding his racialist outlook during this early period in his career. To Poul Bjerre, Jung said simply: "Ich war zuvor kein Antisemit, jetzt werde ich es, glaube ich." [40]

"Until now I was no anti-Semite, [but] now I'll become one, I believe."


Sun worshipers in German Europe

Jung's massive hymn to the sun could not have come at a more opportune time in German cultural history. All around him, in places such as Bavaria, Thuringia, and Ascona, German-speaking youths were on the march. They were hiking, singing German folk songs, reading Novalis, Goethe, Haeckel, Wilhelm Bolsche, Hesse, and Madame Blavatsky, wearing swastika pendants and runic rings, bathing nude in the sun, and dancing around bonfires on the days of the summer solstice -- the ancient German festival of the "changing sun" (Sonnwendfest). They carried banners with the ancient Aryan "sun wheel" on them, a symbol of god that could be found in the ancient homelands of the Aryans -- Iran and especially India -- in the form of circular mandalas. And they sang hymns of praise to the sun.

Because of decades of Volkish speculation about the consequences of the work of philologists such as Muller and Renan, there was an extraordinary revival of interest in not only the symbolism of sun worship but also its practice. [41] The natural religion of the ancient Aryans -- and indeed, of all humans if one were to speculate far enough -- was revived by a multitude of groups all over Germany, Austria, and especially Switzerland, where cults and heretical sects had blossomed for centuries. Some actually performed group rituals in honor of the sun.

But sun worship was just one element in a confused mass of cultural contradictions that beset Germany in the three decades preceding the First World War. From the racialist right to the anarchist left a culture of "progressive reaction" against industrial capitalism was on the rise. All of the values that formed the foundation of the industrial order -- repressive Judeo-Christian antihedonism, utilitarianism, and rational thought -- were confronted with new philosophies of life or of pure experiences that exalted myth over history, impulsive action or deed over conscious reflection, and feeling or intuition over rational thought. This progressive reaction, as historian Jost Hermand has termed it, was manifest in a profound sense of loss, a sense that a spiritual connection with nature and the cosmos had been sacrificed with the rise of a more highly mechanized, industrialized, and urbanized civilization. [42]

Much of the sense of loss was expressed in metaphors of degeneration and decay. Civilization had ruined human beings by forcing them into unnatural, cramped, urban environments. Diseases physical and mental were hatched in some places, and the medical science of the day believed that such damage to an individual could be passed down to successive generations. Racial renewal, whether for the individual or society as a whole, was associated with new attitudes toward sexuality and eroticism. There was a cry to recover the Volk -- that mystical union of a people with its blood and landscape -- from the degenerate industrialized masses. The iron cage of "civilization" -- Judeo-Christian beliefs and other political and value systems -- had to be cast off in order to recover true culture, the primordial ground of the soul, the Volk. There was only one solution: recover the "archaic man" within, allowing a rejuvenating return to the chthonic powers of the Edenic, Aryan past. [43]

It is no coincidence that these same ideas are expressed time and again by C. G. Jung
, especially in the first sixty years of his life.

The multifaceted Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) had a broad plan for Germanic society: at the individual level, the taking of cures, abstinence from alcohol, nudism, vegetarianism, the eating of health foods, contact with the ancestors through spiritualist practices, and hiking through Nature were all remedies to erase the sense of profound loss that so many suffered. At the level of culture, a cleansing of the Aryan race through eugenics and deportations was proposed.

Inspired by Herder, Schleiermacher, Ernst Mortiz Arndt, and Turnvater Jahn [Friedrich Ludwig Jahn], throughout the nineteenth century the movement grew increasingly influential as the Germans sought their place in the sun. After German unification in 1871, Volkish energies fueled the establishment of a multitude of lodges, clubs, societies, and so on, all devoted to spiritual renewal. Some of these groups were motivated by blood mysticism and fantasies of reform through a return to the worship of the old Aryan gods.

As early as 1814, Arndt had proposed a return to the celebration of the summer solstice as a way to return politically fragmented Germans to their cultural and religious roots. It was left to future leaders to bring his dream into reality. Eugen Diederichs, the famous Jena publisher of many of the new texts of this mystical, Volkish, neoromantic movement, was one of them. He personally led sun-worshiping rituals with his youth-movement disciples beginning in 1904, expressing the beliefs of so many of them when he said, "My view of god is this, that I regard the sun as a source of all life." [44] The youth organization of the Monistenbund -- inspired and led by Haeckel -- sponsored sun-worshiping festivals each summer solstice. Haeckel himself was not a practicing neopagan but loved the spirit of the movement. In 1910, the year Jung got lost in sun-hero myths while researching Wandlungen, a Monistenbund journal reproduced this hymn to the sun:


We are all children of the sun. Out of its womb our planet was born. An eternal law of nature compels us to be within its sphere and influence. The immensity of space is cold, still, lifeless -- our luminous mother sun, warming and ripening our fruit, appears as the simple, true element of life. Our ancestors knew this in ancient times. Thus their justifiable joy when the sun made its slow victorious spiral across the sky. They then remembered that all those trees, which concealed their greenness in the wintertime, were consecrated to the god, Wotan. [45]


Others wanted a Wagnerian twist to their Volkish neopaganism. They gathered in bearskins and made ritual sacrifices of animals to Wotan, Thor, Baldur, and other Teutonic deities. They studied the symbols of the ancient Norse runes and took visionary journeys to meet with members of an ancient spiritual brotherhood. There were dozens of groups like these, large and small. They convinced themselves that they were chosen, like the grail knights in Wagner's Parsifal, to seek and protect the Holy Grail -- in this case, the spiritual purity of Aryan blood. The most famous of these was the Tannenberg Foundation of General Erich Ludendorff, war hero and, later, a coconspirator in Adolf Hitler's failed putsch in 1923. The symbol of Ludendorff's organization was the hammer of Thor. Like many in German culture at the turn of the century, Ludendorff wanted to eradicate Christianity and replace it with an Aryan faith. As one commentator on the neopagan movement in Germany revealed, "In line with the Tannenberg program for the restoration of the ancient Germanic religion, General Ludendorff, accompanied by a few young men, would from time to time retire to the forests near Munich, where a bonfire was lighted and a horse sacrificed in honor of Thor, the god of thunder." [46]

Jung was aware of these groups
, but it is unlikely that he participated in any of them. After 1913, Jung rarely deviated from the role of the chieftain of his own tribe in Kusnacht and Zurich. But the cult participation of his clinical associates and of the patients they treated in hospital wards and in their consulting rooms, is an open question.

"An attempt to use old cults to achieve new religious possibilities"

On the bohemian circuit and around the world, Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was such a countercultural success that in the years following the German edition of 1912 and the English translation of 1916 (under the title Psychology of the Unconscious), Jung began to receive spiritual pilgrims from around the world who came to him to help them experience the mythic layers of their own unconscious minds.

For Franziska Grafin zu Reventlow [Fanny zu Reventlow], whom Ludwig Klages called a "pagan saint," the Schwabing-to-Ascona counterculture was "a spiritual movement, a niveau, a direction, a protest, a new cult, or rather an attempt to use old cults to achieve new religious possibilities." [47] "Fanny," as she was called, was a friend and possibly a lover of Otto Gross, and the author of a thinly veiled autobiographical novel known as Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen. It was written during the period (December 1911 to summer 1912) that Jung was working on part 2 of Wandlungen, and was first published in 1913. As Jung's dreams swirled with images of Dionysus and the terrible Great Mother Goddess and sun heroes such as Siegfried, Fanny Reventlow sat at her desk and called forth an entire decade of personal experiences. In the magic theater of her mind she witnessed the passionate discussions in the cafes of Schwabing over the mystical nature of race and blood -- carriers of the "primordial pagan substances" that emerged in the dreams of modern individuals. [48] These were times in which Dionysian bacchantes and Bachofenian hetaira were reincarnated in young women who walked the streets of Munich and danced naked in the sacred groves of Ascona. She remembered pagan costume balls during Fasching and ritual sacrifices to the Great Mother Goddess.

Is it just a coincidence that Jung was obsessed with these very issues at the very same point in history? Is it just a coincidence that this is the time when Jung, too, became a pagan who said the old gods were still alive within us?

The new pagans' artistic prophet was Karl Hoppner, better known as Fidus. [49] More than any other artist, Fidus captured the youthful spirit of the counterculture. In Theosophical journals, in Simplicissimus and Jugend, on postcards and posters, his breathtaking sun-worshiping images seemed to be everywhere in the first quarter of the century. Nude, long-haired, blond young Aryans -- sometimes wearing jewelry made of Runic symbols or swastikas -- looked skyward and raised their arms to the sun. The image most often associated with Fidus -- the motif of the Lichtgebet (Prayer to the light), based on the Norse so-called Lebensrune or "life rune" -- depicts a nude man, legs together, arm upraised in a Y-shaped posture.

Fidus's images tell us much about the neopagan culture in German Europe at the turn of the century. Aryanist sun-worshiping imagery, runic symbols, swastikas, and towering pillars of fire are synthesized with male and female figures, often nude, who symbolized the great cosmic principles of the Masculine and the Feminine. Typically there are polar opposites united within or just under a circle that symbolizes god as the sun -- the primordial ground of all being. In one book illustration by Fidus from 1897, the Masculine and the Feminine are united in a Janus-like bust depicting the Aryan ideals of male and female beauty. This syzygy, this union of opposites, is surrounded by solar rays and crowned by an encircled swastika, a solar symbol of regeneration and eternal recurrence. Fidus contributed this and other similar illustrations to a series of publications by the Berlin Theosophist Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth on the sexual magic and sexual religion of the ancient Aryans. [50] The Aryanist and occultist theory popular in bohemian circles was that the universe had been created from a primordial fiery chaos out of which the first two principles to emerge were the Masculine and the Feminine. Only from the eternal tension between these opposites, the eternal joining and separating of the two, could the creative force, the primal energy of the sun or fire be released. On the individual level, only the integration of the Masculine and Feminine principles within the soul could restore the connection with the internal solar fire.
In the writings of Sebaldt and other Volkish mystics, this blazing primal energy was also associated with the blood. Therefore, to release the creative potential of an entire race, eugenics would be necessary to create pure prototypical Aryan males and females who could then produce progressively superior progeny.



Except for the explicit advocacy of eugenics, all these symbols and themes appear in Wandlungen and form the metaphoric core of Jung's theory of psychological types, his famous concepts of the anima and the animus, and his ideas concerning the structure and dynamics of the psyche.

Among the Asconans who read Jung -- particularly Wandlungen -- and who were treated by him or his assistants in Zurich were Hermann Hesse and Rudolph von Laban. Laban had read Wandlungen and shared it with his colony of Dionysian dancers in Ascona, including Mary Wigman, who would develop an intellectual passion for psychoanalytic literature. Her "Witches' Dance" spooked audiences in Munich and thrilled pagans in Ascona. The occultist Aleister Crowley also briefly passed through Ascona, read Psychology of the Unconscious, and found it useful inspiration for his own writings on ritual magic. [51]

During the war years, and especially after 1916 when word had spread about the new bohemian twist analytical psychology had taken in Zurich, Asconans flooded the consulting rooms of Jung's colleagues. In the creative container that Jung said a therapy session should be, they revealed their dreams and their drawings, their poems and their dances. They were pagans and welcomed for their paganism. In the cafes of Zurich, they gossiped about their analysts, wildly analyzed one another's dreams, offered one another the latest Theosophical or Anthroposophical publications, shared coffee, cocaine, and encouragement.

The prose of Jung's Hymn to the Sun radiated from the pages of his book with a power that could seduce the spiritually hungry. Jung wrote with conviction derived from a personal experience so tremendous, so cosmic, that he could arouse the desire of others to want it, too. But what exactly was this electrifying experience?
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