Showing posts with label E.A. Bennett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label E.A. Bennett. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

E.A. Bennet: Mrs. Jung died at 10.30 this morning. C.G. came up to the Niehus’s house to tell me and to say goodbye.



Küsnacht, 23rd November 1955

Arrived at Zürich station at 12.25 and was met by C.G.

He told me Mrs. Jung was very ill and so I would not be staying with them but with his daughter Marianne Niehus.

But he took me to the Seestrasse for lunch; his second daughter, Mrs. Baumann, was there.

We had a long talk after lunch, mainly about schizophrenia.

This followed my reference in a lecture to a psychotic patient.

He [Jung] spoke of schizophrenia as a protection from the shadow, and usually the collective shadow.

Some say they can’t be perfect and recall some episode in the distant past; but they refuse to look at recent events, the sin of yesterday, that is too much for them.

Or when people are in a depression they may, on the contrary, take on the sins of the whole world.

He also spoke of the Germans who must always be ‘behind’ something – no confidence in just being a man; they must belong to a society, or be a doctor, or have a title.

Even an ordinary person, for instance a woman who has died, is described as ‘so-andso, the wife of...’, not just as herself.

In England it is different; being a gentleman is enough, but not in Germany.

He spoke of his wife’s illness and his dead friends coming in his dreams – death is in the air.

He had a feeling that the bridge had broken, she was different.

Later he mentioned his religious experience at Basel at the age of eleven1 and went on to talk of his father’s library.

He himself was a voracious reader and some books from his grandfather’s library were there, so he read everything.

He said that even at school he had always been suspected of being a fraud – as when the teacher refused to believe he had written his essay; there was so much in it the teacher had never heard of that he concluded C.G. had got someone else to write it for him.

‘I was always a bit too intelligent and people didn’t like it, thought there was some trick about it.’

27th, November 1955

Mrs. Jung died at 10.30 this morning. C.G. came up to the Niehus’s house to tell me and to say goodbye.


He said that four days ago, on Tuesday at breakfast, she had said she felt she was going to die and he said, ‘Oh, don’t think of such things’.

Later that morning he received the medical report they were awaiting which showed how grave the prognosis was.

He struggled with himself about telling her but he did so; she was quite undisturbed, and in a way relieved for ever since her operation she had been preparing for death.

Sometimes she had looked better, but she was very ‘grey’ at other times.

he had been working on the Grail legends in the original.

They had been married fifty-two years – a very full and wonderful life.

He spoke of Cicero’s De Senectute (that is, ‘concerning old age’), and how life ended when it was fulfilled. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 144-148

Monday, February 26, 2018

E.A. Bennet: He [Jung] mentioned the witch doctor at Bollingen, whose house on the hill we had seen from the boat yesterday.



Visit to Zürich on the occasion of C.G.’s eightieth birthday.

Saturday, 23rd July 1955

To Zürich.

Met there by C.G., and then to the Seestrasse in Küsnacht for lunch which was followed by the Jung family celebration of his birthday, in which I joined.

The celebration was a family boat trip on the Stafa from Zürich to Schmerikon; the lake is 43 kilometres long.

There were thirty eight people on board – so many boys and grandchildren; the two little great grandchildren
came to Küsnacht but were too young to come on the boat.

Ruth Bailey and myself were the only people present who were not members of the Jung family.

One of the little grandsons stood up completely freely and cheerfully and made a speech to C.G.; he had it typed out and delivered it splendidly.

Later we had a quiz, Fragebogen, with all the questions about C.G.

All the time there were wonderful refreshments, wine, game and fruit ad lib.

We alighted at Ufenau, the island near Rapperswil, and went to the church.

This island belongs to the monastery at Einsiedeln and they have given C.G. permission to visit it.

It is famous as the place where Hutten, a friend of Luther’s, spent his last years and died.

There are two churches, both old; the larger of the two is Norman, about a thousand years old, but it was closed.

Then we continued up the lake and opposite C.G.’s Tower at Bollingen three of his grandsons dived off the ship from the roof over the deck, quite unexpectedly.

The ship swung round and stopped, and they climbed on board again amid cheers.

As they dived two fish eagles flew over high up.

Then we went on to Schmerikon, to the Hotel Bad where I have stayed on several visits.

The host was Herr Kuster, and in the ‘cellar’, or lower room, a feast was prepared.

Upstairs there was a wedding party.

We had a wonderful dinner, interspersed with incidents.

To begin with C.G.’s son-in-law, Fritz Baumann, made a speech which evoked great applause; then various groups of grandchildren ‘did’ items, such as enacting details of the life at Bollingen, and there were plenty of family jokes.

Another ‘act’ was a simulated mixture, or mix-up, of four ‘radio programmes’: four of the children, two boys and two girls, came and stood in front of C.G. and Mrs. Jung and did a turn.

Each was giving, in his or her act, a radio programme; one was on philosophy, one on farming, one (I think) on housekeeping, and one on Analytical Psychology.

These ‘programmes’, of course, got mixed up with amusing complications.

Then from the floor, on a large dish, they lifted a huge ham and presented it to C.G. who drew out his familiar pocket knife and cut some slices from it.

He always carried this knife.

The children did their acts extraordinarily well; they entered into the spirit of it all very naturally and their spontaneity impressed me very much.

Sunday, 24th July 1955

Chat in the morning with C.G. after breakfast.

He mentioned the witch doctor at Bollingen, whose house on the hill we had seen from the boat yesterday.

The witch doctor has a very ancient book which was given to him by a monk of Einsiedeln who liked him when he was a boy.

It is a reprint of an older volume, and contains the so-called sixth and seventh books of Moses.

This is a spurious writing which contains black magic and incantations about witches.

The witch doctor calms people, and so helps them.

C.G. saw him at work once on a farm.

The farmer and his two sons stood at the corner of the big barn, and the witch doctor stood at the other.

He had his prayer book and read, and he wore a blue ribbon round his neck; C.G. could not get near enough to see what was hung on the ribbon as he had to stay more or less unnoticed at the side.

Monday, 25th July 1955

C.G.J.’s eightieth birthday Celebration

There was a reception at 10.30 a.m. in the Dolder Grand Hotel; I went with Barbara Hannah.

The notice in the hotel hall was ‘Cocktail Party 10.30’!

We had some drinks and the place was crowded with people at little tables.

There were speeches by C. A. Meier and others, then the presentation of the Festschrift and of the Codex Jung, followed by more speeches.

The Rector of Basel University spoke, and so did Baudouin from Lausanne – nice speech. He mentioned the old Swiss custom of erecting a small pine tree decorated with ribbons on a building, when the structure has reached the point when it is possible to put the roof on; then there is a feast.

This occasion was like that; Jung’s building had gone up to its present height and had taken shape, but it was not yet complete and much may still be added.

We returned for lunch at the Seestrasse, and I chatted with Ruth Bailey in the garden afterwards while C.G. and Mrs. Jung rested.

Later in the afternoon we all talked after tea, sitting round. C.G. was very pleased with the seal I had given him.

This was two days ago, and since then he had kept it in his pocket.

With it, in the same chamois leather bag, he had a little jade Chinese wishing wheel (it looked eighteenth century and was celadon jade with a movable centre).

While we were talking he had the seal in his hand and was looking at it with Mrs. Jung; he said she must get a yellow silk cord to hang it on and pointed out that the stone had been selected because of its dual colour, to carry the idea of the opposites.

In the evening the big dinner was held.

About seventy-five people were there.

To my great surprise I was placed at C.G.’s right hand at the main table; on my right was his daughter, Mrs. Marianne Niehus.

There were ten people at this big round table; Mrs. Jung was there also, with Michael Fordham to her right.

There were several speeches at the dinner, including one from the Mayor of Zürich, and a lot of jokes about the relative merits of Basel and Zürich, and some allusions to Berne.

Wednesday, 26th July 1955 This was C.G.’s actual birthday.

We had a meeting in the morning at the Institute4 regarding the formation of the International Association for Analytical Psychology.

In the afternoon there was a trip on the lake on a chartered steamer; about two hundred people were there.

To everyone’s joy and surprise C.G., with Ruth Bailey, joined the ship at Meilen; they left it again at Rapperswil.

Many had been sure they had seen C.G. in the garden of his house as the ship passed, but this could not have been the case.

On the return journey I left the ship at Küsnacht (having nearly got left behind on the boat) with a big bunch of flowers and a stick with ‘8o’ carved on it for C.G. – Meier threw a bottle to me from the deck, which I caught; I chucked it back to Fowler McCormick and he also caught it – great cheers.

I was given a lift to the Jungs’ house and on arrival found the local band of Küsnacht playing in the garden.

There were about twenty players with the usual instruments, brass and others.

As they played some of the family party danced; C.G. danced twice, once with his wife and again with one of his daughters.

Later he told me, ‘I never thought I would dance again!’

He was in great form.

When the band dispersed we went into the house, and for a couple of hours or more there followed the most wonderful evening.

Seven or eight of the Jungs’ children and grandchildren sang and played; a niece, Frau Homberger, played the piano and her husband sang with the others.

Several of the grandsons were very lively, entering into the spirit of the occasion.

Then some left, and C.G. went out and returned with a selection of gramophone records; they were all of Negro spirituals.

One of his grandsons worked the gramophone and C.G. sat beside it, listening and nodding his head in time with the music.

Eventually, at about midnight, the party came to an end; it was a remarkable and impressive family evening.

27th July 1955

In the garden, writing about the birthday proceedings for the B.M.J. Several talks with C.G. ...

In the evening Franz Riklin took me to Meilen for the first meeting of the provisional committee of the proposed International Association; this we held in a hotel in Meilen overlooking the lake.

There were a few discordant elements which stemmed from the London group, and one or two people took a very negative attitude.

Riklin and Meier were amazed, but I was not.

Returned to the Jungs’ house at 1 a.m., brought by Riklin.

28th July 1955

Moved to the Waldhaus Dolder Hotel.

At noon Fowler McCormick called for me.

I was sorry to go, for it had been one of the most eventful visits to the Jungs I had had.

Mrs. Jung said I must certainly stay with them when I come over to lecture next February; and C.G. also said warmly, ‘Well, goodbye, and be sure to come back soon.’

Fowler McCormick took me to Schaffhausen, where we had an excellent lunch and then visited the Rhine Falls.

He has an Oldsmobile car and we had a lovely drive in sunny weather.

29th July 1955

At the Waldhaus Dolder.

Went into town in the morning, shopping; called at Rolf Hofer’s office and got his secretary to type a short article on Jung for the B.M.J.

She did this and posted it for the evening air mail to get to London on Saturday morning.

No lunch; but tea with Fowler McCormick at the Congress House.

Wet.

McCormick talked of synchronicity, and then mentioned two of his dreams in which he had been impressed by the time element, for in both a later event carried the dream further, and it was immediately linked in his mind with the dream.

The most striking of these was a dream in which he saw two aeroplanes weaving a cord (or rope) in the sky in such a way that they joined Europe and America.

He saw this as a commentary upon his life, divided between the continents and somehow coming together, for he is constantly passing from one to the other. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 130-143

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Carl Jung; Unless there is a personal religious experience – realising from the inside what it means – nothing happens.




Bollingen, 2nd July 1957

Arrived in Bollingen.

Very hot day, and I was tired from the journey.

We ad dinner by the lake; the plan is to bring the wooden table beside the lake, and everything is carried out by Ruth Bailey and me.

The Tower is an amazing place.

The entrance opens into a courtyard which has two exits, both with doors which bar; there is an outer space, also enclosed by a wall and by part of the house, and again a barred gate.

There is only one door into the house, as there is at the house in the Seestrasse, and this door is very heavy with an immensely strong lock and two yale locks.

The windows are all small and barred including those upstairs.

The hall leads to the kitchen; this is the base of the original tower which C.G. built in 1923.

Formerly the kitchen door was the main entrance to the house so it, too, is heavy with a very sturdy lock; the door leading upstairs to the study and the new room (built in 1956-57) can also be locked.

C.G. sleeps in the old tower, so he can be quite isolated.

If a robber entered through the front door he could still get no further unless he blew off the locks.

So it is like a fortress and quite mediaeval in character.

6th July 1957

At breakfast, speaking of concentration C.G. said he became so concentrated when he was writing that he did not notice simple interruptions.

Yesterday he had been writing in the morning for two hours when Ruth came to say it was time for lunch.

He was quite surprised, it was as if he had not been there, and as if he had not done any writing; it was all absorbed, all
past.

I mentioned Coleridge and the man from Porlock interrupting him when he was writing Kubla Khan so that he could not continue.

At once C.G. asked, ‘What did the man want? What was his message?’

I did not know. ‘But that was very important’, C.G. went on, ‘it must have touched a complex – made a hole into the unconscious, and what he was writing disappeared.

Also we have to ask why such a person as Coleridge was up in the air with his feet off the ground.’

It was remarkable how he got straight to the point – to me a new one – and made the whole picture alive.

Speaking of ideas of God, he said he had had a Kantian training, and spoke of Ding an sich, God like that, not our idea of God, but God as something unknowable.

All over the world people have ideas of God, but these are their subjective ideas and not objective.

He said of good and evil that we must always have both, an upper implies a lower; the good implies the not-good as the light the shade.

Our subjective point of view was always just that, and we could not make dogmas from it.

Things are what they are, a tree is simply a tree; if we say it is a ‘good’ tree that implies our relationship to it but says nothing about the tree; it may be ‘bad’ for some other animal.

He has been writing about flying saucers, of which we know nothing; all we know is that something has been observed.

It might well come from Mars or some other source in space.

Two forms are described: one is circular and another cigar shaped; the latter could contain, as tablets in a tube, the former.

He mentioned a record in an old newspaper of which a few copies exist in the library in Zürich, and one has a picture exactly like those we see today.

Very few pictures exist although there are too many records to be dismissed as nothing.

We say things are ‘nonsense’ when they do not fit in with our generally accepted ideas.

But when people speak of something as ‘only imagination’ he points to cars or aeroplanes and says that before they were finally constructed they were ‘only imagination’, for imagination is something.

7th July 1957

After breakfast, sitting in the shade where we had the table, I spoke to C.G. about obsessions and their element of secrecy.

He agreed, and said that intuitive people were often asked, ‘What shall we do now?’ – they anticipate the future.

Following a remark made by C.G.’s son, Franz Jung, who arrived last night with two of his sons, I raised a question about people waking in a dream just before the climax, and suggested it was because they feared something in themselves.

C.G. said that it was often because something in their unconscious clashed with their accepted views.

He gave an example of a theologian who had come to him.

This man had a repetitive dream of being on a mountain; below was a wood, and in the wood a lake which he knew was there although he had not seen it.

In a later dream the image was carried further and the priest was in the wood and came to the lake.

There was a ‘breath’, a slight movement of the water by the breeze, and he woke very frightened.

‘Well,’ said C.G., ‘that is a familiar theme, have you any associations?’

I asked what was familiar, and he said it was like the stirring of the waters in the story in the Bible; it meant that the man could be cured, or that a cure was possible, but it would mean giving up his theological views, or altering them, and this he feared to do.

He went on to speak of the natives in Africa – they had a natural psychology.

During his visit to Mount Elgon he had noticed how accurately the natives, among whom he spent some time, observed the characteristics of people in his party.

He was himself always careful of his emotions, and was reserved and kept something back; so they respected him and regarded him as old and wise.

He was fifty but his hair was white, and therefore (as their hair is never white except in very old age) they thought he
was about a hundred years old.

They would bring him their dreams and ask if they were favourable or not; if the dreams were unfavourable they would not move that day.

I mentioned that the manifestations of hysteria had changed; for example in India and Burma the Indians got the classical hysterical symptoms and the British did not.

He said it was the same here, people hardly ever got the old hysterical symptoms nowadays.

C.G. had been reading a paper by a Mr. Routh (Fellow of All Souls) on the possibility of a new Reformation.

This article was very good, he said; but it missed the really important point – that a reformation cannot come from historical research or such parallels but only from the heart of individual experience.

So it must be today, an event springing from the present time.

The teaching of the past, for example of St. Paul or of Jesus, can be edifying, but in itself does nothing; Paul himself had a sudden revelation.

Unless there is a personal religious experience – realising from the inside what it means – nothing happens.

Such an experience can take many forms, for instance falling in love; anything which is really lived. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 230-267

Carl Jung: You can’t change people to fit a theory.




Küsnacht, 3rd January 1957

Arrived in Küsnacht.

In the evening we sat first in the garden room, and after dinner in the library upstairs.

This is a big room, about twenty-four feet by fifteen feet, lined with books.

Off it opens an inner study, and C.G. told me I could use this as my room for writing.

It is a smallish room, and in it I now write at the big table-desk with an array of pigeon holes on it to take stationery and odds and ends.

There is a photograph of Toni Wolff on the table, and also a rather beautiful collection of twenty-one figures representing all the states in India; each one is labelled.

They depict the different apparel of the peoples of India, and are about ten centimetres in height and delicately made and coloured.

The religions also are marked on the labels – Hindu, Buddhist, Islam (Baluchistan), and one from Burma.

On a side shelf are two lovely cloisonne pieces, one of a sage on a creature with horse’s legs and the head and tail of a dragon; the other is an old vase.

On the pigeon-hole part of the desk are books and a few other figures – one a beautifully carved ivory figure of Lao-tse on a stag, the same as the two I have.

There are three lights in the window and an amount of stained glass in the panels.

At the top of each segment is a religious subject – Christ being lashed with whips on the left; in the centre, the crucifixion; and on the right our Lord after death with Mary weeping; two disciples are there with Mary Magdalen, and above is an angel.

In the centre window below is an elaborate coat of arms dated 1590, and on the right the arms of Basel dated 1543, ‘Basilea 1543’.

The centre light also contains a small round inset of stained glass showing our Lord and the twelve apostles at the last supper.

One picture is covered with a cloth; it is a photograph of the Shroud of Turin, the cloth which is said to have covered our Lord’s face and afterwards bore the imprint of his features.

The walls are lined with bookcases; there are many old alchemical books and books of reference of all kinds.

They are labelled and no doubt catalogued; both rooms are filled with them.

There are also numerous ornaments of various kinds, many of them gifts.

On the mantelpiece in the main study is a collection of little ivory carvings depicting the twelve transitions of Vishnu.

C.G.’s writing table is a beautiful mahogany or walnut table with curved legs and a finely shaped stringer.

It is covered with papers and other objects. C.G. told me that one, a metal figure, bearded, and sitting on an elephant, represented a previous incarnation of the Buddha; in Christianity it would correspond to one of the disciples, a
special associate of the master.

And there is a carved lotus which opens out – a present from the Indian Psychiatric Society.

In a standing bookcase are some small leather-bound books; and there is a photograph of Mrs. Jung, and another of C.G. with her.

On the floor of the main study, as in the inner room, are a couple of Persian rugs.

All the floors in the house, the rooms and the landings, are parquet.

4th January 1957

Speaking of his early work at the Burghölzli, C.G. said that when hisobservations on the word association tests were established he wrote to Freud telling him how these experiments provided clinical proof of his theory of repression.

He said, too, that he had noted that the complex acted autonomously, and apart from repression.

Although in his reply Freud agreed with this, he never made use of the idea of unconscious autonomy and confined his interest to the phenomenon of repression.

Besides his work on the word association tests, Eugen Bleuler, his senior at the Burghölzli, suggested that C.G. should do research on the brain.

He turned to this with enthusiasm, working many hours week after week on the various parts of the brain.

He became keen on the work and used to deputise for the Professor and give lectures on histology.

But so far as the normal functioning of the mind was concerned, or abnormalities in thinking which he observed in patients, this work on the histology of the brain was fruitless.

Many of the patients in the hospital were schizophrenics and no attempt was made to treat them.

But he could not accept dementia praecox as deterioration of the personality and leave it there.

Through the word association tests he had come to see the reality of the unconscious, and he recognised that many of the fantasies or delusions of his patients were paralleled in mythological material of which they knew nothing.

The Psychology of the Unconscious was a study in schizophrenia; in it he showed the significance of symbols through historical and literary analogies.

But the book was not a psychological study; one of the difficulties in those days was that there was no psychology, only intellectual abstractions which explained nothing.

People paid little attention to what might lie behind the symptomatology of an illness.

The Psychology of Dementia Praecox was an advance, but even now psychiatrists have paid little tribute to it.

The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious was written to bring people into touch with the unconscious and make them aware of its importance, but it, too, made very little impression.

During the First War he was in command of a camp on Lake Geneva at Château-d’Oex for interned British and Canadian officers.

He said that for some this would have been important and interesting work, but he was more concerned with his writing and the development of his thought.

He was then working on Psychological Types.

I asked him if, looking back, he could see a single thread running through his work.

He said only to a certain extent.

In the early days he had expected his work to follow scientific lines.

But after the break with Freud he did no scientific work for a time, but sought to discover the meaning of the contents of the unconscious.

Todiscover where ideas came from, and how others understood them in the past, he searched for the historical and cultural sources of the images and symbolism he encountered.

It was when he had written his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower that he began to study the writings of
alchemists and found links with this material through parallels in the imagery of their thought and practices, and through their understanding and interpretation of ideas from still earlier times.

His study of alchemy had been foreshadowed in his dreams, and his work had always developed in this way – out of his own experiences and dreams.

He mentioned by way of illustration a dream he had in April 1914; with variations it recurred twice, once in each succeeding month:


He was climbing up the hill above Küsnacht to the plateau where now the Niehuses have their house.

But it took nearly all day and in fact the hill is not very high.

He got to the plateau just as the sun was setting behind him (it does set on the hills on the opposite side of the Zürich Lake).

A cascade of water was falling down the hill, and the sun lit it up with silver and gold.

Away to the left, and higher up – for there was another hill behind, though not so high as the one he had ascended – he observed a big hotel (such as the Dolder Hotel), and he could see the cars parked there looking very small.

He could not understand the dream then.

But much later he discovered an alchemical text, Speculativa Philosophia (Theatrum Chemicum (1602), I) of Gerald Dorn,
in which a similar scene was described.

The gold and silver in the water had a special meaning, and the building was there as well; it was not a hotel, as in his dream, but a building of great symbolic importance.

Dreams such as this fascinated him.

‘That’s the worst of being an introvert,’ he said, ‘you are pushed on by your inner drives.’

He said that Freud was really a feeling type, but he kept this back and worked with his inferior thinking, so what he thought had too great a significance for him.

It even came about that he believed things were so merely because he had thought them.

He mentioned the notion of prevision, that sometimes it was like a waking dream.

On one occasion he was sitting at Küsnacht reading the paper, and suddenly there was a gap in it, a big hole, in which he saw the face of Hans, the servant at Bollingen. (This youth was devoted to C.G., for during the war, C.G. had given food to his mother, who was poor with several children, and he had bought a bicycle for Hans so that he could go to school.)

Shortly after, to C.G.’s great surprise, Hans arrived in the garden at Küsnacht. C.G. had no idea he was coming but he had cycled from Bollingen (about 37 kilometres) to bring C.G. some early strawberries.

He told me of another incident, during the Second War when petrol was scarce.

He was returning to Küsnacht from Bollingen by train and was reading, but his mind became insistently occupied with the idea of a man being drowned – something he had once seen.

Why should he think of it now?

But he could not get the thought out of his mind.

When he reached his house in Küsnacht some of his grandsons (who were living there at the time) were in the garden looking
rather upset, and he asked, ‘What’s up? What’s the matter?’

They told him the youngest boy, who could not swim, had fallen into the water in the boat-house; it is very deep there and they had had great difficulty in getting him out. C.G. said, ‘That would have been about half an hour ago?’ – the time when the idea of drowning had filled his mind in the train – and they said, ‘Yes, that was the time.’

5th January 1957

I asked C.G. if he had ever, as it were, heard the future calling him.

He said it was never like that with him.

He knew others – Goethe, for example – had felt that; but for him it was always something behind, a vis a tergo, pushing him on to find the truth, what things really were.

He had never been satisfied with Freud’s theory because it lacked historical support; it had no background, it was no more than Freud’s theory.

Yet, he said, it was to Freud’s credit that he tried to find a background in Totem and Taboo.

It was after he had written The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious that C.G. became interested in Chinese thought.

In 1928 he had a letter from Richard Wilhelm asking if he would write a commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, a book on Chinese alchemy, and he did so.

He found Chinese thought impressive and studied the I Ching.

Through his study of types C.G. found similarities with Chinese thought; he drew a diagram of the four functions to illustrate what he meant: Thus if a man is predominantly a thinking type he begins to speculate; so he takes in intuition, the knowledge from the unconscious.

But he wants then to see how it relates to facts, and so sensation is included.

This results in a triangle which excludes feeling.

This happened, he said, with Freud.

But the feeling is there, nevertheless.

‘I had a hell of a lot of trouble with that!’ said C.G.

When feeling is left out you get a narrow circle round the thinking, the intellectual function.

But, he observed, the diagram of the functions corresponds to the Yin Yang of the Chinese, it makes for completeness.

I gave him the synopses of my lectures to read and he expanded on parts of them and said he thought they did give the bones on which the flesh could be put.

He digressed a good deal and all he said was interesting.

When he came to free associations he said they were futile for they lead only to the complexes; but in dream analysis they do not tell us what the dream says.

He gave an example: ‘Think of a man who dreams of a daisy and you ask for his associations; he says, “Well, Daisy is a name, it’s the name of my girl friend.”

Freud would go on from there to sex.

But I would say, “That’s interesting, but what about the daisy? It’s still there on the ground – what of the daisy itself?”

Then the man might say, “Well, it’s a flower with white petals and a golden centre; it draws health from the sun and opens when the sun shines.

It exists in itself, apart from other daisies.”

So then I ask, “What about the sun?” and he may think of God or religion.

But that is not Daisy, his girl friend.

So the unconscious is producing something which shows that there is more than Daisy, there is his own life and also a greater life.’

The Self – it is the whole, conscious and unconscious, ‘what I myself am’; it involves much we do not know is there, for example our body and its workings, and the unconscious.

6th January 1957

In the morning C.G., Ruth Bailey and I went up to Bollingen by car.

The sun was shining and the place looked wonderful with the new room added, and the painted ceiling in the loggia.

The painting of this ceiling was C.G.’s idea; his coat of arms, or the separate parts of it, fill a long panel at one end and at the other end is that of Mrs. Jung.

The intermediate panels are painted with the crest of the Hoernis (one of their daughters married into this family) – the emblems were horns, hunting horns.

Opposite this is the Baumann crest (another daughter married one of them).

That of the Niehus family (their other son-in-law) was not yet complete and there was a In the two centre panels the space.

The crests of C.G. and Mrs. Jung were repeated.

We went up to the new room.

The woodwork and metal work of the door hinges and door knobs was excellent and C.G. said it was old.

He told me about the original building, and of the various additions as time went on.

We looked at some of the many stone carvings he has done; a small one was of a snake which had swallowed a perch and died.

A beautiful stone in the classical style was a memorial to Mrs. Jung; this, he said, was to be put up on the wall by the loggia.

At the side of the house is a carving of Mercury.

I asked why he had done it.

He said that when he was writing on synchronicity something restricted him – he just could not get it right.

His eye kept looking at the stone wall at the side of the tower, and he decided to fixate (my word) the interruption and carved a rather smiling face depicting Mercury; beneath he inscribed the words: ‘O (that is, Mercury) Fugaci illi. Ambiguo, duplici, illudendi jocoso’.

That did it.

He could then get on with his work.

On our return we passed the old church between Rapperswil and Bollingen.

C.G. said it dated back to the seventh century and had frescoes of the fifteenth century.

It was dedicated to Dionysius the Areopagite, and no churches were dedicated to him after the eighth century.

After coffee on the verandah, following lunch, C.G., Ruth and I went and sat on the pier by the lake and fed the swans; nine of them collected and seagulls came.

The seagulls breed on the upper lake and remain here all the time.

There were also some coots.

It was sunny and when C.G. went for his sleep, I sat on a chair by the lake in the shelter of the pier; it was beautifully warm.

Later I talked with C.G. in the garden room while he sat in front of the stone he was working on and now and then chipped at it.

He spoke of the importance of rumours as psychological phenomena, and in particular of those concerning flying saucers.

That there are such rumours, so widespread, is significant.

A fact which impressed him in one case was that the radar beam had been deflected; this is beyond rumour and remains a most important, though unexplained, fact.

There seems to be something factual about the hundreds of well-attested reports over many years of these phenomena.

A Californian psychiatrist was driving over a bridge in San Francisco with his wife when she suddenly saw these things in the sky and called his attention to them.

He glanced at them, but as he was driving could do no more.

C.G. heard of the incident and wrote to him; he replied saying he had seen the objects but was puzzled to know why C.G. should be interested in such things.

C.G. was amazed that this man could be so wooden-headed as to disregard such a phenomenon.

He said it was certain that these things could not be explained by our ordinary categories of thought; we had to take note of them for they may well come from outside our world, as we know it.

The French have a special bureau to investigate them, and so have the Americans.

He referred also to the remarkable effect of an American broadcast (this was Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds) about an invasion of New York by people from Mars.

People were ready to accept this, as though they were inwardly expecting some momentous event from outside.

In the ‘little room’, that is the inner study in which I write, and on the table-desk, is the cricket ball presented to C.G. by the Society of Analytical Psychology in London with the inscription: ‘The C.G. Jung Anniversary Cricket Match 10.7.55’.

This was presented to C.G. by Dr. Leopold Stein on behalf of the S.A.P. at the birthday party dinner at the Dolder Hotel in Zürich 1955.

C.G. enjoys detective stories, and I asked him why.

He turned the question and asked me what I thought.

I suggested that people like to identify themselves with, for instance, the clever detective; or in the story they find a character doing all the things they would like to do if they dared.

He said this was probably true, but his own interest was that the stories had nothing to do with him or his work; most of them, too, were about men.

Many novels had psychological themes and these bored him for he had plenty of this with his patients, far more interesting stuff.

But the detective stories were a rest, chiefly because they had no bearing on his professional work; and he could sleep after reading them because they were not true.

7th January 1957

In the afternoon we sat in the garden room; C.G. had the stone he was carving and worked at it now and then.

‘Well, fire away!’ he said.

I asked of his first impressions of the anima and he said it came in his dream of the white dove when the little girl stood beside him; she was like his eldest daughter.

He had this dream at Christmas time in 1913.

It was a momentous dream ranking in quality with his early dream at the Rhine Falls at the age of four.

He was sitting in the loggia of an old, beautiful and impressive castle; the loggia was at the top.

He sat in a gilded chair.

To his left was a table with gilded legs and a top of wonderful green stone, marble of a special kind (vert du mer), or emerald – it was the vivid green of an emerald.

Around the table were his children.

His wife was not there.

He sat gazing out through an arched window which had no glass in it; outside was the clear blue sky, not a cloud in sight.

Suddenly a white bird like a seagull or a white dove flew in and perched on the table beside him.

He signalled to the children not to speak and waited.

The bird disappeared; it was no longer there – this puzzled him greatly.

Then he was aware of a small girl of about eight years of age standing at his right side; she had fair hair like his eldest daughter.

She ran to join the children and afterwards returned for a little.

Then she disappeared.

Shortly after the white dove reappeared and perched on the table and said, ‘I can only come in the early part of the night when the master of the doves is engaged with the twelve dead men.’

At the time he could make nothing of the dream but later he linked the white dove with Hermes – it was the spiritual element.

And he recognized the green table as the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes Trismegistos on which the basic elements of alchemical wisdom were engraved.

The dream foreshadowed his work on alchemy.

He spoke also of another dream which he had about 1925: There was fighting between Germans and Italians in North
Italy.

He was escaping in a carriage drawn by horses; someone was driving this vehicle.

They reached the plains of Lombardy and he thought, ‘Here we are safe.’

They then came to a beautiful ducal palace; it stood in extensive grounds enclosed within a wall.

Before them a gate stood open and beyond, in the wall at the opposite side, was another open gate.

They drove in intending to pass right through; but at the castle steps the coachman jumped down – he had to stop.

Then the gates closed.

He knew they were imprisoned, yet had the feeling that he would nevertheless escape.

It was later that he came to see in this dream a reference to alchemy, for he discovered parallels to the castle and the closing of the gates in an old alchemical text, the Artis Auriferae.

The dream, as he saw it, was a prevision, an anticipation of his research, his captivation by alchemy.

8th January 1957

I asked about the negative aspect of the anima, and he said, ‘Well, we become aware of things first when they seem to be against us, to go in an opposite way.

That calls our attention to them.’

He mentioned how once, when he was painting, he distinctly heard the voice of a woman saying, ‘this is art’.

This happened at a time when his work on a book he was writing had come to a halt – he could not get on with it.

The meaning of the incident seemed to be that his writing could be regarded simply as art, as if truth did not matter and that he might write novels or something of the kind equally well.

It was the voice of a woman he knew, an artist who had come to work in Zürich and had had a very great influence on a former colleague of his at the Burghölzli – an unfavourable influence.

So when he heard her voice saying ‘this is art’, he realised that this was, as it were, the voice of the woman who had led his friend astray, and so he could deal with it.

This occurred at a very difficult time in 1913, when he was about to resign his post in the university as a lecturer in psychiatry.

He could not continue to teach because he had studied Freud’s way and also Adler’s, and had seen that they both had something which was too narrow.

So he had to find his own way, and it was tempting to think, as for a moment he did, of his work as Art.

But this was a deception, it was the negative aspect of the anima leading him astray.

In the afternoon after lunch I sat in the sun by the lake for an hour and a half.

Then tea, and a chat with C.G. and later a walk to the little park.

He was talking about types.

The extraverted person cannot value anything from the inside, hence the superficiality of much academic psychology – psychological tests for example, or the physical explanations of mental experiences.

There is no understanding of the fact that the mind itself has its causality; something from the inner life exerts its influence – ideas just arrive in the mind, or symptoms appear.

But people assume that these are derived from something outside themselves; the ‘cause’, however, may lie in their feelings which they have not considered.

He referred to psychological tests and experimental psychiatry, and the vast sums of money spent at Harvard on it – a big building filled with apparatus measuring reactions.

One experiment, in which he took part, was to demonstrate an optical illusion of a fast-moving object seeming to go in the opposite direction to that in which he was moving.

He asked the professor why they did such things, especially in a ‘Department of Human Relations’.

What results did they get from the work?

He could not answer, but said it was necessary scientific research.

C.G. regarded this and similar things as insignificant – they measured so small a part of human reactions it seemed to have no real bearing on psychological understanding.

In the evening C.G. and I were alone for dinner and sat afterwards in the study.

He showed me an English Bible of 1540, owned by Thomas Wallis of Tonbridge who, according to the inscription at the beginning, died of ‘gout of the stomach’ at the age of eighty-five in the year 1775.

He showed me also his collection of alchemical works which he said was the best in Switzerland.

One volume, he said, was particularly interesting.

This was subtitled:

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum containing several Poetical Pieces, of our famous English Philosophers, who have Written the Hermetique mysterium in their own Ancient Language Faithfully collected into one Volume with nnotations thereon By Elias Ashmole Esq.

Que est mercuriophilus Anglicus London Printed by J. Grifmann for Nath: Brooke at the Angel in Cornhill MDCLII The Prolegomena by E. Ashmole 26 Jan. 1651 addressed to All Ingeniously Elaborate Students In the most Divine Mysteries of Hermetique Learning.

In the main study hang two oil paintings, one on the left of C.G.’s father and the other of his grandfather.

He said he had a letter written by his grandfather, who went over the Gotthard Pass in a coach with horses and was mighty glad to get to the other side and down to the valley, for the road was narrow and difficult.

9th January 1957

Today C.G. received two little booklets entitled The Divine Law sent to him by their author, an Indian philosopher named B. Subramanya Iyer, whom he first met twenty years ago at a philosophical congress in Paris.

They were inscribed: ‘With affectionate regards. 30.11.56.’

C.G. recalled that at the Paris conference no one listened to Iyer’s lectures because he was speaking like someone of the thirteenth century.

It was as if Meister Eckhart were lecturing, and talking of the divine spark in man.

People just disregarded him.

C.G. cheered him up and invited him to Zürich; but he realised that he was unable to grasp modern thought and could not understand why no one took him seriously.

Then when C.G. was in India, he was invited to Mysore State where this man was the guru to the ruler; he was treated very well, stayed in the ruler’s guest-house, and was taken for drives in an ancient but comfortable motor car.

This incident illustrated C.G.’s open attitude; he saw the interesting side of such a man while realising that he could understand nothing of his own psychology.

Also when he was lecturing in Bombay he saw that no one had the slightest idea of what he was talking about, so he began to tell stories of hypnotism and they thought this wonderful!

Later, he referred to the appearance, in analysis, of the archetypes: first comes the anima, then the old wise man, and then the puer aeternus, for every wise old man must also have the spirit of youth.

He mentioned also the archetypes as the representation of the instincts, that is, the instincts can be expressed in many ways – there are hundreds of possibilities.

But one form is selected because it corresponds to the instinct – it is an image of it.

He spoke of Dorset, which he knew well, and of the White Horse of Cerne Abbas, and other things.

Then, after dinner, Ruth opened The Listener, and the first thing she saw was a picture of a White Horse in Yorkshire.

C.G. was interested in this picture and mentioned that the ground had been moving and the horse was distorted.

All is moving.... He found Dorset strange and eerie.

He had camped somewhere there.

10th January 1957

C.G. discussed the point of view of the natural scientist.

He said that his own work made no attempt to be philosophical.

He was not interested in abstractions; he was concerned only with what he observed, and these things he sought to comprehend.

He had a critical mind and could not accept explanations that certain illnesses were caused by certain events.

He wanted to study the particular illness, to see what it was.

Life is not only what we expect it to be. P

eople want to get at reality; they seek, for example, to dismiss a delusion merely because it does not conform to ‘reality’.

But the delusion itself is something; one cannot deny its reality because it is unusual.

He spoke of a dream he had years ago at Bollingen at a time when only the first tower was built.

He was alone there for some days, perfectly quiet and at home with Nature.

He dreamt that he heard music of various instruments, accordions, violins, and so on, and saw a long procession of people walking by the side of the lake, coming from the direction of Schmerikon.

When they reached the Tower they divided, one column passed on one side and one on the other. It was so vivid that he woke wondering what they could be doing.

He did not realise he had been dreaming and got up and pulled the shutter aside to see these people.

There was no one there, nothing but the light of the moon on a clear night.

He went back to bed and fell asleep.

The same dream returned, but in it he dreamt that he thought it to be a dream although in fact it was real.

Then he woke, and again looked out having pulled the shutter aside.

At the time he could make nothing of this dream.

It occurred about thirty years ago, and only last year he came across an account written by an old historian in Lucerne, R. Cysat (1545-1614), who made a collection of the folklore of the area at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Amongst the tales was one of a shepherd on Pilatus.

Another man went up and spent a night with him, and in the morning he asked the shepherd about the procession of people playing musical instruments which had passed on either side of the place where they were camped.

The shepherd said, ‘Oh, you have seen the hosts of Wotan.’

C.G. mentioned this dream as an instance of how the collective unconscious is constellated at certain times, and the great value of this.

It is important to be alone and unhurried sometimes, for then we are close to Nature (as he was on the night of this dream); then we can hear the voice of Nature speaking to us.

He told me also how many years ago he and his wife and children were on holiday in a part of Switzerland he knew well.

One morning he went on an expedition with the children and returned at lunch time.

His wife told him she had been for a walk on the other side of the town where there was a moraine and some small hills.

She had seen a very old wooden building at the top of one of these hills and had gone up to look at it.

She was very interested in the carving on the door; the wood was dark with age and the carving was of unusually fine quality.

C.G. said, ‘That’s funny! I can’t remember such a building and I know that moraine quite well.’

He asked her to describe its position again and she suggested that after lunch they should go and see it, it would only take about twenty minutes; it was on the second, or possibly the third, little hill.

After lunch they set off and passed the second, third and fourth hill, but no building was there.

She was puzzled, but absolutely certain she had seen it.

They spent two hours inspecting every hill but could not find it. C.G. said his wife was a particularly well-balanced person, full of common-sense: ‘She was a sensation type – you couldn’t put anything over on her.’

But she had that experience; here was a fact, and he could not explain it.

A similar episode occurred much later. C.G. had spoken to Toni Wolff about the Baptistry of the Orthodox in Ravenna where Galla Placidia was buried.

Early in the fifth century, after surviving a stormy sea voyage to Ravenna, she had built a church there in fulfilment of a vow.

The original church was later destroyed, but her tomb is there.

After visiting the tomb they entered the Baptistry.

It was filled with a bluish light, though there was no artificial lighting. C.G. looked round the building and remarked to Toni,‘Isn’t it curious?

Here are these beautiful mosaics on the west, the east, the south and the north in this octagonal building, and I can’t remember Seeing them before – it’s most remarkable for they are so striking!’

In the centre was the font; it was big for it was used for immersion.

For twenty minutes they studied the mosaics.

C.G. described them as about twice the size of a tapestry hanging in the verandah (which is about six feet by eight feet).

Each depicted a baptism scene: one of St. Peter sinking into the sea and our Lord saving him; one of the Israelites in the Red Sea, when the water drowned the Egyptians; one of Naaman the Syrian bathing in the water and being cured of leprosy; and one of our Lord’s baptism.

The double symbolism of baptism as a saving of life and as a danger of death was shown in each mosaic.

C.G. was particularly impressed by that showing Peter sinking in the sea and stretching out his hand and Jesus reaching for him; this was a most beautiful mosaic of lapis lazuli.

On leaving the Baptistry they went to a shop opposite to get photographs of these mosaics – one of the small shops always found near such places.

They were offered pictures of the Baptistry, but none of the mosaics.

They went to another shop – no luck – and to several others, but they could not find the photographs they wanted.

Soon after C. A. Meier was going to Italy and C.G. told him to be sure to visit Ravenna and see these mosaics and get pictures of them, or if he couldn’t, to take photographs.

Meanwhile C.G. was giving a seminar, in the course of which he mentioned the wonderful mosaics he and Miss Wolff had seen at Ravenna, and he described them in detail.

When Dr. Meier returned from Italy he told C.G. that he had gone to the Baptistry in Ravenna but that there were no mosaics there of the kind he had described.

C.G. told this to Toni Wolff who said, ‘That’s ridiculous, I saw them with my own eyes and you talked of them for about twenty minutes!’

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘there are no such mosaics!

So at the seminar he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry but there are no mosaics.’

Here was an experience which two people had, yet how to explain it quite defeated him – he had no suggestion to offer.

He mentioned these things to show how mysterious the mind is, how little we know of it, and how futile it is to ‘explain’ the manifestations of the psyche away when they do not conform with what we are accustomed to call reality.

There are many things in the psyche which we do not understand and have yet to discover, and it was this which initiated his trips to Africa, to the Pueblo Indians, and to India.

He wanted to study the mind of the primitive in Africa, people whose point of view was absolutely different from our own.

The spectrum of human understanding is infinitely varied and we cannot look on one attitude as right and another wrong in our attempts to explain things beyond our comprehension.

Thus, on the African trip he asked a very intelligent man who was a priest or teacher whether the world was flat, a disc or a globe. ‘It’s a flat disc,’ he replied.

‘Well,’ said C.G., ‘if you see a ship on the horizon, which part do you see first?’

‘You see the ship.’ ‘No,’ said C.G., and he referred the question to one of the others who said, ‘You see the smoke first, then the masts, and then the ship.’ ‘That’s right,’ said C.G., ‘and that’s because the world is a globe.’

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘that’s not true!’

‘Well,’ said C.G., ‘what is the reason?’

The priest looked very puzzled; he walked up and down holding his head and for a time could find no answer.

Then he said, ‘Now I’ve got it!

Allah once made an enormous stone bull and threw it into the ocean but its left horn remained above the surface; that horn is the earth.

It sticks up so that you think the earth is a globe, but it could not be a globe for if it were the sea would fall off!’

‘Yes,’ said the others, ‘that is the true reason.’

C.G. was greatly interested for he recognised this as an old Persian idea.

These people took it for a fact and were satisfied.

He continued to talk about his visit to Africa, where he first met Ruth Bailey; this was in 1925, and she has remained a close family friend ever since.

C.G.’s companions on the journey were Peter Baynes and George Beckwith; Fowler McCormick was to have come but was prevented.

On the same boat Ruth was also travelling to Africa with her younger sister whose fiancé they were to meet in Nairobi.

She did not meet C.G. on the boat however; he and his companions did not share in the general social activities of the ship but kept apart, reading or talking.

They came to be called ‘the three Obadiahs’ (from the old song, Obadiah, Obadiah).

In Nairobi everyone stayed in the same hotel, and Ruth’s sister was joined by her fiancé.

He, of course, showed Ruth every courtesy as well and she became embarrassed when the couple would not allow her to go off on her own and leave them together.

In the evening there was a dance in the hotel and Ruth slipped away from her companions into an adjoining lounge; C.G. was sitting there studying maps and she asked if she might, without disturbing him, sit at the same table in order not to appear isolated.

He said, ‘Oh yes,’ and went on looking at his papers.

He did not speak for about an hour, and then suddenly said, ‘Are you interested in maps?’

She said, ‘Yes, very.’

He then talked of his projected journey and showed her where they were going.

After this meeting Ruth spent some of her time with C.G. and his companions until they left the hotel.

They made their way towards Mount Elgon and were encamped in its foothills when C.G. received a letter from the Governor of Uganda asking if he would escort an English lady who was to travel back from Nairobi by way of the Sudan and Egypt – the route he himself planned to follow.

Ruth was the person in question, so the meeting in Nairobi paved the way to C.G.’s assent.

She made her own way to the site of their camp and was with them for the rest of the expedition – about three months.

She had not heard of C.G. previously and knew nothing of his work or reputation.

She was well equipped for the eventualities of camp life with a natural ability to meet any situation with humour and goodwill,
and sound practical sense.

11th January 1957

C.G. referred again to the publication of The Psychology of the Unconscious and said he had great difficulty in writing about sacrifice – he could not do so for two months.

He said he did not write in chapters but continuously, and divided the work later.

He felt the book would not be acceptable to Freud because it brought in another principle, namely, that the
unconscious acted autonomously.

This notion Freud had never admitted into his thinking, and C.G. felt that the publication of the book would mean a break with Freud.

His wife reassured him that this would be impossible but he remained unconvinced, and events turned out as he had anticipated.

I referred to the point he had made previously, that his work sprang from his own mind and was not learned from others.

As an instance he quoted his interest in trying to understand why Freud and Adler could not agree.

Plenty of other people were aware of this but no one saw it as a problem except himself.

For him it was a serious matter, and the study of it led to his work on types.

I asked about himself – how his own attitude fitted in with his classification of types, and he said he was most definitely the introverted thinking type.

Like Freud, Adler was satisfied with his own theory, for by it he could explain everything.

For him, sex was not the important thing, but rather that the man wanted to be on top.

C.G. saw that there were these two points of view and each explained a lot, but not everything.

Freud had made his method and his theory one, and this was false.

He would not, and could not, be empirical for you cannot be empirical if you have a fixed theory.

He mentioned that he had a tussle with himself when he realised that through the word association tests he had found clinical proof of Freud’s theory of repression.

The devil said: ‘Why not publish it?

It’s very interesting and nothing to do with Freud.’

But he resisted this momentary idea and decided there and then to throw in his lot with Freud.

It was a serious decision for it meant sacrificing his academic career and going against the advice of many of his friends.

But he was interested in the truth and ‘to hell with an academic career.’

He remarked how important it was for people to be in their own function – as they really are.

For instance how boring it is when women are always sensible – it is better when they behave a little unexpectedly, irrationally; this makes them more interesting.

Regarding Freudian assumptions that everything was infantile sexuality which had been repressed, he said, ‘Their view is that when this is realised you must just put it away, forget it and be cured.

But you can’t put it away without hurt because childish things are very valuable – the dependence, the interest, the expectant attitude.

This is the puer aeternus and you need it, especially in old age for it keeps people healthy.

So it is a bad blunder to try to get rid of it; moreover, you cannot just dispose of it.’

He said he often asked what sublimation really was and he could never get an answer.

It is just a term and has no reality.

You can’t change people to fit a theory.

I asked him for his ideas in the treatment of manic-depressive patients.

He thought they were very difficult, but a good plan was to put them to bed when, as often, they became irritable before either a manic or a depressed phase.

He cited also two cases of depression.

One was a woman who had depressions and a fear of going to Paris.

Having remained well for two years, and being eager to see the pictures in the Louvre – she was a highly educated person – she went to Paris with a friend.

On the day they arrived there she and her friend were killed by a taxi.

The other was the case of a man who was afraid to go up steps into public buildings such, he said, as the steps to the British Museum.

This man was in Berlin during the civil troubles before Hitler; there was firing in a street and people ran into houses for shelter.

He was outside a public building and rushed up the steps to seek safety, but on the steps ‘a bullet found him’ and he died.

Apart altogether from psychological discussions, I have noted again and again in general conversation with C.G. how he always gets the facts straight before he makes any comment, and when anything is obscure he questions people until he is sure he understands their meaning.

This is very typical of his work and of his attitude, he takes nothing for granted, but wants the facts.

He is always ready for something new or unexpected; this is why he has no final theories.

On a walk this evening he asked if I had ever heard a sermon upon the parable of the unjust steward. I said I hadn’t.

‘No,’ he said, ‘the theologians never preach about that, for Christ praised the man who had cheated or, in other words, was fully conscious.’

After dinner we sat on the verandah, C.G. behind the little table wearing, as usual, a blue apron, and on the table lay the stone he was carving of the family lineage on the male side.

Now and then he chipped at the letters with an expert touch.

He mentioned that the inscription was in Latin: ‘You see, Latin is the correct, dignified language in which to address the ancestors.’

He added that when he was given an honorary degree at Harvard there was a Latin oration, and he was presented with a ‘parchment’.

He was particularly interested to see how they had translated the word ‘unconscious’ into Latin, and it was mens vacua, the unknown or unexplored mind.

He had been described as the explorer of the unconscious, and he thought this phrase particularly apt.

Later he showed me the knife which long ago had broken into four pieces with a loud report.

He had it mounted on a piece of thick paper, and he wrote a description under it.

He also spoke of the table which had split with a sudden sharp crack; it was a walnut table which had been part of his grandmother’s dowry and it was about seventy years old.

Both these events were unexplained.

They had happened shortly before he met the mediumistic girl about whom he wrote his dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena.

At the same time he showed me a small tumbler of slightly tinted (red or pink) glass, and the rim at the top was sharp all round.

He said that at the moment his wife’s mother died the upper part of the glass had broken off.

And he referred again to the experience in the Baptistry at Ravenna as yet another unexplained event.

A point of interest to me was that he had kept this knife carefully since 1898, and also the glass later.

It was interesting, too, that he had not written a note on the paper on which the knife was mounted until this evening.

12th January 1957

At breakfast this morning C.G. spoke of his visit to Paris in 1902.

He never saw Charcot, who had retired, but he attended Janet’s lectures.

He found them terribly boring – no fertilising ideas at all.

Janet never knew his patients; he was the opposite of Freud who could never see beyond his patients, but saw them only through his own theory.

Janet was typical of French psychology, which was still of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the French were the centre of Europe.

The French did not travel; he had read an article in Le Matin about this.

They looked on foreigners as barbarians, and why go to see them?

They had all they needed.

The French language was spoken by all polite, educated people; thus in Basel, French was quite de rigueur amongst the patrician families.

Even Leibnitz wrote his works in French.

He mentioned the famous tapestry in the museum in Zürich.

It depicts a treaty made with one of the French kings, and shows the French in gorgeous dresses and robes, and the Swiss delegation in top hats and black coats, like a collection of elders – ‘Nothing outside, it was all inside, and they were very clever, very cunning.

It is the best summary of French and Swiss psychology – you get the whole thing.

You have to know these things to understand the psychology of French patients.’

He was in Paris for months but never got to know a French family.

There were plenty of students, but no meeting them outside the lecture rooms.

The French would be very polite if you were buying something from them or if they wanted something from you; otherwise all was on the surface.

They were like that before the Revolution.

Then came Napoleon and La Grande Armée – but still on top, and everyone else nowhere.

They are like that still, so they make wonderful dresses to sell – all on the surface.

It was totally different when he went to London and lived in a little hotel near the British Museum.

He showed me a letter from an American patient whom he had treated for a schizophrenic breakdown over twenty years ago.

She wrote: ‘You told me at the time that it, the break, was my one big chance, and I thought you were only trying to give me the courage to fight through.

But you were right, and I have the proof of it now.

However, if I hadn’t had the great fortune to get to you, that break would have been my complete ending, and none of the good fortune I listed above would have happened.’

This evening we are sitting again in the study, as has been customary all through this visit – C.G. in his chair, reading or playing patience, Ruth reading on the couch, and myself in a chair by the desk with a shaded lamp, writing notes. Very little conversation. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 166-225

Friday, February 23, 2018

Carl Jung: We must get in touch with the man of the ages, not be over impressed by the present, not be rushed.



Küsnacht, 29th August 1956

Arrived in Zürich.

30th August 1956

At breakfast C.G. spoke of the difficulties implicit in the idea of anyone writing his biography; he said it would require a full understanding of his thought, and no one understood it completely.

Freud’s life, he said, could be clearly described because his thought was simply laid out.

But with him it was more complex, for unless the development of his thought were xentral to his biography it would be no more than a series of incidents, like writing the life of Kant without knowing his work.

To illustrate his meaning he mentioned a momentous dream he had had in 1913.

The experience had an important influence upon his life which resulted from the efforts he made to understand the dream; yet were it related quite simply few people would comprehend the significance it had at that point in his career.

The dream:

He was climbing a steep mountain path, twisting to the top, and on the right the valley was in shadow for it was still night; ahead the sun was behind the peak and rising, but still hidden.

In front of him was a primitive man (the man of all the ages – brown-skinned and hairy); he was following this man and each was armed for hunting, probably chamois.

Then the sun rose, and on the summit of the mountain Siegfried appeared in shining armour with a shield and spear; he was wearing something like skis and glided down over the rocks.

The skis were of bones – the bones of all the dead.

Then the primitive man indicated to him that they must shoot Siegfried with their rifles, and they lay in wait for him and killed him.

The primitive man (the shadow) was the leader; he went to collect the spoil.

But C.G. was filled with remorse and rushed down the mountain into a ravine and up the other side – he had to get away from the awful crime.

It was raining and everything was wet; but while this washed away all traces of the crime it made no difference to the sense of guilt which oppressed his conscience.

He awoke and wanted to sleep again but he knew he must try to understand the dream.

For a while his remorse for murdering Siegfried – the hero – obliterated everything else, overwhelming him to the extent that he felt impelled to take his revolver from the drawer and shoot himself, ‘commit suicide’; the dream and the impulse were terribly vivid and he might have done it but for the fact that his thoughts about the dream began to take shape:the hero, doing the very heroic act, was killed by the primitive man.

That is, the dream was pointing to the primitive man, who was immoral or undeveloped in our eyes, as the leader, the one to be followed.

For him, this meant that he must follow not the here and now of consciousness, the accepted achievements, but the man of the ages who represented the collective unconscious, the archetypes.

This dream was a big turning point in C.G.’s life – a far more significant dream than that of the mediaeval house, he said.

For it showed that he must follow a certain line and disregard popular ideas.

It was like the old Austrian saying of never doing today what can be done tomorrow; that is, time is not the important thing.

American boys carve on their desks ‘Do it now’, and this appeals to people today; but to do this, and to say ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’ isn’t everything.

We must get in touch with the man of the ages, not be over impressed by the present, not be rushed.

In the dream the primitive man behaved naturally, as a primitive man would do – seeing someone approaching with sword and shield, he just fired and killed him.

So C.G. knew from the dream, when he came to comprehend it, that he must follow the deep hidden, discarded primitive man, and forsake his academic scientific career, the heroic role of doing things here and now and ‘getting on’ (‘This world’s empty glory’ E.A.B.).

He mentioned that Freud discovered the first archetype, the incest problem.

But he had regarded it only from the personal point of view, just as he took religion as simply a personal matter.

As such it could be disregarded.

He added that Freud never acquired any idea of the deeper unconscious although he spoke of ‘archaic memories’.

C.G. said that in the Oedipus complex lies a great deal of importance; it is the separation of the child and the parents, and the attitude of the child to the parents.

I asked if this wasn’t the problem in neurosis – the conflict of the personal and the collective; the desire just to be apart, and the difficulty in adapting to the whole, taking one’s place in the group.

It can show itself in many forms of phobias (claustrophobia etc.) where the underlying fear is of being alone and so faced with the central problem of adjustment.

But this varies in different ages; in the first half of life it is personal adjustment to life around us, and in the second half the adjustment is to the bigger spiritual life which goes on and on.

He mentioned Bollingen, that the great thing about it for him is that it is so near to Nature.

They cook on the open fire there, and he does most of the cooking and cuts the firewood – only wood is used.

Speaking of the fire, he said, ‘We haven’t yet mastered the natural forces so you have to know how to use it.’

We strolled round the garden (at Küsnacht) and he pointed out all the trees which had been killed by frost.

There had been warm weather in January, and the very severe frost in March burst a lot of the stems of the laurel, wisteria and other trees, because the sap had risen and it froze.

The bamboos also had to be cut down but they have shot up again and there is a very fine grove of delicate trees some ten or twelve feet high.

A feature of the house is that it was built originally with only one door.

C.G. said this was because ‘We Swiss live in the centre of Europe and lots of things may happen.’

In previous days, at the time of his army service, he had his rifle and thirty rounds of ammunition in the house (all Swiss soldiers have) so that he could defend himself.

The lower windows are protected by grilles of steel or bars.

The garden room was built later – it has a door to the garden and another into the house; the latter is an iron door and is always closed at night.

C.G. has a doze after lunch and so has Miss Bailey.

I sit in the garden, and today it is beautifully sunny.

Later we talked again, and C.G. said how interesting it would be if someone were to study the dreams people had under anaesthetics; he mentioned one or two examples.

Also he spoke of his great interest on reading that a neuro-surgeon, concerned with epilepsy, had stimulated the corpora quadrigemina and the patient had had a vision of a mandala, a square containing a circle.

This vision could be reproduced – and was reproduced – by the stimulation of the same area.

He said he had for a long time thought that the brain stem was important in our thinking life and how interested he was that the corpora quadrigemina, the four bodies, was the area, for it confirmed his idea of the importance of the square and the circle as symbols.

In the evening after dinner, we somehow got onto the subject of numbers which, C.G. said, had a life of their own.

It was always a problem for mathematicians – had numbers been invented or discovered?

This cropped up in talking about what religion was; was it with Origen, relegare: to connect, link back, or with Cicero, relegere: to gather up again, to recollect – that is, something that is there already?

The latter is C.G.’s idea for in thinking of religion we must think of all religions, for instance Buddhism, which is a religion without
a god.

But theologians say they are concerned only with Christianity!

This is like a doctor saying he is only concerned with viruses and is not interested, for example, in malaria.

So in religion we must avoid specialisation, concentrating on one thing only and leaving out the rest because it does not suit us.

Then we passed on to talk of numbers and their individual qualities.

One was nothing, because you could only think of one if you had a lot of ones; but also it could be Everything, like One (and the Many), that is the totality of God.

Two was the opposites – good and evil – and was left out by those who did not hold with opposites, such as those who accept the idea of the privatio boni.

Three was the dynamic number; it was male.

I said, ‘For example, one, two three – go!’ and he said, ‘Yes, that’s it, it’s leading somewhere.’

Four is female, complete; it is an end, final.

Five is four plus one, but the one is in the centre, it is the quintessence of the four.

Six is the double three (there was more to this).

Seven, the divine number, six plus one; the seven branched candlesticks (more also to this).

Eight – the double four.

Nine is the double four plus the central one, the quintessence again.

C.G. thinks of numbers as things existing in themselves which are discovered, not just invented.

31st August 1956

Talk with C.G. after breakfast about theologians – he found them ‘terribly superficial’.

They don’t mind talking, and a lot of their thought was ‘just firing blank ammunition’.

But when it comes to real firing – taking things seriously and seeing what they really are, they close up.

He mentioned the story of the trumpeter of Schaffhausen.

In the eighteen-forties there was fighting in Switzerland among the cantons; the Schaffhausen regiment went to take part and
the trumpeter went with them.

In a week he reappeared in Schaffhausen and everyone asked, ‘Why aren’t you at the war?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they aim at you there!’ – so he had come home.

Theologians are often like that.

Then he went on to talk of the Pope’s dogma about the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and said it had great opposition in the Church because it is laid down that there can be no dogma unless it is founded upon Apostolic teaching, and there was no reference to the ascension of the Virgin until the sixth century.

But the Pope overrode that.

Several popes had attempted it before; one had done so a hundred years ago but he did not succeed in pushing it through.

The whole point of the dogma is to counteract the material; yet the woman is mater (that is, material) and God is manifest in creation, in matter.

There was tremendous opposition to the dogma, principally in northern countries; but the southern countries pressed for it.

The Virgin, therefore, is 99.9999 percent God – but not quite.

What will happen next?

Then I asked if it meant another Christ and he said, ‘Oh no, there can be only one Son of God.’

Laurens van der Post came for lunch and talked of his African adventures.

C.G. spoke also of participation mystique – that everything is known.

The primitive acts in that way; nothing is hidden nor can anything be hidden, it all comes out. C.G. is very keen on this idea, hence the title of his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

In the evening after dinner C.G. spoke of his first visit to Freud in Vienna.

While staying there he had a dream:

He was in the ghetto in Prague and it was narrow, twisted and low ceilinged, with staircases hanging down.

He thought, ‘How in hell can people live in such a place?’

That was the dream.

He went on to speak of how from the time of their first meetings he had noted the narrowness of Freud’s standpoint, his
limited perspective and concentration on tiny details.

He mentioned that to some degree it was because of Freud’s mother-complex that he was so concerned with sexual things – incest, sleeping with the mother and so on – as if they were something new. C.G., having been brought up in the country, knew all these things but they did not interest him.

The old ghetto in Prague, he said, was a famous one. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 149-163

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

E.A. Bennet: C.G. told me that his name was on the black List in Germany because of his views,



Küsnacht, 29th March 1946

Arriving from Geneva yesterday I was met by car at the station in Zürich and reached the Seestrasse just before one o’clock.

With C.G. and Mrs. Jung were their daughter and son-in-law, Marianne and Walther Niehus, and two children, a girl of about sixteen and a boy of six – also C.G.’s secretary, Miss Schmid.

We sat down to a lovely lunch – fish mayonnaise followed by beef, then biscuits, and afterwards coffee on the verandah.

Later I had a long talk with C.G. till tea-time, and left about five.

He looks very fit, is most alert, and appears in excellent health though he says his heart is a bit weak – he can’t do hills and must go slowly upstairs.

He spoke of the sense of isolation in Switzerland in 1940.

They were expecting a German invasion, and one day his brother-in-law at Schaffhausen sent a message warning him that the Germans might come that night.

He took his wife and daughter and his daughter-in-law (who was eight months pregnant) to a refugium in east Switzerland by car.

The general plan was that in the event of invasion the Swiss would evacuate the flat ground near Zürich, and fight in the hills where they would blow up the railway tunnels, the Gotthard and others.

This was a big factor, a trump card – Switzerland would be useless to the Germans without communications To Italy.

He listened daily to the B.B.C. and knew that England was the only hope, and that they would never give in.

He said that until 1935 it had seemed possible, in Germany and Italy, that some good could come from Naziism.

Germany was transformed; instead of roads crowded with people without work, all was changed and peaceful.

Then he saw other things and knew it was evil.

He began to speak against it – as at the Oxford Congress for instance – and did so increasingly.

He showed me an American article which had been falsely translated, misquoting him on the subject: his phrase ‘looking with amazed eyes’ (at the trend of events in Europe) had been transcribed as ‘looking with admiring eyes’.

He said it had been answered.

He became so outspoken in his criticisms of Germany that Mrs. Jung was afraid he would get into trouble, with so much German influence in Zürich.

Referring to the rumours of his so-called Nazi sympathies, C.G. told me that his name was on the black List in Germany because of his views, and that he would certainly have been shot at once had he fallen into Nazi hands.

He said that at the Oxford Congress he had asked Göring if he thought there would be a war, and Göring replied, ‘Well, if there is there will be a round table conference later.’

C.G. added that this would never have happened had Germany won.

Of Russia – he said Stalin was clever and no fool.

He [Jung] had feared much when the Russians came into the war; but then he had a striking dream, of which he told me a part:

He was in a vast field with, in the distance, buildings like barracks.

The place was filled with hordes of buffalos (i.e. Germans).

He was on a mound, and Hitler was on another mound.

He felt that as long as he fixed his gaze on Hitler all would be well.

Then he saw a cloud of dust in the distance, and horsemen – Cossacks – rounding up the buffalos and driving them out of the field.

Then he woke and was glad, for he knew that Germany would be beaten by Russia.

This, he said, was a collective dream, and very important.

Various chat.

I told him of the Stalingrad sword incident and of Chamberlain forgetting his umbrella at Godesburgh.

C.G. was most interested in the former, and said of the latter that when people leave without an object that belongs to them it means that they are unconscious of something – as patients forget their notebook or bag etc.; it is not simply an indication that they don’t want to go, or want to come back.

He has had a long correspondence with Father Victor White of Blackfriars, Oxford, and is very impressed by him and his learning.

They publish a magazine, Blackfriars.

Both he and Mrs. Jung told me that he was publishing all his papers about Germany and the Nazis; the book is already in print and will be translated. ~E.A. Bennett, Conversations with Jung, Pages 23-27

Carl Jung across the web:

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Great Sites to visit:

1. Jenna Lilla's Path of the Soul http://jennalilla.org/

2. Steve Jung-Hearted Parker's Jung Currents http://jungcurrents.com/

3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/

4. Lance S. Owen Gnosis Archive http://gnosis.org/welcome.html



E.A. Bennet: He [Jung] is working on a manuscript with Marie-Louise von Franz.




Küsnacht, 14th January 1952

Breakfast with C.G. and Mrs. Jung, and a walk afterwards with C.G.

He spoke of communists as people without ideals, with whom you could never make a treaty; the peace talks were all nonsense, to wear out the Americans.

You can’t make peace with termites, they just go on and on; that’s how it is with the Russians and it’s best to realise it.

It is constant attrition, and there’s no end to it.

He is working on a manuscript with Marie-Louise von Franz.

It is an old manuscript he found in the British Museum and there are copies; one was in Leyden for safety during the War.

She is writing a commentary on it, and it will be published as a companion volume to his own writing.

He told me how, when he built his house here forty-three years ago, there were meadows all round; the road was quiet and about twice the width of the drive up to the house.

His hedge had been at the kerb of the present sidepath and when the road was widened he had to give up part of his garden.

We went along to a little park and sat in a shelter – pretty cold, but sunny.

In the evening, after my lecture and dinner later with friends, I returned to Küsnacht at 10.15. Mrs. Jung let me in and said they were in the library.

There was C.G. in his usual chair by the window under the lamp.

He looked rather older and a bit tired, but he was full of life and, as always, went on to
some topic.

He wanted to know how many petitions there were in the Lord’s Prayer, because he was writing of this (I think correcting galley proofs of his book on Job).

I said they were really requests or statements rather than petitions, and he agreed that requests was the right word.

‘Give us this day our daily bread’, not just ordinary bread but the thing we live by.

He preferred Jerome’s rendering.

And he spoke of the wonderful language of the English translation of the Bible, and
also of the Zürich Bible, an excellent translation.

He showed me the papal pronouncement, which is in all languages as well as in seventeenth century baroque Latin; he said I should get a copy as it is immensely interesting.

It was quite a striking picture – C.G. with grey hair and feet up on a chair discussing the type of Latin, And Mrs. Jung behind, a sad look on her face at times.

15th January 1952

Walk in the morning with C.G. – got onto the unconscious.

At breakfast he had said how valuable patients’ pictures were because they gave us
knowledge of the unconscious which was not direct.

We can’t look at the unconscious directly, it absorbs us.

It’s like the legend of Perseus who cut off the Gorgon’s head: he could not look at it and could not cut it off unless he did, so he used his shield as a mirror.

Guided by the reflection in a sideways manner, he wielded his diamond-edged sword and smote off Medusa’s head.

Primitives, he said, are in the unconscious all the time.

In Africa, with the natives on Mount Elgon, he had to express himself very dramatically to get them to the point of action when he wanted them to do anything.

He spoke of the three principles in science – time, space and causality – and the need for a fourth, namely synchronicity.

It is a principle.

The book he has been writing with a physicist on these things is not yet published.

He mentioned his correspondence, it was ‘too much’, he would have to give it all his time if he were to attend to it properly.

16th January 1952

Walk after breakfast with C.G. Sunny.

He told me again, but in a different way than formerly, his dream of the mediaeval house, as follows:

I am on the first floor of a house, furnished a bit like my study – a sort of eighteenth century type.

Now I must see what is downstairs.

Beautiful old staircase, and the ground floor is sixteenth century-old, heavy, but beautiful furniture.

I thought, ‘This is nice, I didn’t know it was here – perhaps there is a cellar.’

And there was. I went down – bare walls, the plaster coming off, and behind were Roman bricks; a stone-flagged floor at the bottom.

In one corner was a stone with a ring in it.

I lifted it and looked down, and below were prehistoric remains – bones, skulls and old pottery.

He had this dream during his visit to Clark University in America with Freud.

He told the dream to Freud who said it must mean he wanted to get rid of someone.

Freud kept pressing this point and then said, ‘Well, it must mean you want to get rid of your wife.’

In their discussion Freud disregarded everything in the dream except the bones and skulls, which he related to the death of someone.

He saw the dream only from the point of view of his theory.

Freud was bound up in his theory, it was protective; everything must be reduced to something derogatory, Then you were in a superior position.

So with spirituality – to Freud it was nothing but sexuality.

For him everything could be explained.

He asked Jung to promise: ‘Promise me that you will support the dogma of sexuality.

If we have no dogma, then the black flood of occultism will sweep in and swallow us.’

The Freudians are all suffering from folie à deux and reduce everything to something else.

As against this is Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, something bigger and greater existing in its own right.

Sitting in the shelter he told me as he finished recounting the dream of the mediaeval house, ‘It was then, at that moment, I got the idea of the collective unconscious.’

He said he had had a dream over and over again, before 1930, of a new wing in his house, a lovely room full of wonderful manuscripts.

He could make nothing of this then, but when he began to study alchemy he found that it had all been foreshadowed in this recurring dream.

He said it was always like this with his dreams; he would dream of what he would write – like the mediaeval house dream and the notion of the collective unconscious.

17th January 1952

We talked of dreams and organic disease, and he spoke of a girl with muscular atrophy.

He was consulted and asked for her dreams.

She had two: in one her mother was hanging – had hanged herself – from the candelabra in the centre of the room and was swinging there.

In the second dream a horse had gone mad and was in the house; it rushed along the corridor and jumped out of the window.

The mother, the source of life, and the horse, the life principle. C.G. felt, therefore, that the outlook was bad.

He said she was not neurotic, she had the disease and the prognosis was grave.

Sure enough, she died.

In the case of a man, an American he was seeing, a similar situation evolved.

This man dreamt of his father dying, and that meant himself – ‘I and my Father are one’.

Then one day he complained of his throat – some pain or tightness. C.G. thought it could be his heart.

He examined the man’s heart himself and then sent him to a cardiac specialist who said there was nothing wrong. C.G. wasn’t satisfied; he said that as he had sent the patient the specialist had probably thought, ‘Oh, it’s one of those neurotics!’

He sent the patient back for a second consultation telling him that if the specialist found his heart was sound he should get him to state it in writing, and he did so.

On the way home after this consultation, with the letter in his pocket saying that there was nothing wrong with him, the man fell dead.

He had an aortic aneurysm and the specialist had missed it.

Yesterday C.G. spoke of the Oedipus complex, that Freud had misunderstood it.

Oedipus did not know who it was when he killed his father; he was just a man he met.

This whole dogma was built on a misunderstanding.

It had been snowing in the night and the sun was shining this morning when we went for a walk, but it was cold.

C.G. wore his fur cap.

And then the snow came on again.

This afternoon we had five students at the Jung’s house.

They came, at their request, to discuss case material with me.

Before the meeting C.G. met them in his library and chatted for a few moments.

Then we gathered for the discussion and Mrs. Jung came in and joined the group.

Shortly after, C.G. came in also.

So I found myself conducting a seminar with, as audience, C.G., his wife, and five students.

C.G. did not remain throughout but left after half an hour having contributed to the discussion about my patient’s pictures.

At dinner we talked of it all and of other cases.

Of one patient he said, ‘Let him alone and see what the unconscious has to say,’ adding, ‘Often I’ve been very glad that I haven’t acted as the saviour.’

18th January 1952

Freudian psychology is neurotic psychology.

It is based on patients, and patients like the idea that someone has a theory which explains their troubles.

You never think in somatic disease about its cause only, you have to deal with it in the present.

It’s no help just to search for causes and then blame the parents.

Why not have the parents as the patients?

Freud’s doctrine of resistance: he said of C.G. when he opposed him, ‘That’s only resistance.’

But it might be another point of view; if we persist on and on that it is only resistance people get exhausted and may give up their neurosis.

But the neurosis shows fight, it’s a good thing.

At times C.G. has had to re-create a neurosis in order to get vitality into the treatment – for instance when a patient is just flat and deflated.

I raised the question of projections.

He said, ‘Well, they always appear, and we must expect them.

The physician is in the situation and must be prepared to be hurt; if no disease,
He mentioned a patient who could not talk, and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you?

Why don’t you say what you’ve come to say?’

She asked for a mirror and looked at herself in it, and then added that before seeing him she always looked in the mirror in the waiting room.

She was dissociated and had to do this in order to know where she was.

When people talk continuously in a stream it is because they don’t want to come to the point, and he may just let them go on.

Once with such a patient he fell asleep and had a dream while she was talking; the patient did not notice, and he told her.

She remarked, ‘Oh, really!’ and at once resumed her monologue.

‘It’s amazing,’ said C.G., ‘how auto-erotic some people are.’

The psychology of the Jew is bound up with his intellectual capacities and the other side, his instincts, suffer.

He illustrated this comment with the story of a Rabbi and his pupils.

The Rabbi was teaching, and the pupils agreed with everything he said.

Then he stated, ‘A barking dog never bites,’ and they assented.

Soon after they came to a farm and the dog ran out barking at them.

At once the Rabbi gathered up his skirts and, with his students, ran into a wood. ‘But,’ they said, ‘you told us a barking dog never bites, why did you run away?’

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it’s quite true, but the dog might not know it.’

‘So if you have a theory you must disregard everything else!’ added C.G.

At breakfast he spoke of astrology (one of his daughters is interested in it), and of a German book in which he is criticised for giving support to horoscopes.

One author wrote to him saying it could not be proved, it was all nonsense; and he had replied, ‘But I have always known this.’

He went on, ‘It’s like “bringing owls to Athens”, what is the sense in telling me it can’t be proved?

Of course it can’t!

What I want to know is why it works, for it is amazing how useful it can be.

Like the I Ching, it’s all nonsense if you like; but then it can be absolutely relevant – how is that?

Naturally we can’t always prove things.

But there may be some other sort of truth; and it may be true on a basis we don’t know of.

So if we are reasonable we say we don’t know how it works; but it can certainly give astonishing insight into character.’

Doctors pay no attention to the mind, to he soul.

Nor does the Church – we have all got to be miserable sinners and get rid of ourselves and accept a dogma which will save us.

He spoke of psychology as a branch of natural science or medicine.

The physician for internal diseases must learn and know what happens when food goes into the stomach.

Likewise with the mind, it was precisely the same.

Hence his question at the eminar yesterday when discussing my patient’s pictures:

‘What would you expect the unconscious to be doing in these pictures, having heard the case history of dissociation?’

The answer: to produce a compensation, and that is what we find in the first picture and in the others.

There is bound to be a reaction.

We get patients to draw pictures in order to release something, to let us see what is going on, what the unconscious is doing. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 77-93