Carl Jung has a Visit from a young Quaker

Carl Jung has a Visit from a young Quaker

A VISIT FROM A YOUNG QUAKER

Introduction: George H. Hogle, from Utah, went to see Jung at his Bollingen retreat during the summer of 1947.

He wrote up his recollection of the meeting for a memorial booklet prepared by the Analytical Psychology Club of San Francisco in 1961, and he later added more details of the conversation in a letter.

Following Jung’s advice, Hogle became an analysand of the psychotherapist Frances G. Wickes, in New York.

Previously, he had worked in Wall Street, and subsequently he earned an M.D. degree at Columbia-Presbyterian and underwent psychiatric and analytical training in London.

He is now clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, and a Jungian analyst.

While training for foreign relief work with the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia during 1946, I met several Quakers who were also interested in Jungian psychology.

George H. Hogle: I had recently discovered medicine and now was searching for some connection between psychology and religion.

The experience of trying to help heal the wounds of war in Germany a year later sharpened my search.

During the summer of 1947, while on holiday in Zurich, I telephoned Dr. Jung’s office on an impulse—here was the man who could give me the answers, I thought, not realizing it might take me several years.

His secretary informed me that he did not see people while on holiday at a hideout (Bollingen) at the other end of the lake, but since she was in touch with him she would ask him anyway.

To my delight and her surprise, the next day I was given an appointment.

After I had walked through the woods to what looked like a little fairy-tale castle by the side of the lake, the great wooden door was opened to my knock by the huge old hired man, smoking a pipe and with an ax in his hand.

In lame German I asked for Herr Doctor, and in idiomatic English he introduced himself—not the dignified professor I had expected.

As we stood on the beautiful shore, he put me somewhat at ease, chatting about building his hideaway.

My hesitance and inhibitions were replaced soon after by the conviction that here was a very fallible, rigid old man, as we got into an enormously heated argument about the international situation.

I had told him that I was working with the Quakers in Germany to rebuild the bridges of friendship between enemies and that the next big job, I felt, was already looming on the horizon; namely, to reach out across the Iron Curtain and make some kind of friendship with the Russians.

I felt that the Friends’ approach would lessen tensions and be an example of mutual brotherhood.

He snickered, or something like that, and said he would not advise it; it would be quite impossible to work with the Russians or reach them, you could not trust them, they had broken their agreements many times.

I replied, so had we, which was, of course, not mentioned in the Western press, and that somehow we needed to get beyond that.

But he simply was adamant.

Finally, he patted me on the shoulder and, with a big smile, said, "Well, we don’t have to agree about every- thing."

Having helped me realize he was quite human and that it was safe to show some feeling, he escorted me up to an elegant Swiss tea, which we shared with Emma Jung.

They inquired at length about the situation in Germany, no doubt the reason he was willing to see a non-German coming recently out of that country.

I knew nothing of the controversy regarding his questionable sympathies for the Germans, but certainly at \that time I got no impression that he had ever been warm in any way toward Nazism, rather that he only tried to understand what it all meant at a deeper level.

After tea, we were alone for about an hour, during which he dealt graciously and helpfully with my impossible inquiry as to what I should do with my life, knowing nothing about me and yet no doubt knowing much just by observing.

Instead of answering my questions he gave me other better questions to ask myself over the succeeding months.

I told him something of my belief that God is good and love, at which he inquired, "But do you think that God may also include hate and evil ?"

This rather shook me, but I explained his question to myself that he must be a Pantheist and that God includes all just as the individual self both the divine center and the shadow, that Satan must be another aspect of God. He encouraged me to go into psychology and gave me names of analysts, especially recommending Frances Wickes. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 168-170