The spirit of this time ~Carl Jung

If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say:

no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you.

Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary:

The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning.

Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations.

The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me.

He forced me down to the last and simplest things.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical.

He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.

But the supreme meaning is the path) the way and the bridge to what is to come.

That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning.

God is an image and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.

The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.

The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment.

The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?

The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows.

There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.

The supreme meaning is great and small it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.

The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness.

The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts.

The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image.

This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.

I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.

But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips.

The spirit of this time whispered to me:

"This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you."

But the spirit of the depths spoke to me:

"You are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?"

For the sake of my human weakness, the spirit of the depths gave me this word. Yet this word is also superfluous, since I do not speak it freely; but because I must. I speak because the spirit robs me of joy and life if I do not speak.

I am the serf who brings it and does not know what he carries in his hand. It would burn his hands if he did not place it where his master orders him to lay it.

The spirit of our time spoke to me and said: "What dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this?"

This was an awful temptation. I wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force me into this, and because I found nothing that I could grasp, I was near to making one up.

But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, I was thinking again about reasons and explanations.

But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said:

"To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers
among the scholars?"

But the spirit of this time stepped up to me and laid before me huge volumes which contained all my knowledge. Their pages were made of ore, and a steel stylus had engraved inexorable words in them, and he pointed to these inexorable words and spoke to me, and said: "What you speak, that is madness."

It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.

But the spirit of the depths stepped up to me and said:

"What you speak is. The greatness is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick, paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment."

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.

A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

After this, however, my humanity approached me and said:

"What solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! Reflect on the destruction of being and the streams of blood from the terrible sacrifice that the depths demand."

But the spirit of the depths said:

"No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the
world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly; I prepare you for solitude."

After this, my humanity remained silent. Something happened to my spirit, however, which I must call mercy:

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

The mercy which happened to me gave me belief hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs.

Thus it happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey; that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps.

I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.

This vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke:

"look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this." I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy.

From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands.

In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July; I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly; overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space.

All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen.

The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows:

I was in a remote English land. It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible.

I reached home quickly. In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. So I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng.

In reality; now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.

Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach your I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path therefore I / cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself. So live yourselves.

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us.

Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you.

Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way.

You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way. I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children.

Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community.

Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.

Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.

Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.

Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love.

Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos.

So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of What is to Come, Pages 229-231.

Carl Jung on The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Bardo Thodol, fitly named by its editor, Dr. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," caused a considerable stir in English-speaking countries at the time of its first appearance in 1927. It belongs to that class of writings which are not only of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, which also, because of their deep humanity and their still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman who is seeking to broaden his knowledge of life.

For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights. Unlike the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which always prompts one to say too much or too little, the Bardo Thodol offers one an intelligible philosophy addressed to human beings rather than to gods or primitive savages. Its philosophy contains the quintessence of Buddhist psychological criticism; and, as such, one can truly say that it is of an unexampled superiority. Not only the "wrathful" but also the "peaceful" are conceived as samsaric projections of the human psyche, an idea that seems all too obvious to the enlightened European, because it reminds him of his own banal simplifications.

But though the European can easily explain away these deities as projections, he would be quite incapable of positing them at the same time as real. The Bardo Thodol can do that, because, in certain of its most essential metaphysical premises, it has the enlightened as well as the unenlightened European at a disadvantage. The ever-present, unspoken assumption of the Bardo Thodol is the antinominal character of all metaphysical assertions, and also the idea of the qualitative difference of the various levels of consciousness and of the metaphysical realities conditioned by them.

The background of this unusual book is not the niggardly European "either-or," but a magnificently affirmative "both-and." This statement may appear objectionable to the Western philosopher, for the West loves clarity and unambiguity; consequently, one philosopher clings to the position, "God is," while another clings equally fervently to the negation, "God is not." What would these hostile brethren make of an assertion like the following:

Recognizing the voidness of thine own intellect to be Buddhahood, and knowing it at the same time to be thine own consciousness, thou shalt abide in the state of the divine mind of the Buddha.

Such an assertion is, I fear, as unwelcome to our Western philosophy as it is to our theology. The Bardo Thodol is in the highest degree psychological in its outlook; but, with us, philosophy and theology are still in the medieval, pre-psychological stage where only the assertions are listened to, explained, defended, criticized and disputed, while the authority that makes them has, by general consent, been deposed as outside the scope of discussion.

Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. To the Western mind, which compensates its well-known feelings of resentment by a slavish regard for "rational" explanations, this obvious truth seems all too obvious, or else it is seen as an inadmissible negation of metaphysical "truth." Whenever the Westerner hears the word "psychological," it always sounds to him like "only psychological" For him the "soul" is something pitifully small, unworthy, personal, subjective, and a lot more besides. He therefore prefers to use the word "mind" instead, though he likes to pretend at the same time that a statement which may in fact be very subjective indeed is made by the "mind," naturally by the "Universal Mind," or even-at a pinch-by the "Absolute" itself.

This rather ridiculous presumption is probably a compensation for the regrettable smallness of the soul. It almost seems as if Anatole France had uttered a truth which were valid for the whole Western world when, in his Penguin Island, Catherine d'Alexandrie offers this advice to God: "Donnez-leur une ame, mais une petite!

it is the psyche which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion; it posits the distinctions between metaphysical entities. Not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality.

With this great psychological truth the Bardo Thodol opens. The book is not a ceremonial of burial, but a set of instructions for the dead, a guide through the changing phenomena of the Bardo realm, that state of existence which continues for forty-nine days after death until the next incarnation. If we disregard for the moment the supratemporality of the soul which the East accepts as a self-evident fact we, as readers of the Bardo Thodol, shall be able to put ourselves without difficulty in the position of the dead man, and shall consider attentively the teaching set forth in the opening section, which is outlined in the quotation above. At this point, the following words are spoken, not presumptuously, but in a courteous manner.

O nobly born (so and so), listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.

This realization is the Dharmakaya state of perfect enlightenment; or, as we should express it in our own language, the creative ground of all metaphysical assertion is consciousness, as the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul. The "Voidness" is the state transcendent over all assertion and all predication. The fullness of its discriminative manifestations still lies latent in the soul.

The text continues:

Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light Buddha Amitabha.

The soul is assuredly not small, but the radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from a theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things. But if we can master ourselves far enough to refrain from our chief error of always wanting to do something with things and put them to practical use, we may perhaps succeed in learning an important lesson from these teachings, or at least in appreciating the greatness of the Bardo Thodol which vouchsafes to the dead man the ultimate and highest truth, that even the gods are the radiance and reflection of our own souls.

No sun is thereby eclipsed for the Oriental as it would be for the Christian, who would feel robbed of his God; on the contrary, his soul is the light of the Godhead, and the Godhead is the soul. The East can sustain this paradox better than the unfortunate Angelus Silesius, who even today would be psychologically far in advance of his time.

It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these "given" things, to wonder by whom they are "given." It is from this world of "given" things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation. We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the "giver" of all "given" things dwells within us.

This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it. Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called "knowledge of life" (Manda d'Hayye). Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something "given." A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as "given" by the very nature of the psyche. It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen.

Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances. That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal. And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond. Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries.

In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin. Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything "given."

Thus far the Bardo Thodol is, as Dr. Evans-Wentz also feels, an initiation process whose purpose it is to restore to the soul the divinity it lost at birth. Now it is a characteristic of Oriental religious literature that the teaching invariably begins with the most important item, with the ultimate and highest principles which, with us, would come last as for instance in Apuleius, where Lucius is worshipped as Helios only right at the end. Accordingly, in the Bardo Thodol, the initiation is a series of diminishing climaxes ending with rebirth in the womb. The only "initiation process" that is still alive and practiced today in the West is the analysis of the unconscious as used by doctors for therapeutic purposes.

This penetration into the ground layers of consciousness is a kind of rational maieutics in the Socratic sense, a bringing forth of psychic contents that are still germinal, subliminal, and as yet unborn. Originally, this therapy took the form of Freudian psychoanalysis and was mainly concerned with sexual fantasies. This is the realm that corresponds to the last and lowest region of the Bardo, known as the Sidpa Bardo, where the dead man, unable to profit by the teachings of the Chikhai and Chonyid Bardo, begins to fall a prey to sexual fantasies and is attracted by the vision of mating couples.

Eventually he is caught by a womb and born into the earthly world again. Meanwhile, as one might expect, the Oedipus complex starts functioning. If his karma destines him to be reborn as a man, he will fall in love with his mother-to-be and will find his father hateful and disgusting. Conversely, the future daughter will be highly attracted by her father-to-be and repelled by her mother. The European passes through this specifically Freudian domain when his unconscious contents are brought to light under analysis, but he goes in the reverse direction. He journeys back through the world of infantile-sexual fantasy to the womb.

It has even been suggested in psychoanalytical circles that the trauma par excellence is the birth-experience itself nay more, psychoanalysts even claim to have probed back to memories of intra-uterine origin. Here Western reason reaches its limit, unfortunately. I say "unfortunately/' because one rather wishes that Freudian psychoanalysis could have happily pursued these so-called intra-uterine experiences still further back. Had it succeeded in this bold undertaking, it would surely have come out beyond the Sidpa Bardo and penetrated from behind into the lower reaches of the Chonyid Bardo.

It is true that, with the equipment of our existing biological ideas, such a venture would not have been crowned with success; it would have needed a wholly different kind of philosophical preparation from that based on current scientific assumptions. But, had the journey back been consistently pursued, it would undoubtedly have led to the postulate of a pre-uterine existence, a true Bardo life, if only it had been possible to find at least some trace of an experiencing subject. As it was, the psychoanalysts never got beyond purely conjectural traces of intra-uterine experiences, and even the famous ' 'birth trauma" has remained such an obvious truism that it can no longer explain anything, any more than can the hypothesis that life is a disease with a bad prognosis because its outcome is always fatal. Freudian psychoanalysis, in all essential aspects, never went beyond the experiences of the Sidpa Bardo; that is, it was unable to extricate itself from sexual fantasies and similar "incompatible" tendencies which cause anxiety and other affective states.

Nevertheless, Freud's theory is the first attempt made by the West to investigate, as if from below, from the animal sphere of instinct, the psychic territory that corresponds in Tantric Lamaism to the Sidpa Bardo. A very justifiable fear of metaphysics prevented Freud from penetrating into the sphere of the "occult." In addition to this, the Sidpa state, if we are to accept the psychology of the Sidpa Bardo, is characterized by the fierce wind of karma, which whirls the dead man along until he comes to the "womb-door." In other words, the Sidpa state permits of no going back, because it is sealed off against the Chonyid state by an intense striving downwards, towards the animal sphere of instinct and physical rebirth.

That is to say, anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. It is therefore not possible for Freudian theory to reach anything except an essentially negative valuation of the unconscious. It is a "nothing but." At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As to what "mind" means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this "mind" is, to say the least of it, doubtful.

I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and personal. Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us to take one more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a hint of how we ought to read the Bardo Thodol that is, backwards. If, with the help of our Western science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the psychological character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make anything of the preceding Chonyid Bardo.

The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion that is to say, illusions which result from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view, karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supratemporality of the soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea. There are too many ifs and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect. Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we are understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word.

Psychic heredity does exist that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. It does no violence to the nature of these complex facts if natural science reduces them to what appear to be physical aspects (nuclear structures in cells, and so on). They are essential phenomena of life which express themselves, in the main, psychically, just as there are other inherited characteristics which express themselves, in the main, physiologically, on the physical level. Among these inherited psychic factors there is a special class which is not confined either to family or to race.

These are the universal dispositions of the mind, and they are to be understood as analogous to Plato's forms (eidola), in accordance with which the mind organizes its contents. One could also describe these forms as categories analogous to the logical categories which are always and everywhere present as the basic postulates of reason. Only, in the case of our "forms," we are not dealing with categories of reason but with categories of the imagination. As the products of imagination are always in essence visual, their forms must, from the outset, have the character of images and moreover of typical images, which is why, following St. Augustine, I call them "archetypes." Comparative religion and mythology are rich mines of archetypes, and so is the psychology of dreams and psychoses.

The astonishing parallelism between these images and the ideas they serve to express has frequently given rise to the wildest migration theories, although it would have been far more natural to think of the remarkable similarity of the human psyche at all times and in all places. Archetypal fantasy-forms are, in fact, reproduced spontaneously anytime and anywhere, without there being any conceivable trace of direct transmission. The original structural components of the psyche are of no less surprising a uniformity than are those of the visible body. The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual's life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms.

If the archetypes were not pre-existent in identical form everywhere, how could one explain the fact, postulated at almost every turn by the Bardo Thodol, that the dead do not know that they are dead, and that this assertion is to be met with just as often in the dreary, half-baked literature of European and American Spiritualism? Although we find the same assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-town medium. And a connection between Swedenborg and the Bardo Thodol is completely unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. It is significant, that ghosts all over the world have certain features in common.

I am naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis, though I have no wish to make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have termed the collective unconscious.

So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine, memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be born. (The Sidpa Bardo is the "Bardo of Seeking Rebirth.") Such a state, therefore, precludes any experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses categorically to be born back again into the world of consciousness. According to the teachings of the Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states, to reach the Dharma kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that he does not yield to his desire to follow the "dim lights."

This is as much as to say that the dead man must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it, and give up the supremacy of egohood, regarded by reason as sacrosanct. What this means in practice is complete capitulation to the objective powers of the psyche, with all that this entails; a kind of symbolical death, corresponding to the Judgment of the Dead in the Sidpa Bardo. It means the end of all conscious, rational, morally responsible conduct of life, and a voluntary surrender to what the Bardo Thodol calls "karmic illusion." Karmic illusion springs from belief in a visionary world of an extremely irrational nature, which neither accords with nor derives from our rational judgments but is the exclusive product of uninhibited imagination. It is sheer dream or "fantasy," and every well-meaning person will instantly caution us against it; nor indeed can one see at first sight what is the difference between fantasies of
this kind and the phantasmagoria of a lunatic. Very often only a slight abaissement du niveau mental is needed to unleash this world of illusion. The terror and darkness of this moment has its equivalent in the experiences described in the opening sections of the Sidpa Bardo. But the contents of this Bardo also reveal the archetypes, the karmic images which appear first in their terrifying form. The Chonyid state is equivalent to a deliberately induced psychosis.

One often hears and reads about the dangers of yoga, particularly of the ill-reputed Kundalini yoga. The deliberately induced psychotic state, which in certain unstable individuals might easily lead to a real psychosis, is a danger that needs to be taken very seriously indeed. These things really are dangerous and ought not to be meddled within our typically Western way. It is a meddling with fate, which strikes at the very roots of human existence and can let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed. These sufferings correspond to the hellish torments of the Chonyid state, described in the text as follows:

Then the Lord of Death will place round thy neck a rope and drag thee along; he will cut off thy head, tear out thy heart, pull out thy intestines, lick up thy brain, drink thy blood, eat thy flesh, and gnaw thy bones; but thou wilt be incapable of dying. Even when thy body is hacked to pieces, it will revive again. The repeated hacking will cause intense pain and torture.

it is a disintegration of the wholeness of the Bardo body, which is a kind of "subtle body" constituting the visible envelope of the psychic self in the after-death state. The psychological equivalent of this dismemberment is psychic dissociation. In its deleterious form it would be schizophrenia (split mind).

This most common of all mental illnesses consists essentially in a marked abaissement du niveau mental which abolishes the normal checks imposed by the conscious mind and thus gives unlimited scope to the play of the unconscious "dominants."

The transition, then, from the Sidpa state to the Chonyid state is a dangerous reversal of the aims and intentions of the conscious mind. It is a sacrifice of the ego's stability and a surrender to the extreme uncertainty of what must seem like a chaotic riot of phantasmal forms.

When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was "the true seat of anxiety," he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Fear of self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who strives for (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self the subhuman, or supra-human, world of psychic "dominants" from which the ego originally emancipated itself with enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory freedom.

This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find fulfillment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would appear to be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished, destroyed, or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this paradisal state of innocence to continue forever.

There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality. It is from this profound intuition, according to lamaist doctrine, that the Chonyid state derives its true meaning, which is why the Chonyid Bardo is entitled "The Bardo of the Experiencing of Reality."

The reality experienced in the Chonyid state is, as the last section of the corresponding Bardo teaches, the reality of thought. The "thought-forms" appear as realities, fantasy takes on real form, and the terrifying dream evoked by karma and played out by the unconscious "dominants" begins. The first to appear (if we read the text backwards) is the all-destroying God of Death, the epitome of all terrors; he is followed by the twenty-eight "power-holding" and sinister goddesses and the fifty-eight "blood-drinking" goddesses. In spite of their demonic aspect, which appears as a confusing chaos of terrifying attributes and monstrosities, a certain order is already discernible.

We find that there are companies of gods and goddesses who are arranged according to the four directions and are distinguished by typical mystic colors. It gradually becomes clearer that all these deities are organized into mandalas, or circles, containing a cross of the four colors. The colors are coordinated with the four aspects of wisdom:

(1) White = the light-path of the mirror-like wisdom;

(2) Yellow == the light-path of the wisdom of equality;


(3) Red = the light-path of the discriminative wisdom;

(4) Green = the light-path of the all-performing wisdom.

On a higher level of insight, the dead man knows that the real thought-forms all emanate from himself, and that the four light-paths of wisdom which appear before him are the radiations of his own psychic faculties. This takes us straight to the psychology of the lamaistic mandala, which I have already discussed in the book I brought out with the late Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower.

Continuing our ascent backwards through the region of the Chonyid Bardo, we come finally to the vision of the Four Great Ones: the green Amogha-Siddhi, the red Amitabha, the yellow Ratna-Sambhava, and the white Vajra-Sattva. The ascent ends with the effulgent blue light of the Dharmadhatu, the Buddha body, which glows in the midst of the mandala from the heart of Vairochana. With this final vision the karmic illusions cease; consciousness, weaned away from all form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the timeless, inchoate state of the Dharma kaya. Thus (reading backwards) the Chikhai state, which appeared at the moment of death, is reached.

I think these few hints will suffice to give the attentive reader some idea of the psychology of the Bardo Thodol. The book describes a way of initiation in reverse, which, unlike the eschatological expectations of Christianity, prepares the soul for a descent into physical being. The thoroughly intellectualistic and rationalistic worldly-mindedness of the European makes it advisable for us to reverse the sequence of the Bardo Thodol and to regard it as an account of Eastern initiation experiences, though one is perfectly free, if one chooses, to substitute Christian symbols for the gods of the Chonyid Bardo.

At any rate, the sequence of events as I have described it offers a close parallel to the phenomenology of the European unconscious when it is undergoing an "initiation process/' that is to say, when it is being analyzed. The transformation of the unconscious that occurs under analysis makes it the natural analogue of the religious initiation ceremonies, which do, however, differ in principle from the natural process in that they forestall the natural course of development and substitute for the spontaneous production of symbols a deliberately selected set of symbols prescribed by tradition. We can see this in the Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, or in the yoga meditations of the Buddhists and Tantrists.

The reversal of the order of the chapters, which I have suggested here as an aid to understanding, in no way accords with the original intention of the Bardo Thodol Nor is the psychological use we make of it anything but a secondary intention, though one that is possibly sanctioned by lamaist custom. The real purpose of this singular book is the attempt, which must seem very strange to the educated European of the twentieth century, to enlighten the dead on their journey through the regions of the Bardo. The Catholic Church is the only place in the world of the white man where any provision is made for the souls of the departed. Inside the Protestant camp, with its world affirming optimism, we only find a few mediumistic "rescue circles," whose main concern is to make the dead aware of the fact that they are dead.

But, generally speaking, we have nothing in the West that is in any way comparable to the Bardo Thodol, except for certain secret writings which are inaccessible to the wider public and to the ordinary scientist. According to tradition, the Bardo Thodol, too, seems to have been included among the "hidden" books, as Dr. Evans-Wentz makes clear in his Introduction.

As such, it forms a special chapter in the magical "cure of the soul" which extends even beyond death. This cult of the dead is rationally based on the belief in the supra-temporality of the soul, but its irrational basis is to be found in the psychological need of the living to do something for the departed.

This is an elementary need which forces itself upon even the most "enlightened" individuals when faced by the death of relatives and friends. That is why, enlightenment or no enlightenment, we still have all manner of ceremonies for the dead. If Lenin had to submit to being embalmed and put on show in a sumptuous mausoleum like an Egyptian pharaoh, we may be quite sure it was not because his followers believed in the resurrection of the body. Apart, however, from the Masses said for the soul in the Catholic Church, the provisions we make for the dead are rudimentary and on the lowest level, not because we cannot convince ourselves of the soul's immortality, but because we have rationalized the above-mentioned psychological need out of existence. We behave as if we did not have this need, and because we cannot believe in a life after death we prefer to do nothing about it. Simpler-minded people follow their own feelings, and, as in Italy, build themselves funeral monuments of gruesome beauty.

The Catholic Masses for the soul are on a level considerably above this, because they are expressly intended for the psychic welfare of the deceased and are not a mere gratification of lachrymose sentiments. But the highest application of spiritual effort on behalf of the departed is surely to be found in the instructions of the Bardo Thodol. They are so detailed and thoroughly adapted to the apparent changes in the dead man's condition that every serious-minded reader must ask himself whether these wise old lamas might not, after all, have caught a glimpse of the fourth dimension and twitched the veil from the greatest of life's secrets. Even if the truth should prove to be a disappointment, one almost feels tempted to concede at least some measure of reality to the vision of life in the Bardo. At any rate, it is unexpectedly original, if nothing else, to find the after-death state, of which our religious imagination has formed the most grandiose conceptions, painted in lurid colors as a terrifying dream-state of a progressively degenerative character.

The supreme vision comes not at the end of the Bardo, but right at the beginning, at the moment of death; what happens afterward is an ever deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate degradation of new physical birth. The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay.

Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal. But this eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of the labors and aspirations of earthly existence. This view is not only lofty it is manly and heroic.

The degenerative character of Bardo life is corroborated by the spiritualistic literature of the West, which again and again gives one a sickening impression of the utter inanity and banality of communications from the "spirit world." The scientific mind does not hesitate to explain these reports as emanations from the unconscious of the mediums and of those taking part in the séance, and even to extend this explanation to the description of the Hereafter given in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And it is an undeniable fact that the whole book is created out of the archetypal contents of the unconscious. Behind these there lie and in this our Western reason is quite right no physical or metaphysical realities, but "merely" the reality of psychic facts, the data of psychic experience. Now whether a thing is "given" subjectively or objectively, the fact remains that it is.

The Bardo Thodol says no more than this, for its five Dhyani-Buddhas are themselves no more than psychic data. That is just what the dead man has to recognize, if it has not already become clear to him during life that his own psychic self and the giver of all data are one and the same. The world of gods and spirits is truly "nothing but" the collective unconscious inside me. To turn this sentence round so that it reads "The collective unconscious is the world of gods and spirits outside me," no intellectual acrobatics are needed, but a whole human lifetime, perhaps even many lifetimes of increasing completeness. Notice that I do not say "of increasing perfection because those who are "perfect" make another kind of discovery altogether.

The Bardo Thodol began by being a "closed" book, and so it has remained, no matter what kind of commentaries may be written upon it. For it is a book that will only open itself to spiritual understanding, and this is a capacity which no man is born with, but which he can only acquire through special training and special experience. It is good that such to all intents and purposes "useless" books exist. They are meant for those "queer folk" who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of present-day "civilization.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Commentary Tibetan Book of the Dead; Pages 510-522.

Matter is an Hypothesis.~Carl Jung

Matter is an hypothesis. When you say "matter," you are really creating a symbol for something unknown,
which may just as well be "spirit" or anything else; it may even be God.~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 762

The spirit of this time ~Carl Jung

If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say:

no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you.

Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary:

The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning.

Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations.

The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me.

He forced me down to the last and simplest things.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical.

He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.

But the supreme meaning is the path) the way and the bridge to what is to come.

That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning.

God is an image and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.

The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.

The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment.

The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?

The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continued existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows.

There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.

The supreme meaning is great and small it is as wide as the space of the starry Heaven and as narrow as the cell of the living body.

The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness.

The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts.

The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image.

This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.

I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought, I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.

But the spirit of the depths caught up with me, and forced the bitter drink between my lips.

The spirit of this time whispered to me:

"This supreme meaning, this image of God, this melting together of the hot and the cold, that is you and only you."

But the spirit of the depths spoke to me:

"You are an image of the unending world, all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away live in you. If you did not possess all this, how could you know?"

For the sake of my human weakness, the spirit of the depths gave me this word. Yet this word is also superfluous, since I do not speak it freely; but because I must. I speak because the spirit robs me of joy and life if I do not speak.

I am the serf who brings it and does not know what he carries in his hand. It would burn his hands if he did not place it where his master orders him to lay it.

The spirit of our time spoke to me and said: "What dire urgency could be forcing you to speak all this?"

This was an awful temptation. I wanted to ponder what inner or outer bind could force me into this, and because I found nothing that I could grasp, I was near to making one up.

But with this the spirit of our time had almost brought it about that instead of speaking, I was thinking again about reasons and explanations.

But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said:

"To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers
among the scholars?"

But the spirit of this time stepped up to me and laid before me huge volumes which contained all my knowledge. Their pages were made of ore, and a steel stylus had engraved inexorable words in them, and he pointed to these inexorable words and spoke to me, and said: "What you speak, that is madness."

It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.

But the spirit of the depths stepped up to me and said:

"What you speak is. The greatness is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick, paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer? The sum of life decides in laughter and in worship, not your judgment."

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.

A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

After this, however, my humanity approached me and said:

"What solitude, what coldness of desolation you lay upon me when you speak such! Reflect on the destruction of being and the streams of blood from the terrible sacrifice that the depths demand."

But the spirit of the depths said:

"No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the
world of this time with iron, the call of the desert would break all chains. Truly; I prepare you for solitude."

After this, my humanity remained silent. Something happened to my spirit, however, which I must call mercy:

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

The mercy which happened to me gave me belief hope, and sufficient daring, not to resist further the spirit of the depths, but to utter his word. But before I could pull myself together to really do it, I needed a visible sign that would show me that the spirit of the depths in me was at the same time the ruler of the depths of world affairs.

Thus it happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey; that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps.

I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.

This vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke:

"look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this." I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy.

From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands.

In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July; I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly; overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space.

All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen.

The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows:

I was in a remote English land. It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible.

I reached home quickly. In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. So I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng.

In reality; now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.

Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach your I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path therefore I / cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself. So live yourselves.

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us.

Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you.

Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way.

You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way. I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children.

Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community.

Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.

Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.

Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.

Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love.

Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos.

So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of What is to Come, Pages 229-231.

Carl Jung's Letters to Sabina Spielrein

The letters of C. G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein (Translated from the German by Barbara Wharton)

Dr. C. G. Jung, Burghölzli-Zürich Lecturer in Psychiatry 20.6.08

My dear Miss Spielrein,

You have managed well and truly to grasp my unconscious with your sharp letter. Such a thing could only happen to me.

On Monday I am engaged all day with Dr. Jones.1 However, I am coming into town on Tuesday morning and would like to meet you at 11 o’clock at the steamer landing stage on the Bahnhofstrasse.

So that we can be alone and able to speak undisturbed, we’ll take a boat out on to the lake.

In the sunshine, and out on the open water, it will be easier to find a clear direction out of this turmoil of feelings.

With affectionate greetings from your friend.

Zürich, 30.6.08
My dear friend,

I must tell you briefly what a lovely impression I received of you today.

Your image has changed completely, and I want to tell you how very, very happy it makes me to be able to hope that there are people who are like me, people in whom living and thinking are one; good people who do not misuse the power of their mind to dream up fetters but rather to create freedoms.

As a result there awakens in me a feeling of beauty and freedom which has once more bathed the world and its objects in a fresh lustre.

You can’t believe how much it means to me to hope I can love someone whom I do not have to condemn, and who does not condemn herself either, to suffocate in the banality of habit.

How great would be my happiness to find that person in you, that ‘esprit fort’ who never descends into sentimentality, but whose essential and innermost prerequisite for life is her own freedom and independence.

I look forward to seeing you again on Friday.

With warmest greetings, your friend.

4.7.08
My dear friend,

What we discussed yesterday had a really releasing effect on me.

The very belief that there are people who behave as they think, and who think only good things, is a relief which is so great that it compensates for many disappointments.

Inwardly I feel calmer and more free.

I would very much like to speak to you again next week, before you go to Walensee.3

Or if you are going to Weesen soon,4 we could perhaps meet in Rapperswyl.

May I ask you to write and tell me when you are going to W?

Warmest greetings from your friend.

6.7.08
My Dear,

I found your letter yesterday evening on my return from Sch.

I have to go into town on Tuesday morning to the district prosecutor’s office, and could use this opportunity to meet you in the outer area of the Uto Quay at 10.30; from there you could come with me to the Burghölzli.

In any case I shall be walking along the lake shore as far as Zürichhorn from 10.30 onwards.

Unfortunately I have no time in the afternoon.

Affectionate greetings

22.7.08
My Dear,

Please do come to see me next Friday at 5.30. Unfortunately it is impossible for me to free a whole afternoon.

Last week I had to attend two weddings and the chief5 was spitting venom about it.

So I am deeply upset. I have to work endlessly.

Affectionate greetings and goodbye till Friday, your friend.

Dr C. G. Jung, Lecturer in Psychiatry Burghölzli-Zürich, 12.8.08

My dear friend,

Your letter gave me much pleasure and set my mind at rest. I was rather worried on account of your long silence.

I was afraid something had happened to you, or that somehow the devil had had a hand in it.

There are lovely things in your letter. I must admire your parents’ truly great broadmindedness.

For a mother, that is really a high achievement and one hardly to be expected.

Tell your mother that I admire her for that.

It will be easier for your father, for new outlooks and new life values come more readily to a man of ideas than to the natural conservatism of a woman.

As you say, everything is fine and good; I rejoice at your happiness.

This way your long desired and long feared stay in Russia will be easy.

With me everything is trembling like a volcano: one minute everything is golden, the next everything is grey.

Your letter came like a ray of sunshine through the clouds.6

But your mother is quite right: you should get better notepaper; you do know that I dislike the ‘botany tin’ style because of its lack of beauty. Even ugly clothes give me pain.

You have given that up now, thank God.7a

Don’t be angry with me for writing to you about such things again.

I want you to be beautiful both inwardly and outwardly, for such a thing alone is natural.

No one who is not inwardly defective in feeling can love what is ugly and tasteless, and you are certainly not that!

Your letter had a good effect on me; I realize how much more attached I am to you than I ever thought.

I happen to be terribly suspicious, and always think other people are trying to exploit and tyrannize me.

It is only with great difficulty that I can muster a belief in man’s natural goodness, which I so often proclaim.

That certainly does not apply to my feelings about you, however!

I often think that the happiness that I want to give other people is begrudged me, or is returned to me in the form of hidden hostility, which is what has so often happened to me!

All last week I was not really well, rather hysterical, and a convenient cold set in which sent me off to bed for a day.

There your letter had a very good effect on my mood, so that since then my energy has significantly increased.

How do you like being in your home country again? Are you going into the steppes? And what did your old nurse say to you? Was she pleased to see how
pretty you have become?

We’re reading here in the newspaper that cholera is rife in Rostov.

Don’t drink any unboiled water and don’t eat any salad; you must be careful with uncooked fruit too because of the bacilli.

At the moment one of my patients is living at no. 6 xxxstrasse; Miss xxx7b, a Polish woman. So be careful!

Recently I have had a great deal to do.

Last week two American professors were with me, one from New York, the president of the Lunacy Commission of New York State.8

In addition a doctor from the Tübingen psychiatric clinic has been with me for three weeks9 to get to know me, that is, my views and my methods.

On 23 August I am going on holiday.

It will be best if you continue to send your letters to the Burghölzli; someone will send them on to me from there.

I am urgently in need of a rest.

First I’m going for a week to the Toggenburg10 and will be walking with Riklin,11 then a further six days to Schaffhausen to my wife and child.

When I return from holiday Prof. Freud will be coming for a few days.12

On 28.9.1909 I have to go on military service for five weeks.

At present Prof. Bleuler is on holiday; so I have a lot to do, but I don’t always do it with

A suitable educational present for a five year old.’

Here the meaning seems to be ‘parsimonious’, ‘useful’ in a negative sense, ‘merely functional’.pleasure.

I haven’t got round to any scientific work at all recently. I hope that will improve in the winter.

Write to me again soon, so that I can see that you are happy and at peace.

I received the money safely.

Thank you!

With an affectionate kiss from your friend.

2.9.08
My Dear,

I like the small photograph best. You look your best in that one. So I will keep it, with many thanks.

In the meantime you will probably have received my last letter.

The holidays were not favourable for long letters.

One has literally to steal time from oneself to write.

Your detailed descriptions of your life delighted me very much.

You write in a truly Russian way.

I’ve now finished my tour in the mountains13 and had glorious weather for it.

Now the weather has turned really bad so that I’m having to postpone my planned bicycle trip from one day to the next.

Don’t stay too long in Russia, avoid everything mentally taxing, so that you can return to your studies with fresh energy.

With warmest greetings from your friend.

Brugg, 28.9.08
Dear friend,

You can see from my mistake14 that I often think of you.

You will perhaps have thought of this or that reason for the fact that I have not written to you again for so long.

However, you already know the reason: Prof. Freud was here for quite a long time.15

At this meeting I really had an opportunity for the first time to see this great man in my world, out of his own milieu, and thus to understand him much more deeply than before.

He is truly a great and good man who, by virtue of his wonderful knowledge of humankind and his experience of life, sees incomparably further than I do.

You are right on that point.

If I have previously only admired this man from a distance, now I have really come to love him.

You will understand that I used the time with Freud to good effect.

I clarified many areas for myself. In brief, it did me good.

At present I am on military service in Brugg for five weeks, that is, I am on service until 31 October.

My address is still Burghölzli, however, for I shall be staying in Brugg only a few days; later we are going to French-speaking Switzerland where the new fortifications are being built.

I am hoping to have a thorough rest.

How are you? Are you living a peaceful life? What are you thinking about your future? I often worry about you now because of […]

4.12.08
My Dear,

I regret so much; I regret my weakness and curse the fate that is threatening me.

I fear for my work, for my life’s task, for all the lofty perspectives that are being revealed to me by this new Weltanschauung as it evolves.

How shall I, with my sensitive soul, free myself from all these questions?

You will laugh when I tell you that recently earlier and earlier childhood memories have been surfacing, from a time (3–4th year) when I often hurt myself badly, and when, for example, I was once only just rescued from certain death by a maid.16

My mind is torn to its very depths.

I, who had to be a tower of strength for many weak people, am the weakest of all.

Will you forgive me for being as I am?

For offending you by being like this, and forgetting my duties as a doctor towards you?

Will you understand that I am one of the weakest and most unstable of human beings?

And will you never take revenge on me for that, either in words, or in thoughts or feelings?

I am looking for someone who understands how to love, without punishing the other person, imprisoning him or sucking him dry; I am seeking this as yet unrealized person who will manage to separate love from social advantage and disadvantage, so that love may always be an end in itself, and not just a means to an end.

It is my misfortune that I cannot live without the joy of love, of tempestuous, ever-changing love.

This daemon stands as an unholy contradiction to my compassion and my sensitivity.

When love for a woman awakens within me, the first thing I feel is regret, pity for the poor woman who dreams of eternal faithfulness and other impossibilities, nd is destined for a painful awakening out of all these dreams.

Therefore if one is already married it is better to engage in this lie and do penance for it immediately than to repeat the experiment again and again, lying repeatedly, and repeatedly disappointing.17

What on earth is to be done for the best?

I do not know and dare not say, because I do not know what you will make of my words and feelings.

Since the last upset I have completely lost my sense of security with regard to you. That weighs heavily on me.

You must clear up this uncertainty once and for all. I should like to talk to you again at greater length.

For example, I could speak with you next Tuesday morning between 9.15 and 12.00.

Since you are perhaps less inhibited in your apartment, I am willing to come to you.

Should Tuesday morning not suit you, write and tell me, otherwise I will come in the hope of getting some clarity.

I should like definite assurances so that my mind can be at rest over your intentions.

Otherwise my work suffers, and that seems to me more important than the passing problems and sufferings of the present.

Give me back now something of the love and patience and unselfishness which I was able to give you at the time of your illness. Now I am ill […]

[Probably 1908]
Dear friend,

Tomorrow, Thursday, I shall be going to the Theater landing-stage by boat around 6.40. Since I have no idea where Scheuchzerstrasse is, I would be grateful if you would come with me.

Will you wait for me at the Bellevue, that is at the tram-stop, at this time?

Then we’ll go straight there by tram or on foot, whichever suits you better.

I hope the book reached you safely.

With best wishes.

[Probably 1908]
My Dear,

Unfortunately I am busy on Wednesday until 7 o’clock.

However, I am free at 6 o’clock on Thursday and on Friday from 5.30 onwards.

If you send me no further word, I shall assume you will come on Friday.

Affectionate greetings from your friend.

Küssnach b/Zürich, 12.9.10.

Dear friend,

Although I have not yet finished your paper18 I have already found passages in it which filled me with delight.

The great trouble you took with the case has been richly rewarded by the outcome.

I am somewhat critical of the presentation, in that your demands on the reader’s attention and understanding are too high. The wine symbolism is thoroughly historical/mythical.

On that point I must decidedly congratulate you. Laokoon is marvellous.

You know the Laokoon monument, don’t you? Deeply symbolic.

Until the next time, affectionate greetings and good wishes!

Your friend.

[Probably 9.1910]
My Dear,

Sincere thanks on behalf of my wife for the flowers. That was very sweet of you.19

Affectionate greetings.

[Probably 9/10.1910]
Dear friend,

I too have just recovered from a very severe attack of influenza.

I was in bed from last Thursday. I am better now, but everything is an effort.

Today I went back to work, but am still quite exhausted.

Nevertheless I do have the strength to wish you a good recovery from the bottom of my heart.

I am free on Thursday morning 9–11. On Friday 9–12 I have appointments which I cannot change. On Saturday 9–11 I am free again.

Please let me know whether you will be coming on Thursday or on Saturday.

With affectionate greetings and best wishes for your recovery,

yours.

[Probably December 1910]
Dear friend,

Last Wednesday of course it did not cross my mind that you were already doing examinations20 and so I waited for you.

When you did not come I thought you were well and truly caught up with examination nerves.

So I will expect you next Wednesday at 9.00.

With affectionate greetings, your friend.

[Probably July 1911]
My Dear,

Your detailed letter interested me very much, and I am very, very sorry that you have happened on an old swine who cannot distinguish between human and animal.

That is too bad. One can see what stops men understanding psychoanalysis.

Please get in touch with Dr Seif,21 the nerve specialist. 21/1 Franz Josephstrasse, Munich.

He is the president of the psychoanalytic society there.

There you will be better received. Forgive me for keeping you waiting for my reply.

At the moment everything has had to wait as I had to finish writing an article by the end of June.22

I hope you will have a good reception there.

By the same post you will receive separately the corrections of your paper,23 which you can keep.

The corrections have already been taken care of. I am excited about your new project.24

With affectionate greetings, yours very sincerely,

Jung.

Dr C. G. Jung, Küsnach-Zürich Lecturer in Psychiatry Seestrasse 1003 8.8.11

My Dear,

I have unfortunately not yet been able to finish reading your comprehensive study25 as the presence of Dr Seif, who is currently staying with me, has kept me from it.

Nevertheless I have read so far with care that I can permit myself a provisional judgement.

I am surprised at the abundance of excellent thoughts which anticipate various ideas of my own.

But it is good that others see things the same way as I do.

Your thinking is bold, far-reaching, and philosophical.26

Hence the Jahrbuch will hardly be the right place for its publication.

Either you can make a small independent book of it, or we could try to include your work in Freud’s ‘Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde’ (journals on applied psychology).

That would be the right place.27

Various points of detail still need to be filled out.

I hope grandfather Freud will have the same joy as I have over this fruit of your spirit.

Your stay in Munich does now seem to have been satisfactory in every respect.

Meanwhile I congratulate you most heartily on your paper.

With affectionate greetings,

yours very sincerely,

Dr. Jung.

Tomorrow morning I am going away for three weeks.28 My address remains Küsnach.

Dr. C.G. Jung [Probably 17/18.8.1911] Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zurich, Seestrasse 1003

My Dear,

I can answer you only briefly as I am just at home between two trains and am going away again immediately.

Please get in touch with Dr. Seif regarding the invitation to the Congress.

I have sent the provisional programmes first to the sections.

You should receive your invitation after Sep.1.

Once again you are grumbling too soon.

Regarding accommodation apply to Dr K. Abraham,30 Rankestrasse 24, Berlin W.

Best wishes for your sea-voyage.

Your friend.


Hotel Erbprinz, Weimar 1911 [Probably 21/22.9]

My Dear,

The enormous workload which running the Congress has meant must give you a good idea why I have not replied until today.

I see your situation clearly.

I can hardly think that there is anything organically wrong with your foot, for the psychological situation is too powerfully and traumatically significant.

Something in you was searching for a reason not to go to Weimar.

In other words, you wanted to come with a certain phantasy/ wish which you had to repress.

You ought to have come in spite of that, however, for life demands sacrifices and self-denial, the subordination of stubbornness and pride to the rules of devoted love.

Only when you seek the happiness of the other, will your own happiness be granted. I allow myself to write to you so frankly and to admonish you because, after long and solitary reflection,
I have eliminated from my heart all the bitterness against you which it still harboured.

To be sure, this bitterness did not come from your work, – for there is nothing in that which would be personally disagreeable to me – but from earlier, from all the inner anguish I experienced because of you – and which you experienced because of me.

I truly wish you happiness from my heart, and it is with this feeling that I want to think of you.

But never forget that under no circumstances must you retreat from an immediate goal which your heart considers good and reasonable.

Each time that will mean a sacrifice of selfishness, of pride and of stubbornness, and it will seem to you as if you were losing yourself in the process … Only in the course of this mysterious self-sacrifice
you will gain yourself in a new and more beautiful form and you will also as a result become a blessing and a source of happiness for other people.

So you should not have given up attending the Congress under any circumstances; you made a grave error by doing so for which you immediately punished yourself.

You ought to have sacrificed yourself.

Your dissertations31 were distributed as far as was possible.

Get well again now! Freud will certainly accept you.

He has spoken several times of your dissertation, the best indication that it has made an impression on him.

You do not need my recommendation.32

Approach him as a great master and rabbi, then all will be well.

With affectionate greetings and wishes,

yours.


Dr. med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zurich [Probably beginning November 1911]

My Dear,

In these circumstances I must send you the paper33 back immediately; I am sorry about it, since I have not finished it yet.

In fact I was detailed to an exercise in the mountains34 so that I lost all the time I had set aside for your work.

Please send me back your paper immediately, when you have made the necessary use of it.

I must certainly study it thoroughly, for there are so many important thoughts in it; I must be completely quiet in order to understand it
all properly.

Until now I have not had a moment’s peace.

My dear, you are not to think that I retain any hard feelings towards you.

I’m just waiting for a few days’ peace in order to read your work again at one sitting.

If I am disturbed once more in the middle of it, I shall never reach a clear and conclusive understanding.

I beg your forgiveness. Your work is on its way to you registered as a valuable package35 by immediate post.

Your news from Vienna is interesting – and distressing. Stekel36 is enraptured and unscientific. Klages must have been impressed.37

Why does he go to Vienna? Apart from Freud, Rank38 and Sachs39 there is little there that is serious.

Please don’t betray me.

Your ever devoted friend.

Dr C. G. Jung Küsnach-Zürich Lecturer in Psychiatry Seestrasse 1003 13.11.11

My Dear,

At last I can send you the manuscript.

When I went to send you the letter I suddenly realized that I did not have your address. (It was not on your last letter.) I received all your earlier letters while I was on military service.40

Let me just say, by the way, that you can safely send your letters to me with the usual postage.

I would ask you again to send me the paper back straight away.

In Part 2 of my work (have I sent you an offprint of the first part?) I have made frequent references to your ideas.41

I should like to do so with your new paper too. So that we are in harmony.

With affectionate greetings and apologies, your very devoted friend.

Dr med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich 24.11.11

My Dear,

Your news is very valuable to me.

You partly confirm what I suspected.

On the question of phylogenetic reproductions Freud will soon come over to my side, even if on certain more general philosophical questions he stands his ground.

The difference between Vienna and Zürich will be clearly brought to light in Part 2, where I develop a genetic theory of libido.42

I am rather worried about how Freud will take the corrections I am introducing into the theory of sexuality.

The more I write in my own style, the greater becomes the danger of misunderstandings, for inwardly I am quite alien to the spirit of the Viennese school, though not to the spirit of Freud.

If you will not betray me, I will show you a little snapshot: it reveals Freud in a spontaneous act which suggests the underlying cause of the fact that he has not gathered the best people around him in Vienna: A person (whom I also know) came to Freud.

He had had endless affairs with women and was also neurotic.

Freud said of him: ‘X.Y. is interesting theoretically because he is really not entitled to have a neurosis.’ (Because he is living out his sexual instincts as is well known.)

There is an unspoken expectation that it is a fact that neurosis comes only from repressed sexuality.

From this expectation Stekel was born. But here in Zürich we think that neurosis is a conflict, however one lives it out.

You understand that this expression of opinion on Freud’s part was a completely momentary act, which he would never raise to the level of theory: he is much too conscientious in his research for that.

But the remark indicates a certain latent expectation.

The fact that you think that you are not working along the right lines if I am not recognized means that you are still too closely bound up with me: you cannot judge my value or lack of value accurately.

You do not yet see who I am, in the sense that you are not yet able to free your intuition from your personal prejudice.

You will be set free only when you have completely cleansed your judgement.

If you need to ask me anything about that, I will give you an answer.

I look forward to receiving your paper.

With best wishes, your friend.

Dr C. G. Jung Küsnach-Zürich Lecturer in Psychiatry Seestr. 1003 11.12.1911

My Dear,

Don’t be so downcast.

Your paper will go into the Jahrbuch if Prof. Freud wishes it.43

I heartily congratulate you on your success.

The Jahrbuch for the second half of 1911, which went to print in the autumn, is complete.

You will go to print in January, in the first issue of the 1912 edition.

There you will appear in company with Frl. Grebelskaja’s dissertation44 and with my Part 2,45 which I was unable to finish in time for the 1911 second issue.

In addition, a very nice paper by Dr Nelken will be published.46 I hope that the proofs will reach you promptly in February.

Have you met Silberer?47 What is he like?

His papers are good. If only Steckel would not imagine himself to be a genius.

His book on
the language of dreams48 is astonishing as far as the dream material he brings.

The theoretical part however is thoroughly weak.

Moreover I am in an embarrassing position, as I was to bring out a discussion of it in the Jahrbuch but Freud does not want anything to do with it.

As soon as I have finished correcting the last paper for the Jahrbuch, which will soon be the case, you will be next.

With best wishes and greetings, your devoted friend.

Freud has told me some very good things about you.

Dr C. G. Jung Küsnach-Zürich Lecturer in Psychiatry Seestr. 1003 23.12.11

My Dear,

According to your wish, the work was despatched to you a short time ago as a registered packet. Deadline is 31 Jan.1912.

I would prefer it if you could prepare the paper so that it is ready for printing.

Then give it first to Prof. Freud so that he can give his opinion of it.

After that I will look through it and do any corrections that are necessary.

With regard to your lecture I will let you have my advice in print: ask Rank for my lectures at Clark University;49 there you will find how I basically set things out.

The word association forms will be sent to you shortly. Prof. Freud has spoken very flatteringly of you in his letters.50

I congratulate you on this success, although there are other successes which I would wish for ou much more.

With best wishes for the winter solstice, your devoted friend.

Dr med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich 18.3.12

My Dear,

I did not know that Frl. Grebelskaja is in such difficult circumstances.

She telephoned me recently to say that she was going away in a few days.

I had to give her a certificate showing that her work is at the printers.51

Her work is in press.

Unfortunately I do not have the power to hurry the typesetter.

As I read your paper I find uncanny parallels with my own new work appearing in it which I did not suspect, for until then I had always read your title incorrectly: ‘distinction’ instead of ‘destruction’, and was puzzled about it.

Now I find considerable parallels which show the results one gets if one goes on thinking logically and independently.

Your work will be published before mine in the Jahrbuch.

Your destruction wish is certainly correct. We desire not only the ascent but also the descent and the end.

This thought is developed beautifully by Nietzsche and I say a lot about it too. (Stekel says that a death wish appears in all (?) dreams too.

Certainly this wish is much more frequent than we think.) Stekel however has no overall conception.

He is merely an interpreter. Do you not want to read his book? You would certainly enjoy it enormously!52

As a matter of fact I was involved in the formulation of the lay association in Zürich. Until now it has been a thriving concern.

I received your postscript.

With best wishes,

your friend.

P.S. With regard to the word ‘complex’, this word is found in an old psychological work of Bleuler in the sense of a ‘mass of images, feelings’ etc. which, for example, constitute the ‘I’. That definition however has nothing in common with the present meaning of the concept which I have introduced into psychology. (cf. Diagnostic Association Studies and Psychology of Dem. Praec.).54

Dr. med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich 25.3.12

My Dear,

You are upsetting yourself unnecessarily again.

When I said there were ‘uncanny’ similarities, you again took that much too literally.

I was intending it much more as a compliment to you.

Your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours.55

The death tendency or death wish was clear to you before it was to me, understandably!

I am progressing only slowly with the manuscript since I am correcting style and expression at the same time.

I express myself so differently from you in my work that no one could imagine that you had borrowed in any way from me.

There is no question of it at all.

With regard to the hidden interpenetration of thought, there are more lofty questions here which do not come into consideration in public life and of which, in any case, we know too little to be able to reckon seriously with them.

Perhaps I borrowed from you too; certainly I have unwittingly absorbed a part of your soul, as you doubtless have of mine.

What matters is what each of us has made of it. And you have made something good. I am glad that you are representing me in Vienna.

The new work will certainly be misunderstood.

I hope you will be able to represent my new ideas.

With affectionate greetings, your friend.

Dr Med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse
Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich
11.4.13

Dear friend,

Owing to a lack of material, I have never worked on the associations of morphine addicts. Have you much material of this kind?

One case alone would hardly be typical.

I have just returned again from America.56

It is for that reason that I am rather late answering your letter. I had no idea you were ill and am glad to hear that you have recovered.57

I have not heard of Frl. Aptekmann.58

I am pleased to hear that Krauss59 has found something good in my association studies.

I cannot of course wait for the recognition of these men, but have meanwhile progressed further with the work.

I have left your long letter on the subject of my work unanswered, for I felt it would have needed half a book to reply to it.

I could not manage that as I was then quite exhausted.

So I did not reply at all. I was completely discouraged at that time because everyone was attacking me,60 and in addition I was certain that Freud would never understand me and would break off his personal relationship with me.

He wants to give me love, while I want understanding.

I want to be a friend on an equal footing, while he wants to have me as a son.61

For that reason he ascribes to a complex everything I do which does not fit the framework of his teaching.

That is how he sees it, but I never recognize it.

At the meeting in Munich I saw clearly that Freud is lost to me.62

My inner struggles at that time absorbed me so much that I did not answer your letter.

It is not that I am not open to criticism – but I know only too well that it is too extensive a matter for me to be able to explain it to you in detail.

Too much has changed in me since I last saw you.

I wish you all the best.

I remain ever your friend.

Dr. Med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in Psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich 24.8.13

Dear friend,

I read your letter with much interest and am glad to know how things are with you.63

I wish you much happiness from the bottom of my heart.

If you really love your child then certainly everything will be well. And why should you not love your child?

Where work is concerned, we are always in need of more careful analyses of Dem. praec. However, that is something beyond your reach, at least for the present.

What would be useful would be the analysis of literary characters such as I did in my libido work with Hölderlin, Nietzsche, etc.

But it’s difficult!

A complete bibliography of the psychoanalytic literature from 1909 onwards.

For that the following would have to be researched:

Centralblatt for psychoanalysis.
International journal for medical psychoanalysis.
Jahrbuch.
Imago.
Journal for sexual science.
Journal of abnormal psychology and various other English and American
periodicals.
English and American papers.
L’Encéphale.
Archives of neurology.
Journal for neurology and psychiatry.
Archive for general psychology.
Psychotherapia (Russian).
Psiche (Italian).

It would be necessary to write to Holland, and also to various authors in different countries.

Journal for medical psychology and psychotherapy.

A huge task to collect all this material!

I would be glad if someone could do that carefully.

With best wishes and greetings, yours sincerely,

Jung.

[Probably end Dec. 1913]

I congratulate you most warmly on the happy event!

DR. MED. C. G. JUNG KÜSNACHT/ZÜRICH

Private letter to Dr S. Spielrein-Scheftel 2 bis, rue St. Léger. Genève, Chez Mme Roche

Dr. med. C. G. Jung LL.D 1003 Seestrasse Lecturer in psychiatry Küsnach-Zürich 15.4.1465

Dear friend,

Very many thanks for your friendly letter.

Your fine ideas on ethics may be sure of general applause.66

With regard to my resignation as editor of the Jahrbuch,67 it is the result of so many painful experiences that I do not wish to speak of it.

From the tone of the attacks that have been directed at me you may see what kind of tendencies are at work against me.

The comparison with Stekel is a perfidious invention on the injustice of which the publisher Deuticke68 can be most informative.

I am pleased that your little daughter is well.

Long may she continue to thrive.

I wish your work every success.

The tone of your letter touched me to the quick, for I can see that you too despise me.

Respect for the human personality and its motives should not be undermined by psychoanalysis.

Because I fight for that I suffer much.

Yours sincerely,

Jung.

Dr med. C. G. Jung LL.D 228 Seestrasse Küsnacht-Zürich 31.5.16

Dear doctor,

The inductive method draws up laws based on a comparison of a series of facts.

The deductive method infers the relationship of a fact to a general law.

The introvert uses both methods.

The extravert does so too, in so far as he can think.

In that respect he is lacking, for his principle function is feeling, not thinking.

He thinks according to the feeling principle, the introvert feels according to the thinking principle.

It is very gratifying to know what a kind welcome my writings receive with you.

With collegial greetings,

Dr. Jung.

Internment of prisoners of war in Switzerland The commandant of the English region 13 Sept. 1917

Dear doctor,

Unfortunately it is hardly possible for me to select a suitable case for you as I have a great deal to do.

Your dream:

I am still a figure in your unconscious, that is, I represent a dimension in your unconscious which keeps hieroglyphs and such like at your disposal, that is, clearly symbolic expressions which you have to decipher.

You know perhaps that I distinguish a personal unconscious (the domain of the repressed personal contents) from an absolute or ‘collective’ unconscious.

The latter contains the primal images, that is, the developmental and historical deposits. The hieroglyphs are symbols of those.

The new development that will come announces itself in an old language, in symbolic signs.

I must frankly urge you to observe this language of signs in yourself.

You can derive a special insight from that, which can be of universal value, if the deciphering is successful!

I have long been occupied with this question of the psychic contents of the collective and have found so many interesting things that they have kept me awake at night.

With best wishes,

Dr. Jung.

Dr. C. G. Jung 228 Seestrasse Küsnach-Zürich

Dear doctor,

With your hieroglyphs we are dealing with phylogenetic engrams of an historical symbolic nature.

As it is a matter not of intellectual, but of irrational, symbolic dimensions, your intellect suppresses and devalues these disturbing engrams which now try to reproduce themselves in compensation for a too
one-sided intellectual attitude.

You instinctively suspect (without knowing it?) these parts of your unconscious.

I cannot tell you any more about it in an intellectual sense.

I could only express myself irrationally and symbolically on the subject, and for that you would punish me with disdain because that wisdom would appear to you as ridiculous.

Thus in your dream you fall victim to German technical intellectualism and its brutal power, and you must cry in vain for the sun, for the sun’s golden magic, the greenness of noon, and the scent of the earth.

With what contempt people have treated the libido work and intellectually torn it to shreds!

They have bombarded it intellectually, but it is nevertheless quite clear that a gothic cathedral and a library of old manuscripts are nothing in the face of the thoroughly decisive power of a 28-cm. shell.

Yes, my most respected lady, I have been slandered and mocked and criticized enough; that is why I am clinging to my runes and to all the pale skimpy little ideas at which I hinted in my libido work until people realize that they are sitting in a prison without air and without light – in a prison which, however, is perfectly satisfactory while they can snatch a breath of fresh air daily in the yard and find the sun filtering through the blinds sufficient.

Now you really do want the sun and eternal beauty and the secret of the earth, you even demand it.

But I mistrust your arguments, as one mistrusts Germany’s pacifist ideas when it has been worshipping the god of war for years on end.

I will not hand over my secret to see it trampled under foot by those who do not understand.

A thick high wall has now been built round this garden, and I assure you that there is nothing behind it but those old familiar paltry ideas and ‘superficial allegories’ which were hinted at from a distance in the libido book.

You see, Freudian theory goes much deeper, right into the glands, it is the most profound statement that can ever be made about human psychology.

One cannot go any deeper than back to the mother’s body.

It is from there that the world is best explained.

Everything else is superficial and ‘unscientific’, a symbolic swindle built on repressed anal eroticism.

You just have to know that ultimately everything comes from the mother’s body, and that it is nothing but sexuality and its lamentable repression.

Everything else is nothing but that.

As a supporting hypothesis anti-semitism is worth recommending, and some more minor slanders.

I am sending you by the same post a short paper69 which is based on nothing and contains a string of arbitrary assertions which have arisen from a misunderstanding of Freud’s teaching.

With best wishes,

Dr. Jung.

30.11.17
Dear doctor,

Your comments [see Spielrein’s letter to Jung, 27 November 1917, in Carotenuto 1982, pp.50ff.] are quite correct from the point of view of the psychology of instincts.70

You are proceeding from the outset, in accordance with your type, on the view that there is only the instinct for the preservation of the species and for self-preservation, that is to say simply the instinct for the preservation of the species.

That is a biological supposition which has a certain average empirical truth.

With this assumption, however, you do violence to the psychology of the subject, that is, that psychology which is orientated more or less exclusively towards the ego (Adler!).71

It is inadmissible.

We cannot allow a psychology based on biology simply to cut the throat of a psychology of the ego.

An orientation towards the ego precludes an orientation towards instincts, and an orientation towards instincts precludes an orientation towards the ego.

A psychology of the ego has nothing at all to do with the self-preservation instinct for it is not a psychology of instincts but really a ‘will to power’.

You must read Adler or Nietzsche.

Nietzsche for example, according to Freud’s theory, would be nothing but repressed sexuality, whereas of course he is genuine.

Is there any poet or thinker at all whose creativity did not spring from repressed sexuality?

But the individuality of Nietzsche cannot be encompassed by contrasting him with, for example, Goethe.

Thus Freud’s theory is to that extent altogether incapable of understanding the subject. In fact it is suitable only for objects, not for active subjects.

It is merely ‘empirical’, finding only moving objects, but no living subjects.

It was this latter aspect that Adler perceived, but only this.72

With friendly greetings, yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung.

Dr C. G. Jung 228 Seestrasse
Küsnach-Zürich
18.12.17

Dear doctor,

You have grasped the elements of type theory except for the problem of feeling73 [see Spielrein’s letters to Jung dated 3 December, 4 December & 15 December 1917 in Carotenuto ibid., pp.53ff.].

You define feelings one-sidedly and arbitrarily as something conscious.

If there are unconscious thoughts, there are also unconscious feelings (‘so to speak!’).

The feelings of the introvert are infantile/archaic/symbolic, because they are mainly of an unconscious nature.

The extravert’s own thoughts are similar.

You are an intuitive extravert type.

Your conception of the unconscious seems arbitrary to me.

It is not clear how you can practically distinguish between a side-conscious, a preconscious, a subconscious and an unconscious.

Where do dreams come from?

Freud recognizes the psychology of the ego in the same way as Adler recognizes sexuality, but that is all. Adler is not to be ranked alongside Freud, otherwise you do violence to both.

With friendly greetings,

yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung.


Dr. C. G. Jung 228 Seestrasse Küsnach-Zürich 28.12.17

Dear doctor,

You are perceiving the unconscious as wishes and thoughts that are not capable of consciousness [see Spielrein’s letters to Jung dated 20 & 21 December 1917, in Carotenuto ibid., pp.62ff.].

But if these wishes are not capable of consciousness, how do you know about them?

Moreover there are very many people to whom these wishes are by no means unconscious. In certain circumstances they are, like the rest, just below the surface.

Freud’s unconscious, as you correctly state, consists of the ‘repressed’: when the censorship is lifted, that is, when the repression is analysed, is there no longer an unconscious?

Just a subconscious? I would make different distinctions:

1. a personal unconscious,
consisting of repressed personal material, and

2. a collective unconscious, consisting of common archaic residues and recent combinations of these which represent ‘possible’ future contents of consciousness.

As long as a personal censorship operates, the principles of repression psychology are valid.

If the censorship is lifted, however, the energy valency of the psychic contents comes into play.

Then the unconscious contents rise to the vicinity of consciousness in accordance with their energy valency.

The right interpretation (analytical or constructive, cf. The Content of the Psychoses, 2nd Edit.)75 of a symbol is the one that brings out the greatest value for our life (a pragmatic view).

Theoretically the symbol has debased as well as elevated meaning.

For example, the Last Supper can be interpreted as a union in the spirit of Christ, and as archaic cannibalism (cf. Silberer: Probl. Der Mystik [The Problem of Mysticism]).76

As long as personal repressions continue, so that we are not aware of our incompatible wishes, we must continue to analyse in a

What I designate as the collective unconscious is completely overlooked by Freud, that is, he interprets it as wholly personal, as merely repressed contents which could be got out of the way by understanding.

Thus he remains completely rationalistic and biological and misses a quite essential part of real psychology.

For that reason he conceives of morals as coming from outside the person, whereas human morality springs from an inner urge.

Moreover he has never understood what is meant by a split in the libido itself.

There is no excuse for interpreting the opposition of a – z in such a way that a is nothing other than the negation of z. a is something in and for itself, and so is z. Libido as energy always assumes the opposite.

Without an opposition (high and low) there is no energy at all, and so every energetic process (and that includes the dynamism of the psychic) assumes the a priori existence of the opposites and is itself bipolar because it immediately brings with it two different states.

Energy always strives to cancel itself out, and at the same time presses to manifest itself.

But a manifestation is at the same time its own means of cancelling itself.

Your conception of symbol formation seems correct to me, although there are at times conscious influences in it.

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung.

Dr. C. G. Jung 228 Seestrasse Küsnach-Zürich 21.1.18

Dear doctor,

You are touching on something which belongs to the foundations of our culture [see Spielrein’s letters to Jung of 6 January, 7 January, & 19 January 1918, in Carotenuto ibid., pp.68ff.].

I find it very understandable that you cannot understand me, in spite of the fact that your dream is coming to your assistance.77

I am underlining all the passages in your letter where you are thinking concretely and, typically, misunderstanding the symbol.

Do not think that I am speaking against your music.

Perhaps you are more a musician than a doctor.

I don’t want to argue in any way against your becoming a musician.

But that question has nothing to do with the question of symbolism.

Your dream gives you the German as a representation of a person who acts in a concrete way and whose attitude is completely fixed on reality.

Your earlier Russian attitude is that of an inactive dreamer.

But with this later attitude a christification has taken place.

Thus you are sandwiched between the German and the Russian attitudes, between the real and the unreal.

That is precisely where the symbolic is found, as a common function of both.

You probably live the symbol to a large extent without being conscious of it.

For that reason your dreams think of bright spaces and green meadows.

In relation to this world you have to be real, either a musician, or a doctor, or a wife and mother.

But your task is not completed when you do that. Those are mere functions. You have not thereby become yourself.

You are something different from those functions.

You are always trying to drag the Siegfried symbol back into reality, whereas in fact it is the bridge to your individual development.

Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. That is individuation.

You are rejecting dreams and seeking action.

Then the dreams come and thwart your actions.

The dreams are a world, and the real is a world.

You have to stand between them and regulate the traffic in both worlds, just as Siegfried stands between the gods and men.

Do you understand that?

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung.

[Probably January 1918]
Dear doctor,

‘Nebbich’ as ‘too bad’, ‘on the left’ in a flippant tone is a contrasting association to the rest of the symbolic content; it follows that unconscious contents always contain pairs of opposites and consequently always express themselves in opposite forms.

Valuable through worthlessness, or something connected with worthlessness.

Do not forget that the Jew also had prophets.

There is a part of the Jewish soul which you are not yet living, because you still have your eye too much on the outside.

That is – ‘unfortunately’ – the curse of the Jew: the aspect of his psychology which belongs to him most deeply he calls ‘infantile wish fulfilment’, he is the murderer of his own prophets, even of his Messiah.78

On the 6th floor instead of on the 4th means: higher up, a higher standpoint.


Gegensätzlich [opposite] = 6 = ‘sex’, as Freud understands it.

You are orientating yourself by everything around you, by the visible world, so the inner world is chaotic.

The inner world however comes with irresistible force and will take possession of you.

You will experience a remarkable transformation.

I have just recovered from influenza.

With best wishes,

Jung.
[see Spielrein’s letters to Jung of 27–28 & 28 January 1918 in Carotenuto ibid., pp.82ff.]


The Commandant of the xxx xxx Region, Château-d’Oex 29 Nov. 1918

Dear doctor,

‘Oore’ certainly means ‘ora’=pray.

‘nabich’ as an anagram of ‘Sabina’ is quite probable.

The meaning is: ‘pray to yourself’, for your soul needs you to concentrate all your devotion on the central point of your being in order to find your one right path, the ‘way’.

You like to go away from yourself and lose yourself by doing so.

It is to this strong tendency to look to the outside that ‘cannabis’ relates’79

That is of course ‘cannabis indica’, hemp, hashish, a narcotic which the orientals take to produce inner visions.

Do you understand that?

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

D.r Jung

Dr. med. C. G. Jung LL.D 228 Seestrasse Küsnach-Zürich
19.3.1919

Dear doctor,

Your dreams have a threatening character and show a murderous tendency because your conscious attitude is of a materialistic kind which kills the spirit.

However the spirit will not let itself be killed but changes into an unconscious force which can have murderous effects of a magical kind on all around.

You should recognize the divine spirit and not deny it in that rationalistic way.

You should acknowledge what you hold to be true and not speak the opposite; otherwise if you speak against your own conscience you are cursed.

I hope it is not too late.

Yours sincerely

Dr. Jung.

P.S. A sum of 260fr has arrived at my address from a Mr Seidmann in Berlin. I do not know where the money has come from.

I think it belongs to you. I am sending it to you today by mandate.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Jung.

I wish your little daughter a swift return to health.

C. G. JUNG. MD.LL.D

Seestrasse 228, KÜSNACHT-ZÜRICH 3.4.1919

Dear doctor,

Mistrust disturbs most the person who mistrusts himself.

I do not know whether you mistrust yourself. My mistrust is aroused by the fickleness of the female spirit and its vain and tyrannical presumption.

What you are calling ‘killing Siegfried’ is to me a rationalistic and materialistic razing to the ground.

This razing to the level of banality belongs to the most amiable qualities of the female spirit.

Your little daughter is quite safe when you do not want to kill the ‘strange being’ whom you call Siegfried.

For this being produces a harmful effect onlywhen it is not accepted as a divine being but just as ‘phantasy’.

You have this being to thank for your suggestive influence.

Your influence will be good and rich in blessing if you accept this being and worship it inwardly.

I wish your child everything that is good.

But I wish too that you would learn to accept ‘Siegfried’ for what he is.

This is important as much for your child’s sake as for your own. How you must accept Siegfried I cannot tell you. That is a secret.

Your dream can help.

Dreams are compensatory to the conscious attitude.

Reality and the unconscious are primary.

They are two forces that work simultaneously but are different.

The hero unites them in a symbolic figure.

He is the centre and the resolution.

The dream contributes to life, as does reality.

The human being stands between two worlds.

Freud’s view is a sinful violation of the sacred.

It spreads darkness, not light; that has to happen, for only out of the deepest night will the new light be born.

One of its sparks is Siegfried. This spark can and will never be extinguished.

If you betray this, then you are cursed. What has Liebknecht to do with you?81

Like Freud and Lenin, he disseminates rationalistic darkness which will yet extinguish the little lamps of understanding.

I kindled a new light in you which you must protect for the time of darkness.

That must not be betrayed externally and for the sake of external arguments.

Surround this inner light with devotion, then it will never turn into danger for your little daughter.

But whoever betrays this light for the sake of power or in order to be clever will be a figure of shame and will have a bad influence.

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Dr Jung.

Dr med. C. G. Jung LL.D 228 Seestrasse Küsnach-Zürich


1 Sept. 1919
Dear doctor,

I have not replied until now as I have been in England for some time.

The love of S. for J. made the latter aware of something he had previously only vaguely suspected, namely of a power in the unconscious which shapes one’s destiny, a power which later led him to things of the greatest importance.

The relationship had to be ‘sublimated’, because otherwise it would have led to delusion and madness (a concretization of the unconscious).

Sometimes we must be unworthy to live at all.

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung.

Dr med. C. G. Jung LL.D. 228 Seestrasse Küsnacht-Zürich 7.10.19

Dear doctor,

I congratulate you on your brother’s success.

That is very gratifying.

I cannot answer your question about types.

I would have to write a book about it. Actually it has already been written.

Your questions are answered there in detail.

When I wrote it I had to cancel out the fundamental identity of extraversion and feeling, and of introversion and thinking.

That was wrongly conceived and came from the fact that introverted thinking types and extraverted feeling types are the most conspicuous.

Now I distinguish a universal introverted or extraverted attitude.

Bleuler has an extraverted attitude.

His most differentiated function is thinking. His feeling is introverted and archaic, relatively unconscious.

The schema is thus:

With regard to Freud I am not quite sure, as I don’t know him well enough personally.

His neurotic tendency accords with the schema however.

It cannot be seen from the schema whether a person is introverted or extraverted, because it focuses on other aspects.

Bleuler and Freud are extravert. Nietzsche and Jung introvert. Goethe is intuitive and extravert. Schiller is intuitive and introvert.

In general men are on the outer circle:

Probably you used to be much more extraverted than you are now.

Perhaps the schema will mean something to you.

With friendly greetings,

yours sincerely, Dr. Jung.

N.B.!

In the libido book82 you will find a lot of material on the question of the transformation of libido; similarly in Silberer,

Problems of Mysticism83 who took up my ideas and worked further on them independently.

Reference

Carotenuto, A. (1982). A Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud. New York: Random House.

Notes
1. Ernest Jones (1879–1958), English psychoanalyst, biographer of Freud. For the visit to Jung mentioned here, see references in Freud/Jung Letters, ed. William McGuire, Hogarth Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, (12.7.08, 18.7.08, & 11.8.08, p. 163, p. 164, & p. 166).

2. Free spirit.

3. Mountain lake between the cantons of Glarus and St. Gallen.

4. Place on the Walensee.
5. P. Eugen Bleuler; cf. Note 16, letters from S. Spielrein to C. G. Jung (in Carotenuto, A., A Secret Symmetry, New York [1982]: Pantheon Books.

6. S. Spielrein quotes this sentence in her letter to Freud of 10/20 June 1909 (section dated 11 June) (in Carotenuto 1982).

7a. Cf. also a passage quoted to Freud by S. Spielrein from a letter to Jung, and her remarks referring to this in her letter to Freud of 10/20 June 1909 (section dated 13
June) (in Carotenuto 1982)

7b. At the request of the Jung family the name and address of the person in question have been omitted in order to safeguard her anonymity.

8. One of the guests from New York was Adolf Meyer from NY State Pathological Institute, who was also Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical School. Jung mentions this visit in his letter to Freud of 21.8.08 (Freud/Jung Letters, p. 169f. and footnote 1, ibid.)

9. Wolf Stockmayer (1881–1933), analytical psychologist, at that time Assistant at the Tübingen University Clinic (Freud/Jung Letters, 12.7.08, p. 164 & fn. 4).

10. A region in the canton of St. Gallen.

11. Franz Riklin (1878–1938), Swiss psychiatrist; worked at the Burghölzli from 1902 to 1904 and together with Jung published ‘The associations of normal subjects’ in 1906
(in C. G. Jung, CW 2).

12. See Note 15.

13. See previous letter to S. Spielrein.

14. The mistake in the salutation cannot be completely explained: the ‘n’ in the middle of the word ‘Freundin’ [‘friend’] has been added and in all probability was written over
another letter no longer visible.

15. According to the note in the Freud/Jung Letters 23.9.08, p. 172 fn., Freud was a guest of Jung from 18 to 21 September. During this visit Jung demonstrated to him the famous case of Babette (C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé. Fontana, 1963, p. 149; cf. also Carotenuto, ibid., chap. 4).

16. cf. MDR p. 24f.

17. S. Spielrein quotes this passage in her letter to Freud of 10/20 June 1909 (section dated 13 June; in Carotenuto, ibid.).

18. S. Spielrein’s dissertation ‘On the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia (dementia praecox)’.

19. S. Spielrein had probably sent her congratulations on the birth of Jung’s third daughter, Marianne.; cf. the last entry in her diary for September 1910 (in Carotenuto, ibid.).

20. The first examinations took place on 9 and 15 December 1910, and the last in the middle of January 1911 (see diary entries of 8 and 14 December 1910 and of 15 and 19 January 1911; in Carotenuto, ibid.).

21. See Note 8, letters of S. Spielrein to C. G. Jung (in Carotenuto, ibid., p. 220).

22. cf. Freud/Jung Letters, 12.6.11, 426.

23. This must refer to corrections related to the publication of her dissertation which appeared in the Jahrbuch 3,1 (August 1911).

24. The reference is to the paper ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’, which S. Spielrein completed during her stay in Munich, according to her diary entry of 7.1.1912 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 40). The paper was published in English translation in The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, 2, April 1994.

25. See Note 24.

26. This remark, together with other comments made to S. Spielrein about ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’ (see letters of beg. Nov. 1911, 13.11.11, 18.3.12, & 25.3.12), is in marked contrast to the statement made by Jung in his letter to Freud of 1.4.12 (Freud/Jung Letters, p. 498).

27. The work did finally appear in the Jahrbuch, in the first half-year issue of Vol. 4 (Sep. 1912); cf. also S. Spielrein’s comment in her diary, 7.1.1912 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 41).

28. See Freud/Jung Letters, 19.7.11, p. 435.

29. S. Spielrein wanted to attend the Third International Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar, 21–22 Sep. 1911.

30. See Note 6, letters from Freud to S. Spielrein (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 226).

31. See Note 18.

32. Cf. S. Spielrein’s letter to Jung, early 1911 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 48).

33. S. Spielrein had sent Jung the manuscript of her paper on destruction in August. She probably needed it now to prepare her lecture for the Wednesday meeting on 29 Nov. 1911, at which she referred to a section of it (see minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. Herman Nunberg & Ernst Federn, Vol. 3, 1910–1911, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1979, pp. 314–20).

34. Cf. Freud/Jung Letters, 30.10.11, p. 452.

35. As is implied in Jung’s next letter, there was a delay.

36. See Note 10, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 220f).

37. Cf. Note 4, letters from Freud to S. Spielrein (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 226).

38. See Note 18, letters from Freud to S. Spielrein (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 227).

39. See Note 19, letters from Freud to S. Spielrein (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 227).

40. Refers to the period from the end of September to 31 October 1911 (cf. Freud/Jung Letters, 4.10.11 & 30.10.11, p. 444 & 452).

41. Jung refers to Part 2 of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, which appeared in the Jahrbuch 4, 1 in 1912, and in which numerous references to S. Spielrein’s dissertation appear. (cf. Carotenuto, ibid., Part 2, Chapter 2, Note 11).

42. With the differences alluded to here, cf. Jung’s numerous comments in the Freud/ Jung Letters from November 1911 onwards on Part 2 of the libido work, and his later The letters of C. G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein 197 statement about the role of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in his confrontation with Freud (MDR, pp. 187–91).

43. Cf. Jung’s letter of the same date to Freud (Freud/Jung Letters, 11.12.1911, p. 470).

44. ‘Psychological analysis of a paranoid patient’, Jahrbuch 4, 1 1912, pp. 116–40.

45. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Part 2.

46. ‘Analytical observations on the phantasies of a schizophrenic’, Jahrbuch 4, 1, 1912, pp. 504–562.

47. See Note 26, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid. p. 223).

48. See Note 10, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid. p. 220).

49. ‘The association method’, three lectures (1909). Two of the lectures (‘The association method’ and ‘The family constellation’) are published in CW 2, one (‘Psychic conflicts in a child’) in CW 17.

50. See letters of 12. & 30.11, and 17.12.1911 (Freud/Jung Letters, pp. 457ff, p. 468, & p. 472).

51. See Jung’s letter to S. Spielrein of 11.12.1911 and Note 44 above.

52. Cf. letter from S. Spielrein to Jung of late March 1911 (Carotenuto, ibid., pp. 47–8).

53. In February 1912 a lay association for psychoanalytic endeavour was founded in Zürich (see Jung’s communication to Freud of 15.2.12 (Freud/Jung Letters, p. 483 & fn. 1).

54. Diagnostische Associationsstudien: Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychopathologie, 2 volumes, Leipzig 1906 and 1909 (in CW 2), Über die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox: Ein Versuch (in CW 3).

55. cf. S. Spielrein’s diary entry of 26.11.1910 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 35).

56. See Freud/Jung Letters, 3.3.13, p. 545 & fn. 1).

57. Cf. Freud’s letter to S. Spielrein, 30 Jan. 1913 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 118).

58. Cf. entry for September 1910 and Note 8, diary of S. Spielrein (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 17 & p. 218).

59. The reference must be to Friedrich Kraus who worked at the Charité (see Note 10, letters of Freud to S. Spielrein, in Carotenuto, ibid., p. 226); S. Spielrein had informed Freud of Kraus’s approach to psychoanalysis (cf. Freud’s letter to S. Spielrein, 9.2.1913, in Carotenuto, ibid. p. 119, and Freud’s letter to Karl Abraham, 14.2.13 and Abraham’s reply 3.3.13, in Freud/Abraham Briefe 1907–1926).

60. MDR p. 191f.

61. Cf. Carotenuto ibid., part 2, chapter 6, and the Foreword by J. Cremerius to the German edition of Carotenuto’s book (Tagebuch einer heimlichen Symmetrie, Freiburg, Kore, 1986 also K.R. Eissler, Psychologische Aspekte des Briefwechsels zwischen Freud und Jung, Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, Beiheft 7, (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982), passim.

62. Cf. letter from Jung to Freud of Nov. 1912 referring to the presidents’ conference in Munich (Freud/Jung Letters 15. Nov. 1912, p. 520).

63. S. Spielrein was expecting a child.

64. Birth of Sabina Spielrein’s daughter, Renata; cf. Freud’s letter to S. Spielrein, 29 Sep. 1913 (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 121).

65. On the back of this letter is the fragmentary outline of a letter from S. Spielrein to Freud.

66. S. Spielrein had probably sent Jung the text of her lecture ‘On ethics and psychoanalysis’, which she had given in March 1914 to the Berlin group of the International Psychoanalytic Society (see Zeitschrift 2, 1914, p. 410).

67. Jung had resigned from the editorship of the Jahrbuch in October 1913 (see Freud/Jung Letters 27.10.13, p. 550).

68. Franz Deuticke among others published the Jahrbuch and the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde (Papers on applied Psychiatry) edited by Freud.

69. See Note 17, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 222) [The reference is to Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse (Zürich 1917, the first edition of ‘On the psychology of the unconscious’, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7)].

70. Cf. letter from S. Spielrein to Jung, 27.11.1917 (Carotenuto, ibid., pp. 50–3).

71. See Note 18, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (,Carotenuto, ibid., p. 222).

72. Cf. letter from S. Spielrein to Jung, 3.12.1917 (Carotenuto ibid., pp. 53–6).

73. Cf. letter from S. Spielrein to Jung, 15.12.1917, only parts of which have survived.

74. Cf. S. Spielrein’s letter of 20.12.1917 (Carotenuto, ibid., pp. 62ff).

75. Jung, The Content of the Psychoses, Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, 3, Vienna & Leipzig: Deuticke, 2nd Edition 1914 (in CW 3).

76. See Note 26, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 223).

77. Cf. letters from S. Spielrein to Jung, 6.1.1918 & 19.1.1918 (Carotenuto, ibid., pp. 68–78, & pp. 79–82).

78. Cf. letter from S. Spielrein to Jung, 27/28.1.1918 (Carotenuto, ibid., pp. 82–8).

79. Kannabich was also the name of a Russian psychoanalyst who was known to S. Spielrein. (See ‘Russische Literatur’ in Bericht über die Fortschritte der Psychoanalyse (Report on the Advances in Psychoanalysis) 1914–1919, Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1921, p. 356).

80. Cf. the statement in S. Spielrein’s letter to Jung, 6.1.1918. In this letter, and in the letter of 27/28.1.1918, S. Spielrein develops a discussion of the theme ‘Siegfried – a threat to Renata’, subsequently taken up by Jung.

81. The leader of the communist Spartacus League was murdered on 15.1.1919 together with Rosa Luxemburg.

82. Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, Part 1, Jahrbuch 3.1. (1911), pp. 120–227, Part 2, Jahrbuch 4.1 (1912), pp. 162–464.

83. See Note 26, letters from S. Spielrein to Jung (Carotenuto, ibid., p. 223).

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2001, 46, 173–199
0021–8774/2001/4601/173 © 2001, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.