Carl Jung: Hence everything that to me is essential in Goethe is contained in Faust.

To Max Rychner

Dear Dr. Rychner 28 February 1932

Here are my answers to your questions about Goethe:

1. My mother drew my attention to Faust when I was about 15 years old.

2. Goethe was important to me because of Faust.

3. As a "poet," perhaps Holderlin.

4. In my circle Faust is an object of lively interest. I once knew a wholesaler who always carried a pocket edition of Faust around with him.

Young people today try to be unhistorical. Goethe does not seem to mean much to them because, for them, he is too close to the fishy ideals of the 19th century.

Everything to do with the masses is hateful to me. Anything popularized becomes common. Above all I would not disseminate Goethe, rather cook books.

Apart from a few poems, the only thing of Goethe's that is alive for me is Faust. For me this was always a study-for relaxation I prefer English novels.

Everything else of Goethe's pales beside Faust, although something immortal glitters in the poems too.

What one could "enjoy" of Goethe is, for me, too patriarchal, too much de l'epoque. What I value in Goethe I cannot "enjoy"; it is too big, too exciting, too profound.

Faust is the most recent pillar in that bridge of the spirit which spans the morass of world history, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic,1 the I Ching,2 the Upanishads, the Tao-te Ching, the fragments of Heraclitus, and continuing in the Gospel of St. John, the letters of St. Paul, in Meister Eckhart and in Dante.

It seems to me that one cannot meditate enough about Faust, for many of the mysteries of the second part are still unfathomed.

Faust is out of this world and therefore it transports you; it is as much the future as the past and therefore the most living present.

Hence everything that to me is essential in Goethe is contained in Faust.

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.

Carl Jung: This is the matrix of the mind, as the little great-grandfather correctly saw, I hope something good comes out of it.

Dear Professor Freud, 23 June 1911

Naturally the time after the Congress would suit me just as well, I only thought that if you came before you could stay here a bit longer.

I gather from your letter that you could come before the Congress, minus your wife, but we were so looking forward to having you both under our roof that I wish you would persuade your wife to come along after all if she possibly can.

Whether after or before the Congress is all the same to me. So please decide just as suits you best.

Have you seen Havelock Ellis's book on dreams?

Won't you do a critical review for the Jahrbuch?

What a watery brew Ellis has concocted!

Just what is needed to make everything unclear.

You are probably right about Honegger.

Although it may be true that the fantasy systems in D. pI. exhibit parallels with the daydreams of hysterical patients, it is certain from the start that by no means all cases possess such a system, or at least they do not have it at their disposal.

That it is not of great therapeutic importance to get patients to produce their latent fantasies seems to me a very dubious proposition.

The unconscious fantasies contain a whole lot of relevant material, and bring the inside to the outside as nothing else can, so that I see a faint hope of getting at even the "inaccessible" cases by this means.

These days my interest turns more and more to ucs. fantasy, and it is quite possible that I'm attaching too great hopes to these excavations,

Des. fantasy is an amazing witches' cauldron:

"Formation, transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.
Thronged round with images of things to be,
They see you not, shadows are all they see."

This is the matrix of the mind, as the little great-grandfather correctly saw, I hope something good comes out of it.

Kindest regards,

JUNG ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 430-431