Dr. Jung is visited by Alberto Moravia

Dr. Jung is visited by Alberto Moravia

A VISIT FROM MORAVIA

Introduction: The Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, whose writings had been censored by the Fascists, was working during the postwar period as a correspondent for L’Europeo (Milan).

In the issue of December 5, 1948, he published a brief article on a visit to Zurich; the title translates as "The Psychoanalyst Jung Teaches How to Tame the Devil," though only the latter half is devoted to an interview with Jung, extracted here.

The first part is about Swiss banking and Italo Svevo, his fellow novelist.

In 1952, incidentally, the Roman Catholic Church put all of Moravia’s books on the Index. Alberto Moravia: I am on my way to visit C. G. Jung in one of Zurich’s suburbs.

Here are the luxurious villas of the banking and commercial bourgeoisie, surrounded by vast gardens. They have their offices in modern, austere, and bare buildings in the center of town.

Looking for Jung’s villa along the main thoroughfare, in pouring rain, I am reminded of the American novelist Scott Fitzgerald, writer of another post-war generation. In one of his beautiful novels’ he describes to
perfection the psychoanalytic milieu of Zurich:

An American millionaire, much disturbed by his daughter’s state of mind, brings her to Zurich to one of the most famous and expensive psychiatric clinics.

There it is simply discovered that the daughter, at the age of fifteen, had been seduced by just that loving father.

She falls in love with her physician, who cures her, marries him, and goes to live with him on the Riviera. . .
.

But here, at last, is No. 228 Seestrasse, the street of the lake.

The rain is pelting down on the yellow leaves of the tree-lined avenue, at the end of which one can see the entrance to a villa.

I ring the bell and Jung’s secretary opens the door.

In a few minutes Jung himself ushers me through the waiting room into his study.

Jung is an elderly man (he is 74), of stocky build, with a strong face reddened by the continuous flames of a cheerful fireplace.

He has a white mustache, penetrating eyes, and white, dishevelled hair.

A man of middle-class appearance, dressed in rough woolen sporty clothes, breathing a bit laboriously, stout, and with a pipe in hand.

He asks me to sit down in an armchair, in front of a bright lamp which nearly blinds me.

He, instead, possibly because it is the habit of a psychoanalyst, sits down facing me, his face in shadow as if he wants to study me without being himself scrutinized.

Thus, with my face illuminated and his in darkness, we begin our conversation.

We talk in French, which Jung speaks fluently despite a somewhat harsh German accent. The first questions and answers are awkward.
Then, no doubt because his examination of my face has given him a favorable impression, Jung warms up and begins to talk with greater ease.

Naturally the discussion revolves around his theories and books, all of which I know only superficially, and in particular the theory expounded in his last book, Symbolik des Geistes.

Digressing at times, Jung explains to me some of the ideas of this latest work and its connection with the the- ory which gave him fame.

In the new book, the most important part apparently concentrates on an "attempt at a psychological explanation of the dogma of the Trinity."

This book has caused much talk in Switzerland, precisely because of his interpretation of the Christian Trinity.

In short, according to Jung, the Christian dogma represents a symbol for the collective psyche; the Father symbolizes a primitive phase; the Son an intermediate and reflective phase; and the Spirit a third phase in which one returns to the original phase, though enriching it through the intermediate reflections.

Jung would like to add to that Trinity a fourth figure so as to transform the whole into, so to speak, a Quaternity.

This fourth figure is the direct antithesis to the clear and conscious function of the first three: it would possess an obscure, subconscious function, and would represent—according to Jung—the devil.

In order to make this idea of a Quaternity comprehensible, Jung connects it with his well known theory of the psychology of the unconscious.

He roughly reasons as follows: In ancient times the devil, i.e., the unconscious, existed in direct relationship to the spirit, or the conscious.

This relationship was highly beneficial; the conscious nourished with its light the shadows of the unconscious; with its positivity the negativity of the unconscious; with its rationality the instinctuality of the unconscious.

The ancient religions were aware of the relationships between conscious and unconscious; and what is more, they encouraged them.

Yahweh, for instance, was not only God but also Devil.

However, beginning with Christianity and particularly the Reformation, the unconscious, that is to say the devil, has become increasingly thwarted, suppressed, forgotten, obliterated.

With Luciferian pride the Nordic Protestant believes he can do without the devil.

And so, acquiring strength in direct proportion to that excess of repression, the unconscious suddenly explodes catastrophically in various diabolical and destructive ways, Jung explains that thus one can understand the clearly demonic and suicidal tendency of European civilization on the threshold of the first World War.

At that time the devil, i.e., the unconscious, for too long repressed and even forgotten, took his revenge by driving men to regard with sensual joy destruction and death.

At this point Jung graphically conjures up the picture of trains full of exuberant soldiers, the locomotives be- decked with flowers, leaving Berlin for the front in 1914, and he explains this joy at the imminent massacre with the joy of a finally achieved union with blood and death, i.e., the unconscious.

Jung proposes the same explanation for the monstrous and automatic cruelty of the Nazis during the second He says that this time once again the World War.

He says that at this time once again absence of a healthy relationship with the devil gave origin to an explosion of unprecedented and destructive fury.

He concludes that it is necessary to restore as quickly as possible these relationships: and if necessary, to create precisely that Quaternity.

On this strange prediction, much in tune with the Faustian atmosphere, I leave Jung.

Outside it continues to rain. Through the rain I make my way back to Zurich. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 186-189

Charles Baudouin: “I recognized that these "spirits" had weight, like the atmosphere during a thunder- storm.”

FROM CHARLES BAUDOUIN’S JOURNAL: 1934

Introduction: Charles Baudouin (1893-1963), professor in the University of Geneva, was founder there of the Institut de Psychagogie, whose patrons were Freud, Adler, and Jung and whose program was correspondingly catholic.

Eventually, Baudouin associated himself with the school of analytical psychology as an analyst, teacher, and writer.

His posthumous book L’Oeuvre de Jung (1963) contains, in a chapter entitled "Jung, homme concret," a number of passages from Baudouin’s journal, reporting his, encounters with Jung over more than twenty years.

The earliest one was written after Baudouin attended a seminar that Jung gave to the Societe de Psychologie in Basel, October i–6, 1934.

That version, slightly abridged, was translated and published as "Jung, the Concrete Man" in the Friends an- nual Inward Light (Washington), fall–winter, 1975-76.

It is further abridged here. (For other extracts see pp. 146, 19o, 235, 365.) Charles Baudouin: Basel, Sunday, October 7, 1934

It is time to assemble the impressions which Jung’s personality has left upon me during these few days, to bind the sheaf, to present the portrait.

A standing portrait, emphatically, for I see him on his feet, talking and teaching. The word "stature" is what springs to mind, or the German word "Gestalt."

This is no man of study or office; this is a force.

One of the anecdotes with which he bespangles his lectures stands out for me.

I hope I shall not do it an injusticde by repeating it from memory.different from all one knows, it is another matter.

Jung knew, from his interpreter, of his hosts’ embarrassment at having failed to identify him.

However, he won their hearts sufficiently for them to invite him one day—a sign of confidence and welcome— to visit the upper story of the house.

This meant climbing a ladder.

But while the Indians mount with their backs to the ladder and with the agility of monkeys, he naturally climbed in European fashion, facing the ladder, setting his feet deliberately on the rungs and presenting to the onlookers his square, powerful back.

A great clamor broke out then among the Indians, which he later had explained to him. On seeing him mount that way, they had recognized his totem: the bear! the bear!

He had the wit to enter into the spirit of the thing, and his understanding of "primitives" was advanced enough for him to feel all the seriousness of it.

Substantially, he told them: "Yes, you have guessed aright; the bear is the totem of my country; it has given its name to our capital, Bern; it figures in the coat of arms of the city."

And on his return to Switzerland he sent them, as evidence and as a souvenir, a little wooden bear such as we carve over here.

He received in return and as a pledge of friendship, if I remember rightly, a pair of leather breeches.

These last days, telling us about the tribes, the spirits of the forest, that other world of mystery that comes alive suddenly at nightfall, he has been more like the sorcerer penetrated by the spirits he talks about, skilled at evoking them and making their disquieting presence hover above the suspenseful audience.

Then, all of a sudden, a good story will release the tension with a well-placed laugh.

His is a compact force that is fed by a substantial sum of human experience and flows back to him as though

multiplied by the response of his own tribe, this circle of disciples from both continents who surround and sustain him.

Unkind gossip has accused these disciples and auditors of snobbery.

To be sure there is some of it, as there was around the courses which Bergson gave at the College de France; which is no argument against Bergson, nor yet against Jung.

But when someone raised the objection that a majority of his disciples were women, Jung is said to have replied: "What’s to be done?

Psychology is after all the science of the soul, and it is not my fault if the soul is a woman."

A jest; but for anyone who has followed his teaching, a jest which is itself charged with experience, and be- hind which one sees arising in all its ambiguous splendor the archetype of the anima.

Observing him, seeing him teach and then relax in a more intimate circle, I registered during this week in Basel many aspects of his being and appearance, many disparate expressions.

Under the high forehead of the thinker, the planes of his face are firm and full; the gray eyes seem suddenly curiously small and made for gimlet scrutiny; at other moments they are chiefly mischievous, and the face becomes that of a confessor-accomplice, a priest who enjoys life, suddenly red in the face with a hearty laugh; but the profile then calls one to order—it is much more serious, angular, and marks the top-level intellectual.

But watching him live, one perceives that these disparate expressions are organized into a coherent whole.

One feels that he denies none of them, that being and appearance (the self and the persona) have found their modus vivendi, that his teaching about "integrating all the functions" to form a totality is not book knowledge but lived, which amounts to affirming that he belongs not only among the scholars but among the sages.

I knew Jung from his books and I had met him personally.

But during this week passed in his company I feel I have discovered him. To tell the truth, I have made two discoveries.

First of all, I have been struck by the strongly concrete character of this man and of his thinking.

Secondly, I have realized all he owes to his mingling with the "primitives"; those journeys have not been pic- turesque accidents in his life; they are among the nutritive substances of his thought.

I would add that these two points are intimately connected.

The concreteness stands out every moment from his way of expounding ideas, laying emphasis on the facts, his gestures sober and restrained but felt to be charged with energy and asking only to go ahead uncurbed.

This is especially visible when he describes one of his African scenes; in fact he acts it out in abbreviated form, he makes it visible.

There was that anecdote to illustrate the fact that primitives do not know will-power in the sense that we un-

derstand it; they must first mobilize the needful energy for an action and this is the purpose served by certain precise incantatory rituals.

For example, the boy who is charged with carrying the mail to town (who knows how many leagues away!) remains passively sitting when the European quietly asks him to perform this service and offers to reward him; it is as if he did not understand.

But the sorcerer passes by, takes the case in hand—and the whip too!—starts dancing the "running dance" around the boy; the tribe joins in, the boy is drawn into the circle and finally, as if shot from a sling, is off; and he runs at that! All was reproduced before us; we saw it.

But this play of gesture to demonstrate and explain flourishes yet more freely in familiar conversation.

We were speaking one evening of "telepathic" dreams where, between persons who are emotionally close, a mutual unconscious communication and penetration appears to take place.

Jung finally, to sum up his thoughts on the matter, acted them out as follows: with brief, firm gestures he touched first my forehead, then his own, and thirdly drew a great circle with his hand in the space between us; the three motions underscored the three clauses of this statement; "In short, one doesn’t dream here, and one doesn’t dream here, one dreams there."

And there the hand kept turning, like the above-mentioned sling and the idea, like the messenger, was launched.

I have said that this concreteness is tied up with Jung’s African experience.

I came to see that he had a feeling of concreteness about the soul; when he entitles a book Wirklichkeit der Seele (Reality of the Soul) it is no vain expression.

To be sure, he had been convinced by his patients of this concrete aspect of the things of the psyche, but certainly the "primitives" brought him into touch with it in a closer and more convincing way, for this is how they feel.

When he was telling me the other day, at Dr. von Sury’s, about these "ancestral spirits," which fall upon one on return to one’s birthplace, and which he himself feels whenever he returns to Basel, I recognized that these "spirits" had weight, like the atmosphere during a thunderstorm.

And when he was led by this reflection to study, on the wall, the genealogical tree of the von Sury family, I realized how he felt those roots digging down and holding fast in an earth that was real and solid.

This concreteness of Jung’s was part of his make-up. In his childhood recollections he tells us of the torments he went through over mathematics, especially over algebraic abstractions, which he found incomprehensible.

To make sense out of them, he had to put back numbers in place of letters.

The simple equation a = b infuriated him and seemed a rank deception: since a is one thing and b is another, it is a lie to say they are equal.

If this was an inborn disposition of his mind, it could not but be reinforced and justified in his eyes by his fertilizing contacts with "primitive mentality."

The academic mind expected a mapmaker; and it finds itself face to face with an explorer who emerges from

the brush armed, weighed down, and solidly swathed in magnificent vines and creepers, trailing with him all the odors of the forest.


Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 76-81

Carl Jung “On Creative Achievement”

Introduction: Emil A. Fischer undertook to interview twenty Swiss men and women prominent in cultural life, and he published the resulting articles in a small book entitled Schopferische Leistung (Thalwil, i946)—"Creative Achievement."

Fischer began his conversation by asking Jung about "the strange aphorism that is carved into stone above the entrance door of the house:Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit."

This was an opening that interviewers often hit upon. Jung had the inscription carved over the door when he built the house, in 1909.

It came from an old copy of Erasmus that he had bought while a university student.

Emil A. Fischer: Is there any special relationship between this saying and your Weltanschauung or your life’s work?

Dr. Jung: "Called or uncalled, God is present!" It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus.

You ask whether the oracle is my motto.

In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. "Oh God!" is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love.

Isn’t the psyche of the artist and the intellectual particularly complex and worthy of closer consideration? So far, too much one-sided attention has been focused on the morbid aspect of the matter.

I wonder why there is so much nonsensical theorizing about the pathology of outstanding people.

Most psychopaths are not geniuses; and on the other hand there are many geniuses who do not show the slightest traces of pathology.

What is much more significant in this context is the shadow! It is important to see also the negative sides of great men.
On Palm Sunday, Christ temporarily played the role of a political Messiah.

His negative side and his power are symbolically displayed in the temptation by the Devil. Biographies should show people in their undershirts.
Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship!


Emil A. Fischer: Where do you get the incentive for your creative work, Professor? One is always in the dark about one’s own personality.
One needs others to get to know oneself.

Having said this—I actually started out by simply doing routine scientific work.

I always followed the motto that it is worth doing something only if you do it right! The incentives for my creative work are rooted in my temperament.
Diligence and a strong desire for knowledge accompanied me throughout life.

I do not derive any satisfaction from knowing things superficially: I want to know them thoroughly.

When I came to the conclusion that I had only hazy notions of the primitives, and that it was not possible to acquire full knowledge about them through books, I started traveling in Africa, New Mexico, and India.

For the same reason I also started learning Swahili.

Emil A. Fischer: What were the circumstances that induced you to work in the field of psychological research? Dr. Jung: Even as a small boy I noticed that people always did the contrary of what was said of them.

I found some of the people who were praised quite unbearable, whereas I thought others who were criticized quite pleasant.

I noticed the inconsistencies in the behavior of adults quite early on, because I spent my formative years in Basel, in a rather odd environment, which was frequented by people with a complicated psychic structure.

When I was barely four years old, someone said to me in an exaggeratedly childish tone: "Where do you think you are going with your rocking horse?"

I reacted quite the enfant terrible: "Mama, why does this man say such nonsense?" Even as a child I clearly felt that people did not say what was really in their minds.

Emil A. Fischer: Isn’t it possible for people to come to psychology in exactly the opposite way? Don’t some people feel attracted to psychology because they want to find an explanation for the chaos within themselves?

Dr. Jung: Certainly! If you take a critical look at people, you will find that some of them are involved in psy- chology only in order to demonstrate that "the other person" is even more neurotic.

However, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Emil A. Fischer: Isn’t nature particularly important for you to sustain and enhance your personal productiv- ity?

Dr. Jung: Nature can help you only if you manage to get time for yourself. You need to be able to relax in the garden, completely at peace, or to walk.
From time to time I need to stop, to just stand there. If someone were to ask me: What are you thinking of just now ?—I wouldn’t know.

I think unconsciously.

Emil A. Fischer: How important is the time factor in your scientific activity? Isn’t it a great strain for you to work both as an analyst and as a research scientist?

Dr. Jung: My time has always been divided.

Either I dealt with patients, or I did research work.

For a time, I used to see patients only in the afternoons. The mornings were devoted to scientific work.

In earlier years I worked a lot at night, especially during the first World War.

Until the middle of my life I worked chiefly in the morning, and after I was 36, chiefly in the afternoon.

In the last ten years I’ve turned again to working in the morning.

Emil A. Fischer: How do you react to disturbances?

Some occultist authors recommend that their adepts go into retreat to enhance their energies. Do you think that creative energy grows as a result of isolation?

Dr. Jung: The energy is there, but I must have the possibility of "casting my net."

Once I have all the material, nothing and nobody must get near.

I am not as sensitive to noise as Carlyle, who installed triple glass windows and saw to it that all the fowl and dogs near his property were bought up.

But when I am in the active creative process, any disturbance is downright physically painful.

I have a little house at Bollingen, to which I retreat and where I can work undisturbed when my notes and preparatory studies have reached the stage where I can start writing.

Emil A. Fischer: Do some Yoga systems offer the possibility of developing one’s creative energies?

Dr. Jung: Yoga can liberate certain psychic contents and natural dispositions but it cannot produce them. You can’t make something out of nothing, not even with will-power.

And what is will-power?

To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive. Creativeness is drive!

A creative calling is like a daimonion, which, in some instances, can ruin a person’s entire life. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167

Carl Jung on Time, Disturbances and Systems of Yoga in Creativity

Emil A. Fischer: How important is the time factor in your scientific activity? Isn’t it a great strain for you to work both as an analyst and as a research scientist?

Dr. Jung: My time has always been divided.

Either I dealt with patients, or I did research work.

For a time, I used to see patients only in the afternoons. The mornings were devoted to scientific work.
In earlier years I worked a lot at night, especially during the first World War.

Until the middle of my life I worked chiefly in the morning, and after I was 36, chiefly in the afternoon.

In the last ten years I’ve turned again to working in the morning.

Emil A. Fischer: How do you react to disturbances?

Some occultist authors recommend that their adepts go into retreat to enhance their energies. Do you think that creative energy grows as a result of isolation?

Dr. Jung: The energy is there, but I must have the possibility of "casting my net." Once I have all the material, nothing and nobody must get near.
I am not as sensitive to noise as Carlyle, who installed triple glass windows and saw to it that all the fowl and dogs near his property were bought up.

But when I am in the active creative process, any disturbance is downright physically painful.

I have a little house at Bollingen, to which I retreat and where I can work undisturbed when my notes and preparatory studies have reached the stage where I can start writing.

Emil A. Fischer: Do some Yoga systems offer the possibility of developing one’s creative energies?

Dr. Jung: Yoga can liberate certain psychic contents and natural dispositions but it cannot produce them. You can’t make something out of nothing, not even with will-power.
And what is will-power?

To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive. Creativeness is drive!

A creative calling is like a daimonion, which, in some instances, can ruin a person’s entire life.Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167

Carl Jung on: “The Post-War Psychic Problems of the Germans

Introduction: Four days after the unconditional surrender of the German Army at Rheims, this interview by Peter Schmid was published in Die Weltwoche (Zurich) for May ii, 1945, under the title "Werden die Seelen Frieden finden?" (Will the Souls Find Peace?).

The interview probably took place somewhat earlier.

A partial translation was published by the newspaper PM (New York), May to, 1945.

Peter Schmid: Do you not think that the end of the war will bring about great changes in the psyche of Euro- peans, particularly the Germans, who are now awakening as though from a long and terrible dream?

Carl Jung: Indeed I do.

As to the Germans, we have a psychic problem ahead of us the magnitude of which cannot yet be foreseen, though its outlines can already be discerned in the cases I am treating.

For the psychologist one thing is clear, and that is that he ought not to make the popular sentimental distinction between Nazis and opponents of the regime.

Two cases I am now treating are both outspoken anti-Nazis, and yet their dreams show that behind all the decency the most pronounced Nazi psychology is still alive with all its violence and savagery.

When Field Marshal von Kiichler,’ questioned by a Swiss reporter about the German atrocities in Poland, ex- claimed indignantly: "Excuse me, that wasn’t the Wehrmacht, it was the Party!" this proved that a division into decent and indecent Germans is thoroughly naïve.

All of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, have their share in the horrors; they knew nothing of what was going on and yet they did know, as though party to a secret contract genial.

For the psychologist the question of collective guilt, which worries politicians so much and will go on worrying them, is a fact, and it will be one of the most important tasks of therapy to get the Germans to admit this guilt.

Even now I am receiving many applications from Germans who want to be treated by me.

If they come from those "decent Germans" who want to foist the guilt onto a couple of men in the Gestapo, regard the case as hopeless.

I shall have no alternative ,but to answer the applications with a questionnaire asking certain crucial questions, like "What do you think about Buchenwald?"

Only when a patient sees and admits his own responsibility can individual treatment be considered.

But how was it possible that the Germans, of all people, got themselves into this hopeless psychic mess? Could it have happened to any other nation?

Here you must allow me to go back a bit and to recapitulate my theory as to the general psychic antecedents of this National Socialist war.

Let us take a small practical example as a starting point.

One day a woman comes to me and breaks out into the wildest accusations against her husband: he is a veritable devil who torments and persecutes her, and so on and so forth.

In reality the good man is a perfectly respectable citizen, quite innocent of any such demonic intentions. Where does this crazy idea come from in this woman?

It is the devil in her own soul that she is projecting; she has transferred her own wishes and her own rages to her husband.

I make this clear to her; she admits it and becomes a contrite little lamb.

Everything seems to be in order.

And yet that is just the thing I find most disquieting, because I don’t know where the devil, who had previ- ously attached himself to the image of the husband, has gone to.

Exactly the same thing happened on a large scale in the history of Europe.

For primitive man the world is full of demons and mysterious powers which he fears; the whole of Nature is animated by these forces, which are nothing but man’s own inner powers projected into the outside world.

Christianity and modern science have de-demonized Nature, which means that the European has consistently taken back the demonic powers out of the world into himself, and has steadily loaded his unconscious with them.

Out of man himself the demonic powers rise up in revolt against the supposed spiritual constraints of Christianity.

The demons begin to break out in Baroque art: the columns writhe, the furniture sprouts satyr’s feet.

Man is slowly transformed into a uroboros, the "tail-eater" who devours himself, from ancient times a symbol of the demon-ridden man.

The first perfect example of this species was Napoleon.

The Germans display a specific weakness in the face of these demons because of their incredible suggestibil- ity.

This shows itself in their love of obedience, their supine submission to commands, which are only another form of suggestion.

This hangs together with the general psychic inferiority of the Germans, the result of their precarious position between East and West.

Of all the Western peoples, they were the ones who, at the general exodus from the Eastern womb of the na- tions, remained too long with their mother.

Finally they did get out, but arrived too late, while the mujik never broke loose at all.

Hence the Germans are profoundly troubled with a national inferiority complex, which they try to compensate by megalomania: "Am deutschen Wesen soli die Welt genesen" —though they are none
too comfy in their own skins!

It is a typical adolescent psychology, apparent not only in the extraordinary prevalence of homosexuality but in the absence of an anima figure in German literature (the great exception here is Goethe).

It is also apparent in German sentimentality and "Gemiitlichkeit," which is really nothing but hardness of heart, unfeelingness, and soullessness.

All those charges of soullessness and bestiality which German propaganda levelled at the Russians apply to themselves; Goebbels’ speeches are nothing but German psychology projected upon the enemy.

The immaturity of the personality also displayed itself in a terrifying way in the German General Staff, whose lack of character resembled the squashiness of a mollusk inside a panzer.

Germany has always been the land of psychic catastrophes: the Reformation, peasant wars and wars of reli- gion.

Under National Socialism, the pressure of the demons became so great that they got human beings into their power and blew them up into lunatic supermen, first of all Hitler who then infected the rest.

All the Nazi leaders were possessed in the truest sense of the word, and it is assuredly no accident that their propaganda minister was branded with the ancient mark of the demonized man—a clubfoot.

Ten per cent of the German population today are hopeless psychopaths.

Peter Schmid: You have been talking of the psychic inferiority and demonic susceptibility of the Germans, but do you think this also applies to us Swiss, so far as we are Germanic in origin?

Dr. Jung: We are insulated against this susceptibility by the smallness of our country.

If eighty million Swiss were piled together the same thing might happen, for the demons hurl man is rootless and then the demons can get him.

Hence the technique of the Nazis never to form individuals but only huge masses. Hence, too, the faces of the demonized man of today: lifeless, rigid, blank.
We Swiss are protected against these dangers by our federalism and our individualism.

Such a mass accumulation would not be possible with us as it was in Germany, and in this isolation lies perhaps the therapy with which one can conquer the demons.

Peter Schmid: But what will happen if this therapy is carried out by bombs and guns?

Won’t military subjection of the demonized nation merely intensify the feeling of inferiority and make the disease worse?

Dr. Jung: The Germans today are like a drunken man who wakes up the next morning with a hangover. They don’t know what they’ve done and don’t want to know.

The only feeling is one of boundless misery.

They will make convulsive efforts to rehabilitate themselves in face of the accusations and hatred of the sur- rounding world, but that is not the right way.

The only redemption lies, as I have already indicated, in a complete admission of guilt. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

Out of honest contrition for sin comes divine grace.

That is not only a religious but also a psychological truth.

The American treatment of conducting the civilian population through the concentration camps and letting them see all the abominations committed there is therefore quite right.

Only, the object lesson should not be driven home with moral instruction; repentance must come from inside the Germans themselves.

It is possible that positive forces will emerge from the catastrophe, that from this introversion prophets will once again arise, for prophets are as characteristic of this strange people as the demons.

Anyone who falls so low has depth.

In all probability there will be a miraculous haul of souls for the Catholic Church—the Protestant Church is too split up.

There are reports that the general misery has reawakened the religious life in Germany; whole communities fall to their knees in the evenings, beseeching God to deliver them from the Antichrist.

Then one can hope that the demons will be banished and that a new and better world will rise on the ruins? No, the demons are not banished, that is a difficult task that still lies ahead.

Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult.

Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.

We love the criminal and take a burning interest in him because the devil makes us forget the beam in our own eye when observing the mote in our brother’s and in that way outwits us.

The Germans will recover when they admit their guilt and accept it; but the others will become victims of pos- session if, in their horror at the German guilt, they forget their own moral shortcomings.

We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious na- tions as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers.

"General suggestibility" plays a tremendous role in America today, and how much the Russians are already fascinated by the devil of power can easily be seen from the latest events, which must dampen our peace jubilations a bit.

The most sensible in this respect are the English: their individualism saves them from falling for the slogan, and the Swiss share their amazement at the collective unreason.

Then we must anxiously wait and see which way the demons go next?

I have already suggested that the only salvation lies in the piecemeal work of educating the individual. That is not as hopeless as it may appear.

The power of the demons is immense, and the most modern media of mass suggestion —press, radio, film, etc.—are at their service.

But Christianity, too, was able to hold its own against an overwhelming adversary not by propaganda and mass conversions—that came later and was of little value—but by persuasion from man to man.

And that is the way we also must go if we wish to conquer the demons.

I don’t envy you your task in writing about these things.

I hope you will succeed in presenting my ideas in such a way that people won’t find them too strange.

Unfortunately it is my fate that other people, especially those who are themselves possessed by demons, think me mad because I believe in these powers.

But that is their affair; I know they exist.

There are demons all right, as sure as there is a Buchenwald. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155

Carl Jung answers: What were the circumstances that induced you to work in the field of psychological research?

Emil A. Fischer: What were the circumstances that induced you to work in the field of psychological research?

Dr. Jung: Even as a small boy I noticed that people always did the contrary of what was said of them.

I found some of the people who were praised quite unbearable, whereas I thought others who were criticized quite pleasant.

I noticed the inconsistencies in the behavior of adults quite early on, because I spent my formative years in Basel, in a rather odd environment, which was frequented by people with a complicated psychic structure.

When I was barely four years old, someone said to me in an exaggeratedly childish tone: "Where do you think you are going with your rocking horse?"

I reacted quite the enfant terrible: "Mama, why does this man say such nonsense?" Even as a child I clearly felt that people did not say what was really in their minds.

Emil A. Fischer: Isn’t it possible for people to come to psychology in exactly the opposite way? Don’t some people feel attracted to psychology because they want to find an explanation for the chaos within themselves?

Dr. Jung: Certainly! If you take a critical look at people, you will find that some of them are involved in psy- chology only in order to demonstrate that "the other person" is even more neurotic.

However, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Emil A. Fischer: Isn’t nature particularly important for you to sustain and enhance your personal productivity?

Dr. Jung: Nature can help you only if you manage to get time for yourself.

You need to be able to relax in the garden, completely at peace, or to walk.

From time to time I need to stop, to just stand there. If someone were to ask me: What are you thinking of just now ?—I wouldn’t know.

I think unconsciously. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167

Carl Jung answers: Where do you get the incentive for your creative work, Professor?

Emil A. Fischer: Where do you get the incentive for your creative work, Professor? One is always in the dark about one’s own personality.
One needs others to get to know oneself.

Having said this—I actually started out by simply doing routine scientific work.

I always followed the motto that it is worth doing something only if you do it right! The incentives for my creative work are rooted in my temperament.

Diligence and a strong desire for knowledge accompanied me throughout life.

I do not derive any satisfaction from knowing things superficially: I want to know them thoroughly.

When I came to the conclusion that I had only hazy notions of the primitives, and that it was not possible to acquire full knowledge about them through books, I started traveling in Africa, New Mexico, and India.

For the same reason I also started learning Swahili. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167

Dr. Jung and the meaning of: "Called or uncalled, God is present!"

Dr. Jung:

"Called or uncalled, God is present!" It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus.

You ask whether the oracle is my motto. In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. "Oh God!" is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love.

Isn’t the psyche of the artist and the intellectual particularly complex and worthy of closer consideration?

So far, too much one-sided attention has been focused on the morbid aspect of the matter.

I wonder why there is so much nonsensical theorizing about the pathology of outstanding people.

Most psychopaths are not geniuses; and on the other hand there are many geniuses who do not show the slightest traces of pathology.

What is much more significant in this context is the shadow! It is important to see also the negative sides of great men.
On Palm Sunday, Christ temporarily played the role of a political Messiah.

His negative side and his power are symbolically displayed in the temptation by the Devil. Biographies should show people in their undershirts.
Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man.

This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship! Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167

Dr. Jung gives a WARTIME INTERVIEW

[Dr. Jung gives a WARTIME INTERVIEW]

Introduction: In the summer of 1942, Switzerland was encircled by the Axis powers—on the west, France un- occupied and occupied was under Nazi control.

For the Allies it was the darkest time of the war.

The Swiss, in their neutrality, carried on an existence as nearly normal as they could.

The Eranos Conference, at Ascona, went on with plans for its annual meeting in August, on the theme "The Hermetic Principle in Mythology, Gnosis, and Alchemy."

Jung agreed to speak on an alchemical subject, "The Spirit Mercurius,"’ and when the Tribune de Geneve sent a journalist to interview him on "the spiritual values of the Swiss" in June, he was deep in research.

The interviewer, Pierre Courthion, was a French-Swiss art historian and educator, who had served the League of Nations as chief of the arts section of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation and had written and lectured widely on modern art.

His article, published on June 19, 1942, is somewhat abridged in this version.

Pierre Courthion: C. G. Jung lives in Kiisnacht, at the back of a garden, in a comfortable house full of Biedermeyer furniture and family pictures.

His secretary took me to a book-lined room, its tables piled with manuscripts, and I saw a very tall man com- ing toward me.

He was dressed in dark clothes and wore a little black silk skull cap.

Pushing aside with an enormous hand the lectern on which a volume of Berthelot’s Greek texts’ lay open, he offered me a seat and sat down himself in an armchair by the window.

While he was inquiring if I had had much trouble finding the place (which is secluded, at number 228 on the interminable Seestrasse, past the village and the Sonne hotel) I watched him against the light from windows through which the branches of the still-leafless trees could be seen trembling in the mist.

Jung lighted his copper-stemmed pipe and told me about his life; his travels as an "itinerant psychologist" to India, then Africa,’ to study the psychology of primitive people.

From Kenya and Uganda he went to the Sudan and Khartoum, then down the Nile to investigate the influence of the African mentality on Egypt.

"In Egypt," he said, "the external appearance is Asiatic, but there is a religious influence that is entirely African."

And, Jung told me humorously, when he got back to Switzerland he realized that he had gone a long way looking for what he could have found close to home, in the Lotschenta, for example. "These
studies," he said, "are not easy.

You have to get people’s confidence before they will tell you about themselves. But what surprises!

Things you read about in Paracelsus still exist. I’ve met sorcerers, spell-casters.

Did you know that there are still some places in Bern or St. Gall where they make pacts with the devil and sign them with blood?

That they practice magic on cows?

In the Swiss soul, as all human souls, there are regions we do not know about. . . .""What will individuals of different types tend to do?

That’s very important to know. The rest is just mechanics.

The creative instinct, the will of the creator, that is what matters.

In other words: With the devil’s grandmother for a mother and the devil for a father, how does one get to be the good Lord’s child?"

Jung has a laugh whose sonority is somehow intentionally reassuring.

When I asked him about the signs and symbols being studied again today, he said: "The symbol has a very complex meaning because it defies reason; it always presupposes a lot of meanings that can’t be comprehended in a single logical concept.

The symbol has a future.

The past does not suffice to interpret it, because germs of the future are included in every actual situation.

That’s why, in elucidating a case, the symbolism is spontaneously applicable, for it contains the future; within its zone of mystery, it comprises the individual’s defense.

For example, a developing disease always has a counter-aspect: together with fever as a germ infection, there is simultaneously fever as a bodily reaction and defense.

Why, the dream is even a defense.

In explaining dreams from a causal point of view, Freud got to their primary causes. But what interests me is why a person dreams of one thing rather than another.

If you look at a dream conscientiously you can see that some of the details in it have been changed from im- pressions that you had before.

Thus the dream invents an accident when it needs one, when it wants an accident.

In the end, we have to ask what the aim of the dream is from a teleological point of view. Why does this person’s unconscious wish to show him an image like that?
And here is where I learned a great deal from primitive people: the dream is a product of the imagination, a gallery of images, images of protection from some blow that is threatening; the function of the dream is to compensate the conscious attitude.

I believe that what dreams show us in vivid and impressive images are our vulnerable points. That is why the medieval doctors asked about dreams.
So we must observe the same rule.

A Dutchman said, ’Magic is the science of the jungle,’ and the Chinese claim that when we wake up troubled it is because the soul—kuei, the body-soul, which is less spiritual than the spirit and causes apparitions (ghosts) after death—is hovering above us.

The imagery of alchemy is found all over the world."

Jung’s firm strength surprised me, and the modest way he had of expressing his experience of the human soul in a few words (on a scale that ranges from the greatest common sense to extreme intuition).

He spoke slowly, distinctly; then, as if perceiving my confusion in traversing this obscure psychological domain where he himself moves so easily, he stopped for a moment and got up to switch on an overhead lamp. Its reflections made the shadows of his face look purple.

Our interview continued between two lights: the fading light of day (thick fog right up to the windows now) and the still tentative light from the lamp, filtered through its yellow shade.

In the confined space of the room, fantastic, flickering apparitions came to life.

Still illustrating the premonitions he had mentioned before, Jung said to me, "Take the tendency to commit suicide—right from the beginning.

What happens?

You don’t pay attention on the street. One day you fall down stairs. Then there is a little automobile accident. It doesn’t look like anything.
Yet these are the preliminaries. Chance? Primitive people never mention chance.

That is why I say, ‘Be careful when you are not at one with yourself, in your moments of dissociation.’ "

Jung sat up in his big green armchair and put down his pipe, by that gesture emphasizing what he was about to say.

Weighing each word, he stated, "One must never give way to fear, but one must admit to oneself that one is afraid."

Yet knowing about a repression does not always cure it; sometimes one has to confess to it openly.

Then the doctor told me an ultra-simple tale about a hotel maid who came to him seeking treatment for the agonies of insomnia.

He explained to her about sailing a boat, how one lets oneself go with the wind. "When you want to sleep," he told her, "go with the wind."
And in the rhythmic reassurance of being rocked the young woman found sleep again.’ "You see," he said, "nothing is more thrilling than trying to understand.
One comes to see that life is great and beautiful, that nonsense and stupidity do not always triumph."

Carl Gustav Jung stood up, and it seemed to me that I was now facing another man, pale, with an arched nose, almost pointed at the tip.

He took off his cap (his forehead is higher than I expected) and led the way to another room, equally encum- bered with old books and work tables, there he showed me some remarkable paintings on cloth
made by Tibetan monks.

The door onto the stairs was partially open and the big house was full of voices and laughter.

A burst of sound escaping from a piano somewhere brought us a phrase of Schumann.

My host accompanied me to the garden gate.

In the night fog we spoke sadly of the replica of servitude to which many individuals are reduced.

But as I grasped Jung’s powerful hand in mine, I felt passing into me the vibrant, tenacious, communicative warmth of an immense hope. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

Carl Jung on the provisional life; where one does not exist really

The provisional life; where one does not exist really, they are only a spectator; so any experience is ghost-like, perfectly abstract, without a trace of realization.

I remember a very impressive case of this, a girl about 25 years old.

She proved to be absolutely inaccessi- ble.

She lived things, she did things, but she did not know what she was living.

I said: "Cannot you see what you do, damn it?"
But no, nothing touched her, so she had no relation to the world at all, she lived in a sort of mist.

Finally I said: "Well, it is no good, I cannot waste my time any longer; if you will not try to see what you are doing I must give it up."

And it happened three or four months later she shot herself, and since she was a stranger here I was called in to give evidence.

I saw the corpse.

She had shot herself through the heart in the street and had not lost consciousness for a minute or two.

The expression on her face was completely altered. For a long time I stood watching her face and asking my- self: "What kind of expression is that?"

It was most extraordinary, the expression of someone who was convinced, say, that a thing was black, and to whom it was very important that it was black, but to whom one had finally prove that it was red; and it was as if she suddenly realized it was red.

It was a look full bewilderment and a sort of of pleasant surprise.

I saw what had happened: at the moment when she shot herself, while she was still alive, yet felt it was done and irrevocable, she understood what life was for the first time.

I have seen several cases where serious attempts at suicide have occurred, and just as they thought: now it is the end, they understood what life was, and they never tried it again.

Sometimes people have to injure themselves very badly in order to awaken to what life really is.

The unconscious works sometimes with the most amazing cunning, arranging certain fatal situations, fatal ex- periences, which make people wake up; they are dangerous, they may cost their lives, but that simply shows how deeply unconscious people often are. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 339-340.

Carl Jung has a Visit from a young Quaker

Carl Jung has a Visit from a young Quaker

A VISIT FROM A YOUNG QUAKER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he simply was adamant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Ocampo pays Jung a visit.

Introduction: The distinguished Argentine writer, publisher, and translator Victoria Ocampo had apparently not met Jung before the encounter with him, in 1934, that she describes in this extract from an article in La Nacion (Buenos Aires), March 5, 1936.

Earlier, however, she had arranged to have Jung’s Psychological Types translated into Spanish by Ram6n Gomez de la Serna; it was published in Buenos Aires late in 1934, and for it Jung had written a special foreword, dated October 1934 (included in CW 6).

Jung, for his part, was acquainted with Victoria Ocampo’s personality through numerous references to her in letters written to him by Count Hermann Keyserling, who, in a letter in November 1929, described a "strangely in- tense and at the same time unreal relationship" that had developed between them during his travels in South America.

Some of Jung’s letters to Keyserling that discuss the relationship are published in Letters, edited by Gerhard Adler, vol. 1, Dec. 20, 1929, April 23, 1931, and August 13, 1931. (The first part of Victoria Ocampo’s 1936 article discussed ideas provoked by Psychological Types. The entire article was collected in Domingos en Hyde Park, 1936, a volume in Ocampo’s Testimonios.)

Victoria Ocampo: In October of 1934, on my return from Rome to Paris, I made a detour and stopped in Zurich to see the author of Psychological Types.

It was pouring rain that afternoon when in Kusnacht my taxi dropped me, armed with an umbrella, and dis- armed by contradictory emotions, before Dr. Jung’s door.

Was it because of the long hours on the train, the sudden change of temperature, the rain, the proximity of the great man? I don’t know.

The fact is that I was aware of the growth and development within me of one of those inferiority complexes which make us feel and play the role of the idiot to perfection.

It was in this unhappy state that I, my umbrella, and my emotions, entered the house of the famous Swiss psychiatrist.

But my umbrella—whose fate I envied at that moment—remained in the vestibule while we (my emotions and I) had to go up a staircase.

We were requested to wait in a small study, its walls lined with books. This interval was providential.
On several shelves, I suddenly perceived, lined up in a tight row, a regiment of detective novels.

The arrival of the dove with the olive branch could not have produced in Noah’s heart greater delight than this discovery did in mine.

To me it also announced "Land!" "Homo sum!" I thought.
In Dr. Jung’s house they (he or his family) also read those completely silly stories that were read in mine or yours, and which relax you like a yawn.

I finally recovered my nerve.

True, I know through experience the weakness of certain princes of the mind for detective novels; my library, rich in this type of literature, has repeatedly been sacked by such people.

But despite this, I did not expect to find Edgar Wallace in the home of the most eminent professor of the University of Zurich.

I was enchanted.

Completely comforted, a few minutes later I entered Dr. Jung’s office.

I immediately notice that he is tall, very tall.

But, strangely, my eyes, which I raise to his, do not learn from his face anything but an expression of power and intelligence which suffuses it; an intelligence which comes at me like an enormous elephant, blotting out all else.

An elephantine intelligence!

It is my feeling that that great intelligence which sees everything does not see me, that it is going to knock me down and flatten me out.

Instinctively I tend to avoid him and to throw things at him.

He catches them one by one, with that extreme, incredible adroitness of elephants ... (whether it is a matter of tearing up a tree trunk or catching a cube of sugar).

And so we start our conversation.

Suddenly he says something which I still ponder and which I believe is, of the entire interview, most worthy of repeating.

When I ask him whether he would not like to deliver some lectures in Argentina, he answers: "What for? They could not be interested.
They would not understand.

Because they are Latins? Because they are Catholics ?"

I wished I might have immediately been given a long lecture to explain what he meant; but patients were waiting for him, with God knows what burden of complexes.

Jung accompanied me to the vestibule (where I picked up my umbrella, which I no longer envied). His two dogs did not leave his side, and jostling them, we all went down the stairs.

One was an extravert, the other an introvert, the master of the house told me, laughing.

I did not have to ask which one was which.
As he himself confessed, Psychological Types, which I recommend to my friends both known and unknown, "is the result of almost twenty years’ work in the field of practical psychology."

Huxley says that when we read Jung’s books, we feel that his intuitive understanding of the human being is as profound as Dostoevsky’s.

For myself, I confess that a work like Psychological Types stirred me as deeply as the Brothers Karamazov. Carl Jung,
C.G. Jung: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 82-84

Carl Jung: Have you ever met any people who have seen Ufos

QUESTION 8: Have you ever met any people who have seen Ufos, and were they prepared to interpret this experience purely psychologically and not insist on the physical reality of the Ufos?

Dr. Jung: I actually do know of four cases of people who have seen Ufos or said they did. They are not in the least prepared to interpret the Ufos psychologically.

They are more inclined to ask me, Do you think this is psychological? because for them it was felt as thor- oughly real.

There was, for instance, the case of a doctor in an American city who together with many other people ob- served a Ufo for three-quarters of an hour in the form of a small silvery sphere or disc which then suddenly vanished.

Knowing this man to be a regular camera fiend, I assumed he had taken a marvellous photo of this phenomenon.

But astonishingly enough he hadn’t, although he carried his camera with him, “as always."

Another man was driving with his wife over the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, when she saw in the west about twenty Ufos flying in the Pacific.

She drew her husband’s attention to them and he saw them too. The spheres or discs gleamed like silver in the sun.
Both sent me eyewitness reports and some time later I saw the man personally, whereupon he expressed his astonishment at my interest in such things.

But this, you see, is also a contribution to psychology. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 389-391

Carl Jung answers a series of questions

AT THE BASEL PSYCHOLOGY CLUB

On November i , 1958, Jung visited a small study group of the Psychologische Gesellschaft in Basel and an- swered a series of written questions, besides other questions spoken from the audience.

The event was tape-recorded and transcribed, and it is first published here, in translation. Square brackets indicate lacunae in the text or conjectural readings.

Dr. Jung: I would like to thank you for crediting me with the ability to say something sensible in spite of my advanced years.

This cannot be taken entirely for granted since I tend for the most part to be very absent-minded.

Concentrating on your difficult questions might thus end in the fiasco of my getting lost in some train of thought. So I beg you to call me to order if it seems to you that I am wandering off somewhere into the blue.
QUESTION I:

What is the criterion that indicates whether an archetypal dream or a vision should make an obligatory demand on an individual, or be evaluated only as an expression of a general contemporary event which the dreamer has picked up and which does not address him as an individual human being?

Dr. Jung: The desired criterion here is whether the dreamer feels numinously addressed by the dream. If not, then it doesn’t concern him—and it doesn’t concern me either.

At most it could initiate a theoretical bandying about of words, which of course is futile.

QUESTION 2: Can myth be equated with a collective dream? If so, are we to assume that a historical event either precedes or follows it?

Dr. Jung: Here you must define more precisely what you mean by myth. Strictly speaking, a myth is a historical document.
It is told, it is recorded, but it is not in itself a dream.

It is the product of an unconscious process in a particular social group, at a particular time, at a particular place.

This unconscious process can naturally be equated with a dream.

Hence anyone who "mythologizes," that is, tells myths, is speaking out of this dream, and what is then retold or actually recorded is the myth.

But you cannot, strictly speaking, properly take the myth as a unique historical event like a dream, an individ- ual dream which has its place in a time sequence; you can do that only grosso modo.

You can say that at a particular place, at a particular time, a particular social group was caught up in such a process, and perhaps you can so to speak condense this process, covering it may be several thousand years, and say this epoch historically precedes such and such, and historically follows such and such.

This is a very troublesome undertaking.

What precedes the myth of Osiris, for example?

The Osiris myth goes back to approximately 4000 B.C. What preceded it?
Total darkness.

We just don’t know. And what followed it?

The answer to this is of course much easier: the Osiris myth was followed by the Christ myth.

That is perfectly clear, even though theologians assure us that remarkably enough the mental outlook of the New Testament has nothing to do with Egyptology, or precious little; but it is simply that people know too little, that’s all.

I will give you only one example.

As you know, Christ’s genealogical table in the New Testament consists of 3 x 14 names.’

The number 14 is significant, because at the great Heb-Sed festival of the ancient Egyptians, celebrated every thirty years to reaffirm Pharaoh as God’s son, statues of 14 of his ancestors were carried before him at the procession, and if 14 ancestors couldn’t be found, some invented ones were added—there had to be 14 of them.’

Well, in the case of God’s son Christ, who was of course infinitely more exalted than Pharaoh, there had to be 3 x 14 generations, and that is a Trishagion, the well-known triple formula for "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Sabaoth."

This triple repetition is simply an expression of the numinosity of the "Thrice Holy." Here, then, we have one such trace [of Egyptian influence].
If you carefully study the statements about Christ that have been handed down historically, you will find they are mythological statements intimately connected with the myth of Osiris.

That is why Christianity spread into Egypt without meeting the slightest resistance.

The country was Christianized in no time because all the necessary precedents already existed.

Take for example the fish, the fish attribute of Christ: it was swallowed by the Egyptians without question be- cause they already had a day on which a certain fish might be eaten and on other days not.

All this quite apart from the spiritual content of the Osiris myth.

Now it is the case with most myths, when you examine them more closely, that the historical event can be es- tablished post festum but not ante festum, because the more numinous these mythological statements are, the further they recede into the dim bygone of human history.

We at any rate are in the fortunate position of late epigoni, who, looking back on three Platonic months, three aeons of conscious history, can demonstrate that these myths form a continuity.

Thus the Osiris myth was clearly superseded by the Christ myth. This is one of the finest examples of mythological continuity.
It is as though in the course of the millennia slow upheavals took place in the unconscious, each new aeon be- ing as it were ushered in by a new myth.

The myth is not new, it is age-old, but a new version, a new edition of it, a new interpretation characterizes the new epoch.

That is why, for the ancients, the transition from one age to another was an important event.

For instance Hammurabi, the famous Babylonian lawgiver, felt he was the Lord of a new aeon; he lived around 2000 B.C.

That is roughly the time when the Jewish tradition began.

Think, also, of the Augustan Age another two thousand years later, which began with Divus Augustus, whose

birth was regarded as the birth of a savior.

And if you recall Virgil’s 4th Eclogue,’ you will see that the child who ushers in the coming age is a bringer of peace, a savior, who was naturally interpreted by the Christians as Christ.

The date of Virgil’s poem is pre-Christian. For him it was certainly the birth of Augustus that was meant.

At that time there was a tremendous longing for redemption in Italy, because two thirds—please note—two thirds of the population consisted of slaves whose fate was hopelessly sealed.

That gave rise to a general mood of depression, and in the melancholy of the Augustan Age this longing for redemption came to expression.

Therefore a man who knew how to "mythologize," like Virgil, expressed this situation in the 4th Eclogue. Thanks to this prophetic gift he is also the psychopomp in Dante, the guide of souls in purgatory and in hell.

Afterwards, of course, in the Christian paradise, he had to surrender this role to the feminine principle [Beat- rice], and this is naturally highly significant in view of the future recognition of the feminine figure in Christianity.

But all that was in Dante’s time.

Then, as you know, it was six hundred years until the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by Pius IX,’ and another hundred years until the promulgation of the Assumption.

QUESTION 3: Do you believe we are heading for complete barbarism in the new aeon, or is there still some likelihood that cultural disaster can be avoided?


Dr. Jung: I must confess that in this matter I believe nothing, for I just don’t know.

I can’t believe anything I don’t know, and once I know it I don’t need to believe it any more.

I don’t know whether we are heading for complete disaster, I only know that things look very black—but you know that too.

I don’t want to play the prophet, but you see, the great problem before us is over-population, not the atom bomb.

The atom bomb, teleologically considered, makes provision for the disposal of the surplus.

There are population statistics which already predict even more serious food shortages in 1965; India, the entire subcontinent of India is already in the grip of this crisis.
The slightest disturbance in the seasonal fertility leads to frightful famines, and the same is true of China.

Now they have stamped out malaria in India and that alone causes an immense population increase, quite apart from all the epidemics of cholera and plague that have been averted.

However, it is likely that in time they will have to be allowed to spread again; it is the only possible way of skimming off the surplus population.

This is not my idea; I have talked with the Chief of Public Hygiene who has a big laboratory on the Gulf of Kutch, the main import center for such articles as smallpox, cholera, and plague.

He told me that they can imagine no other solution of the overpopulation problem in India except a colossal epidemic. In 1920, for instance, following the influenza epidemic, they had a loss of 675,000 lives.
But that is exactly the surplus birthrate for one year and it goes on piling up like an avalanche. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Can’t something be done with birth control?

Carl Jung: Well, they have granted half a million pounds for that, and you should just ask the Indians what good it has done and how it went down with the masses—you can imagine.

It amounts to nothing at all, a drop of water on a hot stove.

The decrease of population doesn’t begin with the educated classes who understand birth control; it must begin with the lower classes, and in India until recently only 20 per cent of them were not illiterate.

Today about half the population is still illiterate.

You can imagine what birth control means under these conditions: nothing.

They are little better than cave-dwellers, and many of them are still completely wild tribesmen. Reasonable measures like these are quite hopeless.
The birth rate can only be controlled by catastrophes, short of a miracle.

The question naturally arises: What will happen if the world population goes on increasing and people are huddled together still more as a result?

It will produce a frightful tension which can discharge itself in one way or another, and on the rational side we have no answer and on the irrational side we can expect heaven knows what, at any rate nothing particularly hopeful.

You can put this down to the pessimism of old age.

At all events, it is highly probable that we are heading for an extremely critical time, which all of us may per- haps not experience—the peak of it, that is—because we are the end of the Pisces aeon and can certainly expect that with the transition to the new aeon of Aquarius, approximately 150-200 years from now, our distant descendants will experience all sorts of things.

This atom bomb business, for instance, is terribly characteristic of Aquarius, whose ruler is Uranos, the Lord of unpredictable events.

But this is speculation.

Have you any questions? I wouldn’t want my esteemed audience to be left out of it!

QUESTION 4: Since our consciousness is one of the contents of the self, can we assume that individual consciousness continues after death? Do you know any modern dream material which would corroborate such an assumption? Does the concept of eternal life mean the preservation of individual consciousness, or that the human soul enters into other forms and configurations, thereby losing its individuality?

Carl Jung: You realize that this is very difficult to answer. To put it briefly, it’s a question of conscious immortality. This is a question our Lord Buddha was asked twice.
For his disciples it was naturally a matter of great concern whether the karma that passes from one genera- tion to another by metempsychosis is personal, and represents a personal continuity, or whether it is impersonal.

In the latter case it’s as though there were an unconscious karma suspended somewhere, which is seized upon in the act of birth and is reincarnated with no awareness of any personal continuity.

That is one aspect.

The other aspect is that this karma is by nature, conscious, having a subjective consciousness, and when this is reincarnated it becomes potentially possible to remember one’s previous births because of this karma’s transcen- dent self-awareness.

Both times Buddha evaded the question, he didn’t go into it, although he himself asserted that he was aware of his previous births, about 560 incarnations in all conceivable forms, plant, animal, and human.

So you see that in those times, when people were not exactly sparing with metaphysical assertions, there being as yet no theory of knowledge, Buddha rejected this question as useless.

He thought it much more useful to meditate on the nidana chain, the chain of cause and effect, consisting of old age, sickness, and death, than to speculate about immortality.

And in a sense such speculation is sterile, because we are never in a position to adduce any valid proofs in this respect.

If we could eventually adduce any proof it would be of a man, say, appearing as a ghost one year or two years or ten years or maybe even twenty years after his death.

But we still cannot prove that this ghost is identical with this dead man.

There is thus no possibility whatever of furnishing proofs, because even if the ghost of a dead man were to reveal something that only he had known in his lifetime and no one else—and there are such cases, well authenticated cases—the question would still remain as to how that was related to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.

The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental.

It is something we cannot grasp at all, for we are not yet eternal and consequently can say nothing whatever about eternity, our consciousness being what it is.

These are transcendental speculations, which may be so or may not be so.

Hence for epistemological reasons it is absolutely impossible to make out anything with certainty in this matter.

On the other hand, the question of immortality is so urgent, of such immediacy, that one ought nevertheless to give some kind of answer.

So I say to myself, Well then, if I am up against a question I cannot answer and yet ought to answer for the peace of my soul, for my own well-being, I can be so disquieted by this question that an answer is
absolutely imperative.

At any rate I ought to try to form an opinion about it with the help of the unconscious, and the unconscious then obliges and produces dreams which point to a continuation of life after death.

There is no doubt of that, I have seen many examples of this kind.

Now of course you can say these are only fantasies, compensating fantasies which we cannot hinder, which are rooted in our nature—all life desires eternity—but they are far from being a proof.

On the other hand, we must tell ourselves that though this argument is all right as far as it goes, we have irrefutable evidence that at least parts of our psyche are not subject to the laws of space and time, otherwise perceptions outside space and time would be altogether impossible— yet they exist, they happen.

All cases of telepathic clairvoyance, predictions of the future—they exist.

I have been able to verify this from countless experiences, not to mention Rhine’s experiments, which can’t be refuted unless you stand the whole theory of probability on its head.

This has actually been proposed, a whole new probability theory should be invented, though how this could be done without violations of logic is completely beyond me.

At any rate we have at present no means of contesting Rhine’s results, quite apart from the numerous instances of prediction, nonspatial perception, and the like.

This offers the clearest and most incontrovertible proof that our conceptions of space and time, as seen from the causal, rationalistic standpoint, are incomplete.

To get a complete picture of the world we would have to add another dimension, or we could never explain the totality of the phenomena in a unified way.

That is why rationalists maintain through thick and thin that no such experiences as clairvoyance and the like exist, because the rationalistic view of the world stands or falls with the reality of these
phenomena.

But if they do exist, our rationalistic view of the world is untenable.

You know that in modern physics the possibility that the universe has several dimensions is no longer denied.

We must reckon with the fact that this empirical world is in a sense appearance, that is to say it is related to another order of things below it or behind it, where "here" and "there" do not exist; where there is no extension in space, which means that space doesn’t exist, and no extension in time, which means that time doesn’t exist.

There are experiences where space is reduced by 20 per cent, or time by 90 per cent, so that the time concept is only zero percent valid.

If that is so—and I see no possibility of disputing it—we must face the fact that something of our psychic existence is outside space and time, that is, beyond changeability, or one could also say, changeable only in infinite spaces of time.

These are ideas which for us are logical deductions, but are commonly held views in India. For instance, if you read the Buddha stories in the [Pali Canon], you will find many examples.
Here is one: When the Buddha was dwelling in the grove he suddenly heard that one of the highest Brahma gods had a wrong thought.

He at once betook himself to the highest Brahma world and found the Brahma god in a fort—actually the palace of the Rajah or the Maharajah—and in the spacious paradisal gardens of this fort, set on a
high peak of the Himalayas, the Brahma god was enjoying himself with his court ladies.

They had climbed up a tree and were throwing flowers and fruit down and he found it delightful and said to the Buddha, This spectacle you see, this joy and this pleasure, will endure forever because I am
immortal.

Then said the Buddha, There you make your mistake.

Your life will endure for kalpas, for cosmic ages, but sometime it will come to an end. The Brahma god wouldn’t believe it.
At this moment there was suddenly absolute silence.

No flowers and no fruit fell down any more, the laughter of the court ladies froze, and the Brahma god was very astonished and said, What’s up?

Then said the Buddha, At this very moment the karma of your court ladies is extinguished and they are no more—and so it will fare with you.

Then the Brahma god was converted to the Lord Buddha and vowed him true discipleship. That is the story. Life may endure for an infinity of kalpas but it is not eternal.

Of course that doesn’t bother us much.

But it does show that in India there was a realization of the relativity of time.

It is an intuition, naturally evolved and become second nature, of what is probably the actual state of our world.

We see a world of consciousness from which we can’t really draw any conclusions, but then we know from ex- perience that there is a background which is absolutely necessary, otherwise we couldn’t explain the phenomena of this world. In consequence, we are unable to explain a prediction of the future or a spatial extrasensory perception in terms of special radar facilities, for even the finest radar cannot predict an event taking place a fortnight hence.

We always use this radar comparison to explain seeing at a distance in space, but you get nowhere with it in explaining seeing at a distance in time.

QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Some years ago you once talked about the physicist’s concept of the time quantum, according to which there is not time in between two time quanta, so that what appears between them is a kind of timelessness. Would you elaborate on this?

Dr. Jung: That is really beside the point, it is only an analogy for making comprehensible how timelessness must be implicit in the time concept, as is necessary for logical reasons.

When you say "high" you also mean "low" without saying so.

When we speak of time we must also have the concept of nontime.

Just as we have the quantum concept in energy, so also, since time is a phenomenon of energy, we can speak [without any difference of a succession of such [time quanta], that is, of these gaps then produced.

The quantum theory is a theory of the discontinuity of events, and that is why Einstein tried to bridge over the gaps.

It was a thorn in his eye that discontinuities exist; the perfect world-creator cannot afford discontinuities, everything should be rational, but it just isn

We are not in a position to prove that anything of us is necessarily preserved for eternity. But we can assume with great probability that something of our psyche goes on existing. Whether this part is in itself conscious, we don’t know either.

There is also the consideration, based on experience, that any split-off part of the psyche, if it can manifest it- self at all, always does so in the form of a personality, as though it possessed a consciousness of itself.

That is why the voices heard by the insane are personal.

All split-off complexes speak in personal form whenever they express themselves.

You can, if you like, or if you feel the need, take this as an argument in favor of a continuity of consciousness.

In general one could say that since consciousness is an important psychic phenomenon, why shouldn’t it be just that part of the psyche which is not affected by space and time?

In other words, it goes on existing relatively outside space and time, which would by no means be a proof of immortality but rather of an existence for an indefinite time after or beyond death.

In support of this psychological hypothesis you can also adduce the experiential fact that in conditions which by all medical standards are profoundly unconscious, resulting from cerebral anemia or shock, the most complicated dreams can occur, presupposing a high degree of conscious activity as well as the presence of an individual consciousness, despite the fact that for sound commonsense any psychic activity is no longer possible.

So if I fall into an absolute coma and am totally unconscious of my coma, it is possible for a big dream to take place in this coma.

Well, who is doing that, and where?

It is explained that because of the lack of blood the brain is incapable of sustaining consciousness. But how then does it sustain a dream in which an individual consciousness is present?

Two German physiologists have published a very interesting work on subjective levitation phenomena following brain injuries.

Such cases have been observed fairly often, though these things are rather rare. For instance, a soldier is shot in the head in combat and lies there as if dead.
But, in his subjective consciousness, he rises up in the air in the position in which he is lying.

The noise of battle is completely extinguished, he sees the whole terrain, he sees the other people, but it is all utterly soundless and still; then he hears his name, a comrade is calling to him and he comes to himself and is now really a wounded man.

But up to that point he is in a state of levitation, he is as though lifted out of this world, yet though it continues to exist and he has some perception of it, it no longer affects him.

By any human standard such a person is profoundly unconscious.

But in his unconsciousness he undergoes a subjective experience which is simply psychic, and which can be placed on entirely the same footing as consciousness.

It is observations like these that have to be considered here.

The concept of immortality tells us nothing about the related idea of rebirth or metempsychosis. Here again we have to depend on dreams that give us a few hints.
But it is worth bearing in mind that a highly civilized continent like India—that is, highly civilized in its spiritual culture—is absolutely convinced of the transmigration of souls, and that reincarnation is regarded as self-evident.

This is as much taken for granted as our assumption that God created the world or that some kind of spiritus rector exists—that would be a fitting comparison.

Educated Indians know that we don’t think as they do, but that doesn’t bother them in the least; they simply find it stupid that we don’t think that way.

When I was in India, a doctor gave me a whole dossier about a child of four, a little girl who remembered her previous life.

She had been reborn a few years after her death and knew what her name was previously, her husband’s name, what children she had and where she lived.

So when she was four years old—in India children are very precocious—her father went with her to that dis- tant city and let himself be shown round by the child.

She led him to her house, where she had been the mother, where her children still were, where her husband was, and she recognized everybody, even the grandmother—an Indian household always has a grandmother on top—she knew them all and was then accepted as the previous wife.

I have never heard of such a thing in Europe.

Certainly there are many people among us today who believe in reincarnation.

Maybe it is simply a sign of our [. . .] and barbarism that we don’t think like that and are only just beginning to take such thoughts seriously.

But in India, whose civilization is so much older than ours and where there is also a much greater inner culture, these ideas were arrived at very early and the Indians have never got out of them.

They took them over from the age of primitives, for practically all primitives believe that there is a continuity within the tribe.

Hence the amusing [custom] of certain Eskimos who put one of the grandfather’s lice on the head of the grandchild, so that the soul substance of the grandfather shall be passed on to him.

So you see, the matter is a bit complicated, but I hope you have understood what I mean. [Two members of the audience then relate examples of the transmigration of souls.] Individual instances like this certainly do exist but they are very uncommon.

There is also an interesting story that allegedly happened in England.

A house began to be haunted and the whole household was terribly frightened of the ghost.

Now there was a society lady who had no connection with this house but had longed for years to own a certain house which she claimed was hers.

She searched everywhere to find something answering to this description, saying she would buy it. Then she suddenly hit on this house, which was up for sale because it was haunted.

And when she came the housekeeper opened the door and ran off with a shriek, and it turned out that she herself was the ghost who had been haunting the house for a long time because she had seen it in her imagination.

So she got her house, or so the story goes. But—si non e vero!
QUESTION 5: Can I help the spirit of my dead father by trying to live in accordance with the demands of the unconscious?

Dr. Jung: Yes, provided—one must always add—that the spirit of the dead father [remains a living idea].

I call this idea hygienic, because when I think that way everything is right in my psychic life and when I don’t think that way everything goes wrong, then somewhere things don’t click, at least in the biological sense.

It’s as if I ate something that rationally considered is harmless but it doesn’t agree with me—I get the stomach ache.
But if I eat something that rationally considered is not good, it does agree with me so why shouldn’t I eat it?

It is even advisable to do so.

For instance, for many people there is no harm in drinking a glass of red wine, while for others it is sheer poison and can have very bad consequences, but that doesn’t mean that because it has bad consequences sometimes, one shouldn’t drink wine.

Rationally one can argue that the enjoyment of alcohol is harmful, but it is not true in general, only in certain cases.

So it is much better that we do what agrees with us than what does not agree with us.

It agrees with human beings to have ideas about things they cannot know.
And if they have these ideas that suit them, they are better off psychologically.

They feel better, they sleep better, have a better appetite, and that’s the only criterion we have.

It means a tremendous lot to people if they can assume their lives have an indefinite continuity; they live more sensibly, they don’t need to hurry any more.

They have centuries to waste, so why this senseless rush?

But of course one always wants to know whether it is really so—as if anyone knew whether it is really so! We know nothing at all.

Think of the physicists, they are the closest to reality, and yet they speak of models, of fields of probability. That’s it, we just don’t know.
QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: But the fact that such a need exists—We have many needs!

Yes, but just this one seems to indicate that something in the psyche proves that this idea—

Yes, but now go and ask a rationalist, he will say, Quite, quite!

And if you feel the need for a large income, what then ?—This need exists too, or to own a fine car, but that doesn’t prove he’ll get it.

We have many needs, you see.

The existence of a need proves only that it should be satisfied, and from that we deduce that we ought to have just those ideas which correspond to this need.

But for this need to arise, there must be something in it, like the psyche’s striving towards a goal. Yes, but that still doesn’t prove anything.
It’s like when you have a patient who says, I simply must have a fine car, or else. So you tell him, Then get one, go to it, work!
That is his reality, but it proves nothing.

Similarly, when someone says, I want to be immortal, that doesn’t make him immortal. He has that need, but you can find many people who don’t admit to any such need.

And when you come to think of it, how frightful it would be to have to sit on a cloud for ten thousand years playing a harp!

Now the idea of the spirit of the dead father is a transcendent idea, but it serves a purpose and I would call it "reasonable."

It is reasonable to think that way.

So supposing this spirit has a subjective existence, a consciousness of its own, then there also exists an ethical relation to what it is or what it wants or what it needs.

And if I live in such a way that it helps this spirit, it is a moral achievement from which I can expect satisfac- tion.

But the question we are being asked is: if I live in accordance with the demands of the unconscious. That is too general.

In such a case I would say: What corresponds to the urgent need of the father should be compensated, not simply the unconscious—that’s going too far.

For instance, something the father has left unfinished.

Or the father appears to his daughter and tells her in a dream or in reality that he has buried a treasure some- where which didn’t belong to him, but was stolen property and she should give it back.

These are situations that occur in reality.

Or he tells her that he had a philosophy which actually made him unhappy and so the daughter must think differently. Only these specific relationships are really satisfactory.

They must fit the real character of the father, then the corresponding reaction can be expected, in so far as these transcendent ideas are any use at all.

This may be a quite ruthless question, but the real criterion is: Do they serve a purpose? Are they an advan- tage?

For if they accomplish nothing, why should I have these ideas?

But if I feel they are a positive advantage, then why shouldn’t I have them?

They cannot decide the issue one way or another, any more than we are in a position to understand actual re- ality and establish what it is: there are only fields of probability.

There are average predictable phenomena and there are just as many that are unpredictable—were it other- wise there would be no statistics!

QUESTION 6: May we assume that there is a connection between dual predestination and synchronicity, and that experientially they are the same thing? The same as being in Tao—the simultaneous reality of spirit and matter, simultaneously experienced with equal intensity, but always vibrating dike a compass needle?

What do you mean by dual predestination?

ANSWER FROM THE AUDIENCE: Karl Barth has rethought Calvin’s predestination theory along new lines and says it is not, as Calvin said, that people are either rejected or accepted from the very beginning, but that each person is both accepted at one moment and rejected at another.

Dr. Jung: The theory of predestination has of course nothing to do with synchronicity. Synchronicity is a scientific concept and the predestination theory is a dogma.
Synchronicity is a description of facts, whereas the predestination theory is riddled with contradictions.

If predestination is true, then everything goes on as it must: there are some who are chosen to go to heaven, others are predestined to roast in hell and go down to the kitchen.

If you fit the bill, you’re chosen—or else the good Lord invalidates his own decree by suddenly sweeping up to heaven someone predestined for hell, or snatches someone down from heaven and sticks
him in the pit.

If you examine these things logically it is simply a juggling with words that has nothing to do with actuality.

Dual predestination, indeed! So I am predestined for hell and predestined for heaven, and then suddenly, by a sleight of hand, I am either here or there.

That is not a workable argument, it is a conjuring trick: you think the top hat is empty, and behold there is a white rabbit sitting in it!

MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: I had hoped this was a point where depth psychology and theology could finally meet.

Dr. Jung: Oh no, here we are not in agreement at all.

Synchronicity states that a certain psychic event is paralleled by some external, non-psychic event and that there is no causal connection between them.

It is a parallelism of meaning.

That has nothing to do with the acrobatics of predestination. Theologians do perform the merriest pranks.

One professor of theology reproached me for asserting, in contradiction to God’s word, that a man must grow up and put aside childish things.

Man, he said, must remain a child.

Now it is precisely the teaching of the New Testament that one should not remain a child but become as a child.

My view, he declared, was "en flagrant contradiction avec la parole du Maitre."

So I sent him a postcard citing the Biblical passages that say exactly the opposite. The same is true of Catholics.
A Jesuit father came to me, a very intelligent type, and said, I really can’t understand you, you must explain to me how you can assert that Christ and Mary were not human beings.

I replied, But it is very simple.

According to the teaching of the Church you were born in sin, so was I, and all men, and that is how death came into the world.

We are corruptible and have corruptible bodies, but Christ and Mary have incorruptible bodies.

Therefore they were taken up to heaven in the body as was Elijah of old, and therefore they were not human beings.

All men are mortal, all men are corruptible because of original sin. He had never thought of that!
He was so dumfounded that he couldn’t utter a word!

There’s the theologian for you—the general run of theological thinking is often simply incomprehensible. Now can a theologian not notice that Christ and Mary according to dogma have an incorruptible body? That is a divine attribute, only gods have it, or demons, but not men.
QUESTION 7: What is the psychological difference between belief in a personal God and the concept of a di- vine impersonal principle?

Dr. Jung: Men naturally have ideas about God, and as my dead friend Albert Oeri quite rightly said, some imagine a good God, the conservatives imagine him as an elderly railway official with a beard, and the others as a little more gaseous.

So it goes—we have all sorts of ideas of a personal father god with a beard, and a universal "principle" which is really more than "gaseous"—much more abstract.

It is simply the difference between an infantile idea and a philosophical one.

Or, it is the difference between being personally addressed, the personal encounter, and a general philosophi- cal hypothesis.

If one has an idea, that is to say a rationalized idea which has been discussed and reflected upon, it is always a paradox.

As Kant has already pointed out, only antinomial statements can be made about transcendental positions. He exemplifies this by: God is, God is not.

Thus every statement about God is also represented by its opposite. Hence God is personal, he is my Father, he is a universal principle.
An infinity of statements is possible, all of them valid in so far as they also state the opposite.

The antinomy of the statements is a proof of their honesty.

But naturally one cannot form any such ideas of which it could seriously be said that they must be so, because their object is one which we cannot know unless we were God himself, and in so far as we are "God" we are speaking of our unconscious, being ourselves unconscious to the extent we are "God."

Thus it is that all the statements we make about God are statements about the unconscious.

It is local, it is universal, it is the One, it is the Many or the All, it is personal and impersonal because the un- conscious appears to us in all these forms.

One feels personally addressed by the unconscious—or one doesn’t.

QUESTION 8: Have you ever met any people who have seen Ufos, and were they prepared to interpret this ex- perience purely psychologically and not insist on the physical reality of the Ufos?

I actually do know of four cases of people who have seen Ufos or said they did. They are not in the least prepared to interpret the Ufos psychologically.
They are more inclined to ask me, Do you think this is psychological? because for them it was felt as thor- oughly real.

There was, for instance, the case of a doctor in an American city who together with many other people ob- served a Ufo for three-quarters of an hour in the form of a small silvery sphere or disc which then suddenly vanished.

Knowing this man to be a regular camera fiend, I assumed he had taken a marvellous photo of this phenomenon. But astonishingly enough he hadn’t, although he carried his camera with him, “as always."
Another man was driving with his wife over the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, when she saw in the west about twenty Ufos flying in the Pacific.

She drew her husband’s attention to them and he saw them too. The spheres or discs gleamed like silver in the sun.
Both sent me eyewitness reports and some time later I saw the man personally, whereupon he expressed his astonishment at my interest in such things.

But this, you see, is also a contribution to psychology.

It is said that people who make the least fuss about these things are the most likely to see a Ufo.

A former patient, now an analyst living in the southwest of America, also observed a silvery object in the sky for about four minutes, after which it vanished at great speed.

She described it as "web-like" and as though sprayed with aluminum, so that one could make out its web-like structure.

She evidently wanted to convey that the object was lighter than metal.

Not for a moment did she doubt that it was real—it was like seeing a bus passing—with no connection what- ever with any kind of psychology, so that one is absolutely flummoxed and thinks these people must have seen something real.

I have not concerned myself at all with the question of whether these things can be real and if so how. Ufos in dreams should be treated like any other dream image, they play exactly the same role.

QUESTION’ I0: Can our preoccupation with psychology and with Ufos be traced back to a decline of the belief in God, as though this left a void which the unconscious had to fill?

Yes, we feel uneasy and dissatisfied and insecure and now under modern political conditions we are naturally afraid also.

And naturally we ask, What is the matter with man’s psychology?

We cannot make anyone else responsible for what is happening in the world except man. There lies the great danger: why is man as he is?
In our world miracles do not happen any more, and we feel that something simply must happen which will provide an answer or show a way out.

So now these Ufos are appearing in the skies.

Although they have always been observed" they didn’t signify anything.

Now, suddenly, they seem to portend something because that something has been projected on them—a hope, an expectation.

What sort of expectation you can see from the literature: it is of course the expectation of a savior. But that is only one aspect.
There is another aspect, a mythological one.

The Ufo can be a ship of death, which means that ships of death are coming to fetch the living or to bring souls.

Either these souls will fall into birth, or many people are going to die and will be fetched by fleets of these ships of death."

These are important archetypal ideas, because they can also be predictions.

If an atomic war were to break out, an infinite multitude of souls would be carried away from the earth. How one is to explain the Ufos in individual cases, I cannot say.

It depends on the circumstances, on a dream, or on the person concerned.

There is indeed a void in individuals now that we are beginning to discover that our belief in metaphysical explanations has grown enfeebled.

In the Middle Ages the Ufos would have been taken for divine manifestations, but we must say with Goethe: "For all our wisdom, Tegel still is haunted." Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking – Interviews and Encounters, Pages 370-391