Page 106 arose, their personal relationship broke up, leaving Jung with bitter feelings and a deep sense of loss.
The above story is but one of many strange and bizarre occurrences
experienced by Jung during his midlife “confrontation with the unconscious.”
An interesting account of his unusual journey into the recesses of his psyche is found in Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961).
acknowledged the rumor, the younger Jung, at least sometimes, believed himself to be the great-grandson of Goethe (Ellenberger, 1970).
Both of Jung’s parents were the youngest of 13 children, a situation that may have contributed to some of the difficulties they had in their marriage. Jung’s father, Johann Paul Jung, was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church, and his mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, was the daughter of a theologian. In fact, eight of Jung’s maternal uncles and two of his paternal uncles were pastors, so both religion and medicine were prevalent in his family. Jung’s mother’s
family had a tradition of spiritualism and mysticism, and his maternal
grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a believer in the occult and often talked to the dead. He kept an empty chair for the ghost of his first wife and had regular and intimate conversations with her. Quite understandably, these practices greatly annoyed his second wife.
Jung’s parents had three children, a son born before Carl but who lived only 3 days and a daughter 9 years younger than Carl. Thus, Jung’s early life was that of an only child.
Jung (1961) described his father as a sentimental idealist with strong doubts about his religious faith. He saw his mother as having two separate
dispositions. On one hand, she was realistic, practical, and warmhearted, but on the other, she was unstable, mystical, clairvoyant, archaic, and ruthless. An emotional and sensitive child, Jung identified more with this second side of his mother, which he called her No. 2 or night personality (Alexander, 1990).
At age 3 years, Jung was separated from his mother, who had to be
hospitalized for several months, and this separation deeply troubled young Carl. For a long time after, he felt distrustful whenever the word “love” was mentioned. Years later he still associated “woman” with unreliability,
whereas the word “father” meant reliable—but powerless (Jung, 1961).
Before Jung’s fourth birthday, his family moved to a suburb of Basel. It is from this period that his earliest dream stems. This dream, which was to have a profound effect on his later life and on his concept of a collective
unconscious, will be described later.
During his school years, Jung gradually became aware of two separate aspects of his self, and he called these his No. 1 and No. 2 personalities. At first he saw both personalities as parts of his own personal world, but during adolescence he became aware of the No. 2 personality as a reflection of something other than himself—an old man long since dead. At that time Jung
Page 107 did not fully comprehend these separate powers, but in later years he
recognized that No. 2 personality had been in touch with feelings and intuitions that No. 1 personality did not perceive.Between his
16th and 19th years, Jung’s No. 1 personality emerged as more dominant. As his conscious, everyday personality prevailed, he could concentrate on school and career. In Jung’s own theory of attitudes, his No. 1 personality was
extraverted and in tune to the objective world, whereas his No. 2 personality was introverted and directed inward toward his subjective world. Thus, during his early school years, Jung was mostly introverted, but when the time came to prepare for a profession and meet other objective responsibilities, he became more extraverted, an attitude that prevailed until he experienced a midlife crisis and entered a period of extreme introversion.
Jung’s first choice of a profession was archeology, but he was also
interested in philology, history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Despite a somewhat aristocratic background, Jung had limited financial resources (Noll, 1994). Forced by lack of money to attend a school near home, he enrolled in Basel University, a school without an archeology teacher. Having to select another field of study, Jung chose natural science because he twice dreamed of making important discoveries in the natural world (Jung, 1961). His choice of a career eventually narrowed to medicine. That choice was narrowed further when he learned that psychiatry deals with subjective phenomena (Singer, 1994).
While Jung was in his first year of medical school, his father died, leaving him in care of his mother and sister. Also while still in medical school, Jung began to attend a series of seances with relatives from the Preiswerk family, including his first cousin Helene Preiswerk, who claimed she could
communicate with dead people. Jung attended these seances mostly as a
family member, but later, when he wrote his medical dissertation on the occult phenomenon, he reported that these seances had been controlled experiments (McLynn, 1996).
After completing his medical degree from Basel University in 1900, Jung became a psychiatric assistant to Eugene Bleuler at Burghöltzli Mental
Hospital in Zürich, possibly the most prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital in the world at that time. During 1902–1903, Jung studied for 6 months in Paris with Pierre Janet, successor to Charcot. When he returned to
Switzerland in 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach, a young sophisticated woman from a wealthy Swiss family. Two years later, while continuing his
Page 108 duties at the hospital, he began teaching at the University of Zürich and seeing patients in his private practice.
Jung had read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953) soon after it appeared, but he was not much impressed with it (Singer, 1994). When he reread the book a few years later, he had a better understanding of Freud’s ideas and was moved to begin interpreting his own dreams. In 1906, Jung and Freud began a steady correspondence (see McGuire & McGlashan, 1994, for the Freud/Jung letters). The following year, Freud invited Carl and Emma Jung to Vienna. Immediately, both Freud and Jung developed a strong mutual respect and affection for one another, talking during their first meeting for 13 straight hours and well into the early morning hours. During this marathon conversation, Martha Freud and Emma Jung busied themselves with polite conversation (Ferris, 1997).
Freud believed that Jung was the ideal person to be his successor. Unlike other men in Freud’s circle of friends and followers, Jung was neither Jewish nor Viennese. In addition, Freud had warm personal feelings for Jung and regarded him as a man of great intellect. These qualifications
prompted Freud to select Jung as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
In 1909, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University and one of the first psychologists in the United States, invited Jung and Freud to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together with Sándor Ferenczi, another psychoanalyst, the two men journeyed to America, the first of Jung’s nine visits to the United States (Bair, 2003).
During their 7-week trip and while they were in daily contact, an underlying tension between Jung and Freud slowly began to simmer. This personal tension was not diminished when the two now-famous psychoanalysts began to interpret each other’s dreams, a pastime likely to strain any relationship.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961) claimed that Freud was unwilling to reveal details of his personal life—details Jung needed in order to interpret one of Freud’s dreams. According to Jung’s account, when asked for intimate details, Freud protested, “But I cannot risk my authority!” (Jung, 1961, p. 158). At that moment, Jung concluded, Freud indeed had lost his authority. “That sentence burned itself into my memory, and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed” (p. 158).
Page 109 Jung also asserted that, during the trip to America, Freud was unable to interpret Jung’s dreams, especially one that seemed to contain rich material from Jung’s collective unconscious. Later, we discuss this dream in more detail, but here we merely present those aspects of the dream that may relate to some of the lifelong problems Jung had with women. In this dream, Jung and his family were living on the second floor of his house when he decided to explore its hitherto unknown levels. At the bottom level of his dwelling, he came upon a cave where he found two old and mostly disintegrated human skulls.
After Jung described the dream, Freud became interested in the two skulls, but not as collective unconscious material. Instead, he insisted that Jung associate the skulls to some wish. Whom did Jung wish dead? Not yet
completely trusting his own judgment and knowing what Freud expected, Jung told Freud that he wished his wife and sister-in-law dead because those were most believable.
Although Jung’s interpretation of this dream may be more accurate than Freud’s, it is quite possible that Jung did indeed wish for the death of his wife. At that time, Jung was not recently married but had been married for nearly 7 years, and for the previous 5 of those years he was deeply involved in an intimate relationship with a former patient named Sabina Spielrein.
Frank McLynn (1996) claimed that Jung’s “mother complex” caused him to harbor animosity toward his wife, but a more likely explanation is that Jung needed more than one woman to satisfy the two aspects of his personality.
However, the two women who shared Jung’s life for nearly 40 years were his wife Emma and another former patient named Antonia (Toni) Wolff (Bair, 2003). Emma Jung seemed to have related better to Jung’s No. 1 personality while Toni Wolff was more in touch with his No. 2 personality. The three-way relationship was not always amiable, but Emma Jung realized that Toni Wolff could do more for Carl than she (or anyone else) could, and she remained grateful to Wolff (Dunne, 2000).
Although Jung and Wolff made no attempt to hide their relationship, the name Toni Wolff does not appear in Jung’s
posthumously published autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Alan Elms (1994) discovered that Jung had written a whole chapter on Toni Wolff, a chapter that was never published. The absence of Wolff’s name in Jung’s autobiography is probably due to the lifelong resentments Jung’s children had toward her. They remembered when she had carried on openly with their
father, and as adults with some veto power over what appeared in their father’s autobiography, they were not in a generous mood to perpetuate knowledge of the affair.
In any event, little doubt exists that Jung needed women other than his wife.
In a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910, Jung wrote: “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful” (McGuire, 1974, p. 289).
Almost immediately after Jung and Freud returned from their trip to the United States, personal as well as theoretical differences became more intense as their friendship cooled. In 1913, they terminated their personal correspondence, and the following year, Jung resigned the presidency and shortly afterward withdrew his membership in the International
Psychoanalytic Association.
Jung’s break with Freud may have been related to events not discussed in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961). In 1907, Jung wrote to Freud of his “boundless admiration” for him and confessed that his veneration “has something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush” and that it had an
“undeniable erotic undertone” (McGuire, 1974, p. 95). Jung continued his confession, saying: “This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped” (p. 95). Jung was actually 18 years old at the time of the sexual assault and saw the older man as a fatherly friend in whom he could confide nearly everything. Alan Elms (1994) contended that Jung’s erotic feelings toward Freud—coupled with his early experience of the sexual assault by an older man he once worshipped—may have been one of the major reasons why Jung eventually broke from Freud. Elms further suggested that Jung’s rejection of Freud’s sexual theories may have stemmed from his ambivalent sexual feelings toward Freud.
The years immediately following the break with Freud were filled with loneliness and self-analysis for Jung. From December of 1913 until 1917, he underwent the most profound and dangerous experience of his life—a trip through the underground of his own unconscious psyche. Marvin Goldwert (1992) referred to this time in Jung’s life as a period of “creative illness,” a term Henri Ellenberger (1970) had used to describe Freud in the years immediately following his father’s death. Jung’s period of “creative illness”
was similar to Freud’s self-analysis. Both men began their search for self while in their late 30s or early 40s: Freud, as a reaction to the death of his
Page 110 father; Jung, as a result of his split with his spiritual father, Freud. Both
underwent a period of loneliness and isolation and both were deeply changed by the experience.
Although Jung’s journey into the unconscious was dangerous and painful, it was also necessary and fruitful. By using dream interpretation and active imagination to force himself through his underground journey, Jung eventually was able to create his unique theory of personality.
During this period he wrote down his dreams, drew pictures of them, told himself stories, and then followed these stories
wherever they moved. Through these procedures he became acquainted with his personal unconscious. (See Jung, 1979, and Dunne, 2000, for a collection of many of his paintings during this period.) Prolonging the method and going more deeply, he came upon the contents of the collective unconscious—the archetypes. He heard his anima speak to him in a clear feminine voice; he discovered his shadow, the evil side of his personality; he spoke with the wise old man and the great mother archetypes; and finally, near the end of his journey, he achieved a kind of psychological rebirth called individuation (Jung, 1961).
Although Jung traveled widely in his study of personality, he remained a citizen of Switzerland, residing in Küsnacht, near Zürich. He and his wife, who was also an analyst, had five children, four girls and a boy. Jung was a Christian, but did not attend church. His hobbies included wood carving, stone cutting, and sailing his boat on Lake Constance. He also maintained an active interest in alchemy, archeology, gnosticism, Eastern philosophies, history, religion, mythology, and ethnology.
In 1944, he became professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel, but poor health forced him to resign his position the following year.
After his wife died in 1955, he was mostly alone, the “wise old man of Küsnacht.” He died June 6, 1961, in Zürich, a few weeks short of his 86th birthday. At the time of his death, Jung’s reputation was worldwide, extending beyond psychology to include philosophy, religion, and popular culture
(Brome, 1978).