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Page from the original printing
of the
VII Sermones, c. 1917.
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Jung's first mandala drawing, inspired by the VII Sermones.
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C. G. Jung on Film:
Transcript of the Biographical Film "Matter of Heart"
Matter of Heart
A film
Transcript
DIRECTED AND EDITED BY
MARK WHITNEY
PRODUCED BY
MICHAEL WHITNEY
CONCEIVED AND WRITTEN BY
SUZANNE WAGNER
SPECIAL CONSULTANT
SAM FRANCIS
ORIGINAL MUSIC COMPOSED BY
JOHN ADAMS
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
GEORGE WAGNER
Participants In Matter of Heart
in Order of Appearance:Marie-Louise von Franz, Ph.D. Analyst, Zurich
Barbara Hannah Analyst, Zurich
Lilian Frey-Rohn, Ph.D. Analyst, Zurich
Sir Laurens van der Post Author, statesman, London
Baroness Vera von der Heydt Analyst, London
C.A. Meier, M.D. Analyst, Zurich
Mary Bancroft Author, New York
Joseph Henderson, M.D. Analyst, San Francisco
Aniela Jaffé. Analyst, Zurich
Jane Wheelwright Analyst, San Francisco
Joseph Wheelwright, M.D. Analyst, San Francisco
Heinrich Fier; M.D. Analyst, Zurich
Hilde Kirsch Analyst, Loa Angeles
Gerhard Adler, Ph.D. Analyst, London
Michael Fordham, M.D. Analyst, London
James Kirsch, M.D. Analyst, Los Angel's
Rudolf Niehus, M.D. Grandson, Zurich
Johanna Molar-Fritzsche. Family Friend, Zurich
Dietar Baumann, M.D. Grandson, Analyst, Zurich
Hugenmatter Family Neighbors, Bollingen
Tadeus Reichstein, Ph.D. Nobel Laureate, Basal
Matter of Heart
[Opening Scenes with Text]
The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object. it is in the highest degree odd that Western man, with but very few and ever fewer exceptions, apparently pays so little regard to this fact.
Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence.
C.G. Jung, 1946 Collected Works 8, para. 357
Not nature but the "genius of mankind" has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.
C.G. Jung, 1952 C.W. 11, para. 734
VON FRANZ: I met him when I was eighteen. And I began in the year later in '34: I began analysis with him.
We went out there to the tower, and out of the bushes suddenly--we were standing around, kind of, you know awkwardly, as one does, not knowing what was going to happen--and then out of the bushes came a man, and I was deeply impressed by him. I thought he naturally, he was a Methuselah because when you are eighteen you 'think a 58 year old is ready for the cemetery.
He told that story which you can read in the Memories about this girl who was on the moon and had to fight a demon, and the black demon got her. And he pretended, or he told it in a way as if she really had been on the moon and it had happened. And I was very rationalistically trained from school so I said indignantly, "But she imagined to be on the moon, or she dreamt it, but she wasn't on the moon." And he looked at me earnestly and said, "Yes she was on the moon." I still remember looking over the lake there and thinking, "Either this man is crazy, or I am too stupid to understand what he means." And then suddenly it dawned on me, "He means that what happens psychically is the real reality, and this other moon, this stony desert which goes round the earth, that's illusion, or that's only pseudo-reality." And that hit me tremendously deeply. When I crawled, rather drunk into bed because he gave us a lot of Burgundy that evening, I thought, "It will take you ten years to digest what you experienced today."
HANNAH: Both Jung and I minded most of all about wholeness, about becoming whole and that I'd got at it through my art by always trying to draw paintings that looked whole: animals, primitives, anything, anything that seemed still at one with itself and whole, and he'd got at it by studying the things that go wrong with people. And then realizing the way to cure, to get it right, was to find their wholeness, to find the opposite to the thing that was destroying them so terribly. And of course I went through a tremendous encounter with the unconscious, one always does in analysis, particularly with him. He didn't let you pick flowers by the wayside.
FREY: When you met him in the club or when you met him privately or in analysis, it was always a man interested in the, I would like to use the word, in the supernatural food. Always. And to the depths. And you see, you could come into his room in analysis, and he was just speaking about the dreams you had had before, last night, not knowing them, but he was, he was involved. He was so transparent for people, and that was the fascinating thing in the relationship with Jung. Therefore, everybody who knew Jung had the feeling he speaks one's own language.
L. VAN DER POST: We started talking, and I went home with him afterwards, and to Mrs. Jung's despair, we sat talking till about three o'clock in the morning without break. And again it was I had this very strange feeling, although it was snowing outside and bitterly cold, that I was sitting around one of the first fires in a camp somewhere in the bush in Africa talking as you can only talk in those conditions. And I said to him, "why don't you come back to Africa with me?" He said, "You know, when I came back from Mt. Elgon and from Kenya and living amongst the witchdoctors of Africa," he said, "I found so much witchcraft in Switzerland I felt that I had to deal with all this witchcraft first before I could, you know, before I could travel again." And he was to refer to himself as an old witchdoctor. Very often when people asked him, "Are you a Protestant, are you a Catholic?" he said, "Don't ask me these questions." He said, "You know, I'm only an old African who finds his God in his dreams." And he really meant that. He really meant that. He had this tremendous human, almost animal warmth and immediacy. It was the immediacy of the laugh that got one.
HANNAH: Schopenhauer said that humor was the only divine quality of man. And in that, Basel helped him a lot. The Baselers have an extraordinary sense of humor and their carnival is really marvelous.
WAGNER: Jung took you there once?
HANNAH: Yes, he did. We went there the night before and got up at 4 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning, I think, to see the so-called Morgen-Streich. And the procession comes through with lights. It's most impressive.
L. VAN DER POST: This feeling that he had that if man lived his life religiously, if he lived his life symbolically, then it all--it was almost as if what the theologians called God and my Zulus called M-cooloo-coolo the first spirit--well, the first spirit had passed over some of his power and some of his responsibilities to the human being and that the human being had a God-like task to perform in creation. And the extent to which he performed it, he derived his meaning. That's a very important part of Jung's thinking.
Today humanity, as never before, is spit: into two apparently irreconcilable halves.
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the control' and be torn into opposite halves.
C.G. Jung, 1959 C.W. 9, II, para. 126
C.G. Jung was born In Kesswil, Switzerland, July 26, 1875. He spent his childhood In Laufen next to the Rheinfalls.
Jung died at age 88 in 1961 at his home In Kusnacht, near Zurich.
He studied medicine In Basel and In 1900 at 25, he became staff physician at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital.
He married Emma Rauschenbach of Schaffhausen in 1903. They had four daughters and a son.
Jung's correspondence with Sigmund Freud began in 1906.
JUNG: Oh well, I just paid a visit to him in Vienna, and then we talked for thirteen hours without interruption, thirteen hours without interruption! We didn't realize that we were almost dead at the end of it. But it was tremendously interesting. He was the old man and had great experience, and he was of course way ahead of me, and so I settled down to learn something first.
In 1909, Jung and Freud sailed to the United States at the Invitation of Clark University.
We were together everyday and analyzed each other's dreams.
C.G. Jung, 1961 M.D.R. (paperback, p.158)
Jung published Symbols of Transformation In 1913, later designated his psychology "Analytical" Psychology: as distinct from Freud's "Psychoanalytic" theory.
I had written that book that cost me my friendship with Freud because he couldn't accept it. To him the unconscious was a product of consciousness, and it simply contained the remnants, I mean, it was sort of a storeroom where all the discarded things of consciousness were heaped up and left. But to me the unconscious, then was already a matrix, a sort of basis of consciousness of a creative nature, namely, capable of autonomous acts, autonomous intrusions into consciousness.
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial Insight that there are things In the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.
Psychologically, Philemon represented superior Insight.
All my works, all my creative activities, have come from those Initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.
C.G. Jung, 1961 M.D.R. (paperback, p. 183)
JUNG: Man's soul is a complicated thing, and it takes sometimes half a lifetime to get somewhere in one's psychological development. You know, it is by no means always a matter of psychotherapy or treatment of neuroses. Psychology has also the aspect of a pedagogical method in the widest sense of the word. It is something
BLACK: A system of education.
JUNG: It is an education. It is something like antique philosophy, and not what we understand by a technique. It is something that touches upon the whole of man and which challenges also the whole of man in the patient or whatever the receiving party is as well as in the doctor.
VON DER HEYDT: One of the tremendous things which Jung did was to always emphasize the aspect of man's totality. And our totality is not complete unless we take our human failings into it. It doesn't mean that I necessarily have always to live my human failings. I obviously may have to take responsibility for them, but they are not only a part of me but they are part of every human being. That is to say, it is part of man.
JUNG: Consciousness is one factor, and there is another factor, equally important, and that is the unconscious. That can interfere with consciousness anytime it pleases. "And, of course," I say to myself, "now this is very uncomfortable because I think I am the only master in my house." But I must admit that there is another somebody in that house that can play tricks. And I had to deal with the unfortunate victims of that interference everyday in my patients.
C.A. MEIER: Analysis proper, and particularly Jungian analysis, begins and ends with conscience. That is, that you take responsibility, that you take into consideration all those manifestations which so far have remained in the unconscious, in other words, you were not conscious of. And if you start taking responsibility for those manifestations, like shadow qualities and whatnot, then this is a very strong test for your conscience, isn't it? And so, I mean, you have to, only have to, think of the beginning of psychoanalysis. I mean, it took an enormous amount of moral courage to face these facts which so far have not been considered, or repressed.
BANCROFT: I felt that Jung should tell me what I should do: whether I should write a book, whether I should get a divorce, what I should do. And he wouldn't and so I got mad at him. And I said, "Why is everybody so mean to me?" And he said, " Why are you so mean to everybody?" So I stormed out. And, you got what I said there. I said to him, "Why is everybody so mean to me?" and he said, "Why are you so mean to everybody?" That was the trigger point. I was gone for a year. And I wrote, oh, I don't know, every now and then I'd sit down at the typewriter and write him what a son of a bitch I thought he was, how when I first got to Europe everyone thought he was a charlatan, and I thought he was too. He was the most conceited, vain man. And you know, I really had a great time.
WAGNER: And you sent all these letters?
BANCROFT: Sent the letters! Of course I did. And I thought, "I hope he drops dead of a stroke." And I felt very good. I just felt fine. When I can get mad, my, I can lose five pounds just by getting mad. Just the adrenalin goes, and I just think, you know, it's the opposite of "poor little me." Then it's "I don't care; let them all go stuff it up, I don't care what happens to them." And one morning I woke up, and I began to laugh. I thought, "For God sake, what's been going on here! What a jackass you are," and suddenly I realized; 'Sure, he really hit it:" And sot phoned Miss Schmidt, Fraulein Schmidt, and asked if I could have an appointment, and she laughed and said, "Oh yes," she said. "Professor Jung told me to save some time for you. He thought you'd be calling shortly."
HANNAH: And sometimes he'd be quite unfair to one, and he'd think, he'd tell me, at the club for instance, he'd go and sometimes be horrid to people, and then he'd go home saying, "Now wasn't that nasty of me? I really spoilt their weekend, I'm sure ." It was always on Saturday evenings. But when they next came to analysis, he found that that particular nastiness was exactly what they needed. I really got more from Jung when he hit me over the head than any other time. I don't mean literally.
HENDERSON: He had very small eyes, and when he looked through those little eyes, usually over the top of his eyeglasses, you knew that he was looking at something that you couldn't see. And what came out was usually some very simple fact. It wasn't any aura or any great message that came back from the beyond. It was something about your ordinary life, or the ordinary situation. I described a party where I felt the shadow got loose with Jung in the center of it, where they threw a knotted towel from one person to another around a circle. Jung kept this thing going beyond, almost beyond endurance, and I fell down and broke my glasses, and somebody else skinned a knee, and at the end of the party we were all in a shambles. But this was characteristic of Jung's intolerance of persona. He was so afraid that the party would stick on a polite persona level that he engineered it to bring out the shadow. And in the end we all had a marvelous time. We all got drunk, and it was, it ended very happily.
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!
C.G. Jung, 1943 C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 165.
C.A. MEIER: He became a human being and a total one. I mean he included everything. He could be terrible. He could be absolutely terrible.
J. KIRSCH: In these rages?
C.A. MEIER: Ja. I remember one thing when we sailed on the lake up there at Bollingen, you know, in his boat. And the wind died down completely, and we were way out from the Turm, you know, way off. So there was nothing else but to row. And I was an old sailor, you know; I knew how to row, indeed, better than he did, as a matter of fact. So I went and rowed, and he started criticizing me for every single part of a movement I made with those oars, you know. And he knew it better, of course.
J. KIRSCH: Oh, and could he row himself?
C.A. MEIER: And Joan was in the boat as well, my wife. And so, it was absolutely, it was hell! It was real hell until I said, "Good. Fine! Do it yourself!"
KIRSCH: And he did it?
C.A MEIER: Yes, he had to!
J. KIRSCH: He had to if you gave him
C.A, MEIER: He had to. I wouldn't make one single move.
KIRSCH: And did he ever apologize?
C.A. MEIER: No!
J. KIRSCH: No?
C.A. MEIER: Oh, he could be terrible. He could be a real devil.
JAFFÉ: When I was his secretary, he grumbled at me in a very loud voice, and he didn't like when I took it personally. So I took it, and sooner or later there was a big and very beautiful--how do you say it--balloon or recompense, a compensation. He compensated it. He knew exactly what he had done, and then he--one was rewarded if one could stand it and if one didn't take it personally. You see, he was so burdened by his ideas and by people outside and his inner figures. So I understood it quite well. He had to have a "let out." Ventile.
WAGNER: Ventilate?
JAFFÉ: Vent out, the steam has to go out.
WAGNER: Yes, and it sometimes came out on you when you were there.
JAFFÉ: Yes. Why not?
VON FRANZ: The personal shadow is the personal shortcomings of things which every human being could be conscious of which is not archetypal. For instance, such things as greed for money or jealousy, inferiorities which everybody has but prefers not to know about. If one is jealous or if one is suddenly possessed by wanting money or soon, one could know about it if one is honest with oneself. But the collective shadow has to do with the dark side of the archetype of the Self, that means, is the shadow of the God image. In the Christian tradition, it would be the devil. And that has always been personified and felt as something which has not to do with, directly with the human being. I mean, if somebody is possessed by the devil, he is much worse than just, he is not human. It's demonic. And, but on the other hand, generally that merges. First you have this area, of dim, dark side, and behind it lurks the other. I've for instance, seen that, when Germany went to the devil in Nazism, people fell into it through their personal shadow. For instance, they didn't want to lose their job because they were clinging to money. That was their personal shadow. But then they joined in with the Nazi movement for that reason and did much worse things than they would have done normally under normal social conditions. So you can say the personal shadow is the bridge to the collective shadow or the open door to the collective shadow. But the collective shadow comes up in those terrible mass psychoses. It's like if you have your room, and there is one door not shut, and there the devil can come in. And if you know your personal shadow, you can shut all the doors.
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing Is the life of the Individual.
This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, bait also its makers. We make our own epoch.
C.G. Jung, 1934 C.W. 10, para. 315
JOE WHEELWRIGHT: I think that it is quite an important fact, historically, that there were very few of us that intentionally became analysts. What happened was that we all had neuroses, and we were--nice fat juicy ones--and we were vibrating like an aeolian harp in a high wind. And very often this was exacerbated by a marriage relationship, and so that—most of us, of my generation, didn't prepare to be an analyst, but we went to an analyst so that he could tinker with our psyches, and somewhere along the line we'd say, "Wouldn't it be peachy if I could be one of those, too!"
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: I have to remember our first appointment because Joe and I went together, and he talked right over the top of my head to Joe, arranging my appointments. And I finally said,"Well, where do I come in?" And he said, "Oh, that comes later." And I'll never forget that.
JOE WHEELWRIGHT: Jane and I arrived in Zurich in 1932. We had a very deep bond between the two of us, but we also were very dissimilar, and so we got into horrendous clashes and crashes. We just were anxious to get a hold of something that would give us some tools to work with so that we could resolve these clashes.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: I was not so enamoured of him at first. I didn't--I thought the way he talked--no, it was his writing-of course, it was very intuitive writing--it wasn't my dish. And I kept thinking, "Who the hell does he think he is?" You know. "How does he, how do you, know what he's saying?" I mean, "How does he know what he's saying is right?" I was really very resistant.
JUNG: It is almost a rule, but I don't want to make too many rules in order not to be schematic: that an introvert marries an extravert for compensation, or another type marries the countertype to complement himself
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: I thought, "Well, he's just talking through his hat. And I just can't go for that stuff." Until I got in trouble and had him head on, and then, my God, he just made all kinds of sense.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: I liked his opening comment. He said, "Oh, so you're in the soup too!" I liked the too.
WAGNER: That you'd be in it together.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: Yes!
JUNG: The archetype is a force. It has an autonomy. It can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. So for instance, falling in love at first sight; that is such a case. You see, you have a certain image in yourself, without knowing it, of the woman. Now you see that girl, or at least a good imitation of your type, and instantly you get a seizure, and you are gone. And afterwards you may discover that it was a hell of a mistake. Or you see, a man is quite capable, if he is intelligent enough to see that the woman of his "choice," as one says, was no choice; he has been captured. He sees that she is no good at all, that she is a hell of a business, and he tells me so. He says, "For God's sake, doctor, help me to get rid of that woman!" He can't; he is like clay in her fingers. And that is the archetype; that is the archetype of the anima. And he thinks it is all his soul, you know. Like the girls, you know, when a man sings very high, then she thinks he must have a very wonderful spiritual character because he can sing the high "C," and then she is badly disappointed when she marries that particular number. Well, that is the archetype of the animus.
JOE WHEELWRIGHT: This is built right into the center of Jung's whole psychology. That one should develop one's "contra-sexual components," as Margaret Mead so quaintly phrases it. But Jung prefers to talk about the animus and the anima, meaning the feminine side of the--or the masculine side of the woman and the feminine side of the man. And so that all of us who are really committed and involved in the Jungian world are very busy trying to develop our animuses or our animas. And we don't ever expect that it's going to be quite a dead heat and that our voices will alternate from soprano to basso or that we are going to get a reissue of our vital parts, but on the other hand, we do feel that usually, going on a two-step operation, first with the projection of one's anima or one's animus and then the gradual peeling of it off and retaking it back in again and assimilating it, and hopefully integrating it into one's consciousness, that this androgynous or almost androgynous state of being is the way one hopes to be before they throw the switch.
VON FRANZ: In the beginning stages of a relationship, there is generally a lot of projection mixed up with it. And that is responsible for all those love quarrels. I mean, she makes demands which he can't fulfill and he makes demands she can't fulfill, and animus-anima crossing the swords, and I mean, if you tape record a love quarrel, it's the same all over the world, literally, and that is projection. And if people don't run away but work it out and take back all what is projection in it, then appears, or is peeled out of all this, the true relationship. Now, it might be none, and then it would be like the Freudian thing, "Goodbye, and now I see you simply represented that and that in me and thank you very much, goodbye" Or, there might be a tremendous amount of relationship, true relationship, built up, which is not the same thing as projection.
JOE WHEELWRIGHT: The intensity of our struggle suddenly became clear to me, that Jane had a thinking function developed and I had a developed feeling function. And of course that was upside down. Everybody knows that men think and women feel. Only that didn't happen to be so with us.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: But I think that his, what he did for women, came through his tremendous interest in the individual. And women could be individuals, too. And this problem of what is feminine and what is masculine, and so forth and so on, almost came second to that. So, I think in a sense--and then, of course, his discovery of the animus and the anima, that did a lot.
FIERZ: Jung was not apt to be a father figure. He was in an astonishing way, near to you, natural. He could sit down, and, after ten seconds, you felt you speak with a brother, not with a father. And if you have had this brother relationship to him, where you discuss in a free way, where you accepted that he got angry, where you also were ready to get angry at him, as men do in an upright clear way. It was easy to get along with him. But the moment where one thought that he was a father figure, he was for men very destructive because he was too irrational to give guidance as a father. He changed too openly, too often, his mind to give such a guidance. That's a natural thing to change one's mind. Quite a normal thing. But a father should give a certain guidance, and he had no intention at all to give a guidance. So, for men it was often difficult because the moment men look, and many men look for a father, for a father. Whereas, with women, it went much better because a woman doesn't look so much for a father; she looks for her lover. And he was charming, seducing; and there he offered transference, often a little bit too much, but with a great healing power, with a great healing power.
WAGNER: Well, what about the atmosphere in Zurich at that time?
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: Well, that's what put me off. Oh, the cultism was just reeking! It was just awful. There were the transferences. And I swore I would never get a transference. That was one thing I decided right away because it just looked too awful. I mean these people were just goofy. But I got a transference.
WAGNER: Couldn't help it.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: Couldn't help it. I mean, after all, you get a transference because what's missing in you has got to be seen in somebody else. And there was plenty missing in me. You know, with a man of Jung's caliber, there's a lot missing.
JUNG: It is a regular observation that when you talk to an individual and this individual gives you insight into his inner preoccupations, interests, emotions, in other words, hands over his personal complexes, then you get slowly and willy-nilly into the situation of authority. A point of--you become a point of reference. You know you are in possession of all the important items in a person's development. Now you see, that creates an emotional relationship to the analyst, and that is what Freud called the transference, which is a central problem of analytical psychology. It is just so, as if these people had handed out their whole existence, and that can have very peculiar effects upon the individual. Either they hate you for it or they love you for it, but you are not indifferent to them.
JANE WHEELWRIGHT: But I never felt as though I had too much transference. It didn't last too long because Jung, the one nice thing about, or the good thing about him, was he gave so much of himself. He just gave you everything he had. So it wasn't as though you had a hangover. You got it all. You know?
BANCROFT: I never felt in awe of him. I just thought sometimes he was funny, when we used to have a little argument about God. He said, you know, "I'm not so sure about God. I'm perfectly willing if he shows up. Fine." used to say to Jung, "Of course, if he shows up he'll probably look like you." And I guess that I thought, before I got mad at him, I thought that he would have a, some kind of a, solution to life's problems. Then I found I had to find the solution myself. Which I suppose is, was, what he did. Brings you to that point.
HENDERSON: We didn't know whether we were fish, flesh, or fowl, and we had to find ourselves anew.
I dreamt that Jung was a Protestant clergyman standing at a pulpit giving a sermon and we were all in the pews, and when he finished his sermon all the others got up and began to chant "Mandala, mandala," the way they might in Christian times have sung "Hosannah". And this represented a worshipful attitude to Jung that was laughable, as you can imagine. So I thought I hate to tell Jung this dream, but I did, and he said, "Well, of course you should feel that way." I was simply projecting my own Protestant background, making Jung a father figure, making the other people into a group, which they were not.
FREY: Freud always wanted to break a transference and to...
WAGNER: Resolve it?
FREY: To resolve it and to bring people to life again, down to the adaptation to life again. But Jung had another point of view. He had the feeling, as long as we had a strong transference, one must serve it because he said there is a greater personality involved in transference. And we don't know what this greater personality has in storage, and so we must serve it. And that was tremendously difficult for Jung. He often told us, you see, "I should have ten lives," in order really to follow the development of the individuation process so deeply as he did with us all. But that was also what interested him. He many times said, "Without you women I couldn't have developed my psychology."
JUNG: I had a case that was an intelligent young woman. She was a student of philosophy, a very good mind, where one could expect easily that she would see that I am not the parental authority. But she was utterly unable to get out of this delusion. And in such a case what one always has recourse to is the dreams. It is just as if one would ask the unconscious, "Now, what do you say to such a condition?" You see, she says, through the conscious, "Of course I know you are not my father, but I just feel like that, it is like that, I depend upon you:' And then I say, "Now let's see what the unconscious says." Now the unconscious produced dreams in which I really assume a very curious role. You know she was a little infant, she was sitting on my knees, I held her in my arms. I was a very tender father to the little girl, you know, and more and more her dreams became emphatic in that respect. Namely, that I was sort of a giant and she was a very little frail human thing, you know, quite a little girl in the hands of an enormous being. And the last dream of that series (I cannot tell you all the dreams) was that I was out in nature, I stood in a field of wheat, an enormous field of wheat that was ripe for harvest. I was a giant, and I held her in my arms like a baby, and the wind was blowing over that field of wheat. Now, you know when the wind is blowing over wheat it makes these waves in the wheat field, and with these waves I swayed, like that, putting her, as if it were to sleep. And she felt as being in the arms of a god, of the godhead, and I thought "Now the harvest is ripe and I must tell her." And I told her, "You see, what you want and what you project into me, because you are not conscious of it, is you have the idea of a deity you don't possess. Therefore you see it in me."
That clicked! She suddenly became aware of an entirely heathenish image that comes fresh from the archetype. She had not the idea of a Christian God, or of an Old Testament Yahweh. It was a heathenish god. you see, a god of nature, of vegetation. He was the wheat himself, he was the spirit of the wheat, the spirit of the wind, and she was in the arms of that numen. Now that is the living experience of an archetype. Now that made a tremendous impression upon that girl, and instantly it clicked. She saw what she really was missing, that missing value that was in the form of a projection on myself and made myself indispensable to her. And then she thought, well he is not indispensable. Because, it is as the dream says, she is in the arms of that archetypal idea.
Now that is a numinous experience you see, and that is the thing that people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value. You see, they depend upon outer conditions, they depend upon their desires, their ambitions. They depend upon other people because they have no value in themselves. They have nothing in themselves. They are only rational and they are not in the possession of a treasure that would make them independent. But when that girl can hold that experience, then she doesn't depend anymore. She cannot depend anymore because that value is in herself. And that is a sort of liberation and that is of course, it makes her complete. You know, in as much as she can realize such a numinous experience she is able to continue her path, her way, her individuation. The acorn can become an oak, and not a donkey.
JAFFE: If you have a relationship to C.G. Jung, then you have to work on it and the meaning is a result, perhaps, you see. One can say, I projected on him a father, but I also projected on him a mother, you see, and the one who accepted me, I could say. And from this, in the course of the years, I found a place in this world. I found a place in myself and in the world. A transference is a projection. So I projected on him this and that. And he took it seriously, and he acted accordingly. But he never laughed at it. He accepted it. He accepted it.
FIERZ: I remember once a patient wanted to marry Jung. She was convinced that he was the man for her and for her lifetime. And when Jung explained to her that he already was married, she continued to be convinced, and, therefore, Jung accepted. She went on, prepared a marriage to Jung, had printed cards, everything was ready. Jung continued to accept in full confidence of unconscious reactions coming from the patient or from him. And the day before the planned marriage, he got an express letter from the patient telling him that this night God had told her that, unhappily, enough, the marriage would not be possible. The patient came out of her psychosis. Had always in her memory this event, and was completely balanced afterwards. That's how Jung handled the transference situation as a full reality and having fully confidence in the unconscious which would lead the patient and himself through a seemingly difficult situation.
FREY: He could see what every woman was really substantially like and helped her to find her main interest: literature, politics, psychotherapy, or astrology, or what you want. He had an art to follow a person until she found herself. And the value of transference was great for Jung himself.
H. KIRSCH: It really was as if he was always in, inside of your unconscious and not trespassing, but because he has been wherever one was, and so he knew how to be there. He also would never use any of his terms, ever. My last interview I told him a dream, and I realized, "My god, that man is 85 years old," and it was pages of dream, and so I only told him half the dream, thinking I can't put that all on him. And so then he started. You know, he didn't ask you for one association, very seldom he did. He just started to talk. And i was kind of--not making the connection, which what he was talking about had anything to do with my dream, but I knew better, that I will find the connection, if I listen, eventually. And suddenly he said, "Oh, that is as if you dream..." and he told me the second part of my dream which I hadn't told him.
G. ADLER: After about two years, I had a dream in which Jung had died. And I was in his house in the antechamber where he was laid up, and I paced up the room, very depressed, very unhappy, and suddenly my feeling changed as if I had pulled up my socks and said, "Well, all right, he's dead. Now it is for us to go on and work." I told Jung that dream, and he said, "Well, all right - now you can see patients. You are ready to see patients."
FREY: One didn't see it, but one felt it, that a ray of his spirit was falling onto us. And one was terribly spoiled because, compared with this, other men were no more so interesting!
WAGNER: Yes, that must have been a problem.
FREY: I will say besides one's own husband.
WAGNER: Well, you were married. And you had a deep relationship. How did your husband feel? Did he ever feel jealous of Jung?
FREY: Sure. All our husbands, all of the husbands of the women around were very jealous. But since they knew and they understand that Jung was not falling into the traps and wishes of the women, so they had not to be really jealous because Jung never misused his position in all these transferences.
L VAN DER POST: Now, Jung worked in this rejected feminine world of the unconscious for years. People came to him. He was particularly successful with women patients. And one person came into his life very early on because she's already with Jung and Emma Jung at the famous conference in Vienna where they are all photographed together. And that is Toni Wolff.
C.A. MEIER: Well, all I can say is that, of course, she was a most extraordinary person; there is no doubt about that. And she was great help to Jung, too. I mean, when it comes to psychological types, for instance, she played a very important part there, very important.
J. KIRSCH: In his development of his ideas?
C.A. MEIER: She had all this knowledge in philosophy and so on and so forth, and she was, she had been one of his patients to begin with.
J. KIRSCH: I see.
C.A. MEIER: Oh yes, and I remember very well, he was very proud of the fact that he had succeeded in curing her.
L VAN DER POST: A lot of people who knew her said that they despaired of her ever recovering from whatever her psychological disturbance was. I think one must accept that it was profound enough to fit the rare, exceptional spirit that she was because, in a sense, the rarer, the more exceptional, the spirit, the deeper the psychological suffering. And Jung managed to bring her out of this so that by the time of the famous Vienna conference, she was already an integrated, working personality. And to me, that photograph is very moving because the one who looks young, as if the has just beep born, is Toni Wolff. She sits there with these large eyes.
Jung had an instinct that what was wrong with life, what made life tear apart, made it incomplete, was because the feminine was rejected, driven insane, driven mad by a world of men. Rejected by a masculine-dominated world. And that time when he let himself go and when he landed deep down in what he came to call the collective unconscious, all this rejected feminine in himself confronted him.
FORDHAM: Toni Wolff was being analyzed by Jung when Jung started to have his active imagination and really got going, and he got rather unstable. And that Toni Wolff simply said that she wasn't going to go on with her analysis with him and that she was going to have a relationship with him and, more or less, I gather, took him by the ear and did so.
L. VAN DER POST: In this unfamiliar, terrifying underground of the collective unconscious, she was Jung's guide to such an extent that she lived with him, and she took over the whole of the burden. And of course, the tensions caused by that in Zurich and in the family must have been tremendous.
FORDHAM: She reflected his anima in a way that Mrs. Jung didn't.
VON DER HEYDT: It was she who introduced him to all the Eastern things: Eastern spirituality, Eastern philosophy, and so on.
ADAMS: They were lovers, I take it.
VON DER HEYDT: Oh yes.
ADAMS: Yes. Emma knew of their relationship, but she didn't wish to divorce Jung.
VON DER HEYDT: Oh, good gracious, no. It would never have entered her head. I Mean, that wouldn't have been done.
ADAMS: That's rather unusual.
VON DER HEYDT: No, I don't think so, not at that time. I mean, I don't even think nowadays, I mean, she had four children, and I don't think that Jung would have wanted a divorce at all.
ADAMS: Well, perhaps this isn't really relevant, but not many women will countenance open infidelity.
VON DER HEYDT: Please forgive me. I'm not so sure if that is not a kind of British, maybe even English, prejudice, conditioning, or something. I think that
ADAMS: I think it's an American one, too.
VON DER HEYDT: Is it?
FREY: Without Toni Wolff he couldn't have made it because she had brakes in a way, and she was stopping him always when he had a temperament where he was losing himself completely and without boundaries. And Toni Wolff stopped him and always brought him back to reality, and that was tremendously important for Jung. And then she also understood him. She had such a bright mind that she grasped it even before he understood it. And she was also really furthering his intuition very much because at that time he was also a medical doctor. He had worked at the Asylum of Bergholzli, and he was very' intellectual, until really he came to know her.
J. KIRSCH: That was the point: there was nothing shadow in it, no shadow. Jung wanted to be, and tried to be, as conventional as possible, wherever possible, so that in the inner world, where he had this relationship with both women, he could be as unconventional as he really was, as unique as he really was. It was quite a thing for him to do between, around 1910. You know, the Victorian age wasn't quite so far gone, and it wasn't anything he hid. I remember I was walking in Zurich there near the Institute, and there was Jung and Toni Wolff walking. It was nothing hiding. And it was in this relationship that he had these tremendous experiences of the coniunctio. That's when he understood the mystical background of sexuality, mystical, or the psychological archetype that was working.
H. KIRSCH: That was later such an established relationship, and Mrs. Jung was so included that I am very sure he
would not have parked his car in front of Toni Wolff's house--who was one minute away from the Institute, and
everybody would know when he was there and when he was not there--if he would have had the slightest doubts about it.J. KIRSCH: And so this relationship with Toni Wolff was not an affair, it was another wife.
NIEHUS: Two wives and one man. That's an excuse! My opinion is he should, as C.G., he should know earlier that that was his anima and so, come to a stop.
C.A. MEIER: One day Mrs. Jung approached me and said, "Would you please cooperate analytically with me and Toni Wolff'?" So we did a threesome analysis for quite a long period of time. That was very funny.
J. KIRSCH: I see, of mutual dreams or just Jung's dreams?
C.A. MEIER: No, no, Jung's dreams! Mrs. Jung's dreams and Toni's dreams and my dreams.
J. KIRSCH: Oh, all three. I see. And you found this very helpful?
C.A. MEIER: It was interesting. It was very interesting.
FORDHAM: Mrs. Jung wasn't at all brow beaten by Jung. She was down right and direct, and she did a lot of work on his papers too. She obviously stood by Jung all through his periods of crisis. She was a much more solid sort of character than Jung.
FREY: First, she had given birth to five children. And then Jung told us, and she told us, that she felt the need, also, to know more, and then she studied physics and mathematics and many other things. And then she had an analysis with her own husband.
WAGNER: She did! How difficult!
FREY: Yes. She had also another analysis, but the main thing was analysis with Jung, and afterwards, he allowed her to analyze. And she was a very good analyst and the opposite of her husband. He was more intuition and thinking, and Emma Jung was sensation, mainly sensation. Absolutely down to the earth, and more to that, to the depths of the earth.
J. MEIER: Mrs. Jung had a fantastic sense of humor. She giggled and laughed, and she was a very, very nice
woman. Motherly. But I think she helped a lot in working out, let's say, the animus-anima problem. It's those three who did the work, I think.
L. VAN DER POST: Emma Jung said to a close friend of mine, just before she died, that she had never ceased to
be grateful, in her life, for Toni Wolff, because Toni Wolff was able to do for her husband something that she could not have done.
JANE WHEELRIGHT: I think that what's remarkable is that they made it. And I think they are the ones, that Toni and Emma are the ones that made the threesome situation possible. They worked it out, something, worked out something between them.
ADLER: Jung, in his dedication copy of Answer to Job, wrote: --well I have to translate it--"Unasked, dropped from heaven"; "Ungefragt vom Himmel gefallen." So, no, no I think naturally their relationship changed; relationships do change. But it existed.
In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, It Is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious Interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without.
Bringing these opposites Into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.
Emma Jung, 1935 Anima and Animus, p. 87
After my wife's death In 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the "maternal" and the "spiritual" towers. So, In that same year, I added an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my ego-personality.
I had started the first tower in 1923, two months after the death of my mother. These two dates are meaningful because the tower, as we shall see, Is connected with the dead.
At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here lam, as it were, the "age-old son of the mother." That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the "old man," the "ancient," whom I had already experienced as a child, Is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.
C.G. Jung, 1961 M.D.R. (paperback, p. 225)
D. BAUMANN: And he was always very present and very concerned also about the future of life on this globe and of mankind. I think he needed space and quietness to meditate about them and to find as much answer as he could find.
It was at the same time, I think, a total participation, but also--well, I wouldn't call it a withdrawal, but a philosophical distance, or I don't know how to call it.
C.A. MEIER: He went to Bollingen so often during the year, and he did all his reading up there.
J. KIRSCH: Most of the reading was done there and also most of the writing?
C.A. MEIER: Also most of the writing.
D. BAUMANN: In the fall of 1922.
FARMER: He was still coming by bicycle then, from Kusnacht.
D. BAUMANN: Dr. Jung came by bicycle from Kusnacht.
The Hugenmatter family, Bollingen Neighbors.
For 400 years the Hugenmatters have farmed this land.
D. BAUMANN: The western part of the land was sold by Mr. Hugenmatter's father to Dr. Jung. Mr. Hugenmatter's father and Dr. Jung had a very good relation.
FARMER: He spoke to everyone.
D. BAUMANN: He spoke with everybody.
FARMER: When we were in trouble, he came to help.
Von Franz: well, we nave to revive primitive superstition. Because in primitive people their sword has a soul, their hammer has a soul, no smith would start making a sword without a ritual first. Still, in the middle ages, the heroes who depended on their swords--think if your sword breaks in battle, you are a dead man. So their sword had a name and a soul. They knew that sword, and the solidity of that sword was their fate. And now it's still so. Let a few of your atomic plants explode and please. Matter, if it has to cooperate with you, needs loving care, and not, only technically by oiling and so on, you have to kind of live with it. Otherwise it plays you tricks.
One of the last times he went to the tower, for instance, he hadn't been there for a long time, and the first days the covers of the pans liked to jump off and fall on the floor in the wrong moments. And you know how objects can absolutely misbehave. So he put himself up in the middle of the kitchen and said, "Now ladies and gentlemen, pots and spoons, I know I have neglected you for a long time, and you are angry with me, but I beg your pardon, and I ask you now to cooperate again." And from then on there were no more accidents. He had great fun with that. If you notice, its highly symbolic, the days you can't open a door, or you can't get at something, or some object hides from you just when you--generally, when you are not in yourself, and in an impatient mood, or so on; then everything plays you tricks. It's naturally your own unconscious mixed up with it, but it communicates with matter.
JUNG: We are only deeply unconscious of these facts because we live all by our senses and outside of ourselves. Ifa man could look into it himself, he could discover it. And when a man discovers it in our days, he thinks he is crazy, and he may be crazy.
VON FRANZ: He played a lot, along the lake. And he did it very often alone. He took always a little shovel, removed the sand, and then played with little rivers, and soon. And he said, when he was 83, he said one day when we were playing, I was generally watching him and playing a bit with him, and he said to me, "You know, only today I have suddenly thought, 'what am I doing when I'm playing like that? That's what I have done all my life, digging out springs."' He was just enjoying that. He called it the water-works. And always before, he was writing. He did some
VON DER HEYDT: For Jung, religion was an attitude. For Jung, religion was an attitude to life and had absolutely nothing whatever to do with any kind of creed. And he was actually ambivalent about creeds because, on the one hand, he said that a creed would stop you from having an experience. And since he believed that religion was not only an attitude but had to do with experience, personal experience if you block it by a creed, obviously you can't have an experience. But, at the same time, he also thought that a creed might be tremendously important framework for someone whose ego was too weak to stand the horror, the void, of complete loneliness.
L. VAN DER POST: He was always saying, "Why don't the priests go down with me into the collective, into the unconscious of modern man, to learn what the modern soul is about before they start to cure it." Because nobody, nobody would look at the soul of a man in a modern way. They all behaved, as I said before, as if creation was accomplished, as if the soul was an accomplished fact. And it wasn't. That's why the Book of Revelations had so much meaning to Jung, and that's why he saw it having its place in the Bible. You know, Calvin fought very desperately to have the Book of Revelations removed from the Bible because he called it a dark and dangerously obscure book. But it really is very meaningful because it's the one book which suggests that the revelation of God doesn't end with the coming of Christ, there is more to come. That religion is a process of continuing revelation, and experiencing of revelation; and being obedient to your greater awareness of becoming in life.
VON DER HEYDT: He was very conscious of the center of his being which he called the Self. And he would talk about the God image living, being alive, in this center of our whole being. He always said he did not wish to discuss the existence of God because this was a metaphysical question which he was not prepared to go into. But from the psychological point of view, he knew that the God image was within oneself. The God image changes; God does not change.
From 1912 to 1916 Jung had his first encounter with the collective unconscious.
He painted and wrote In Journals objectifying his experience. Later, he used excerpts to make the 'Red Book'.
JUNG: I never could claim that any kind of human work could reveal something about the nature of God or about his existence. I only know that the idea of God is a pattern, an age old pattern, a primitive pattern that always has been and never lost its--what we call--numinosity. It is always there, and it still plays the same role as it always did. We can establish the existence of that pattern, and that is, for our practical purposes, enough. Because when we can integrate such an idea in our minds, the idea of such a being, then that gives an entirely different scope to things.
Man's relation to God probably has to undergo a certain important change: instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child's prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God.
His goodness means grace and light and His dark side, the terrible temptation of power.
Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet.
Let us hope that God's good spirit will guide him In his decisions because It will depend upon man's decision whether God's creation will continue.
Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man.
C.G. Jung, 1956 Letters, Vol. II, p. 316
J. KIRSCH: He does not project you see, so to speak, nor does he confuse the image of God that exists in man with God himself. He says he cannot make any statements about God, but about the image of God as it exists in the human being. And so this whole ego-Self relationship is really at the basis of Jung's work. That's all it is about, that the Self is experienced as something inside man but not the same as the ego. But he doesn't project it.
L. VAN DER POST: Jung puts the burden squarely on each person. And this psychology of individuation, of making what you are and what you've inherited of the universe, of making that specific, of making what you've got of the collective in you, making that individual, and carrying it as an individual, and not only standing still in it but allowing an act of becoming in the midst of your being to become your own way of moving through life. This is the hardest thing you can ask of human beings.
WAGNER: What would you say the main value of the research and the writing that you and Jung have done on alchemy is?
VON FRANZ: I would say that a civilization needs a myth to live. We know that if missionaries destroy the myth of a primitive people, they destroy them, also physically, they begin to drink, they degenerate, they are lost, and no civilization can live only from welfare. It needs a myth to live. All great civilizations, when they were flourishing, had a living myth, and I think that the Christian myth on which we have lived has degenerated and has become one sided and insufficient, and I think that alchemy is the complete myth. And that, therefore, if our Western civilization has a possibility of survival, it would be by accepting the alchemical myth which is a completion and continuation and a richer completion of the Christian myth. That's a myth we could live again with. In contrast to the Christian myth which doesn't satisfy a great amount of people anymore. And the Christian myth is deficient in not including enough of the feminine or--in Catholicism they have the Virgin Mary, but it's only the purified feminine; it's not the dark feminine--and in excluding matter and treating matter as dead and the realm of the devil and in not facing the problem of the opposites, of evil. And alchemy faces the problem of the opposites, faces the problem of matter, and faces the problem of the feminine--the three things which are lacking in Christianity, and, therefore, it complements the Christian myth, and could revive it too, that way.
HANNAH: For 2000 years the Christian religion has told you to repress evil, and look at the damn thing now. It began to be so visible at the First World War, and that's now a very great many years ago, isn't it?
WAGNER: And it's on a much grander scale, a much larger scale. The possibility
HANNAH: Oh, far, far!
FREY: What is it? What did we really learn from alchemy? It's finally that in each of us there is a rejected part which can become the cornerstone, like it's written in the Bible. And we have to be aware of the stinking side, of the bad smelling side, of the--as Jung says about the urine, about the excrement--and all that in our lives. And this is the beginning of the way of God. This is the beginning of the transformation.
L. VAN DER POST: The psychology of individuation has nothing to do with politics at all because it deals with the ultimate values. But yet, it has shattering political implications. And I think we are not now--we cannot behave as if this journey into the collective unconscious hasn't happened, because it has happened. We can't plead ignorance anymore. It has happened, and because it's happened, because we are facing a universe within, objective universe within as great as the universe without, we can never be the same again. We cannot ignore it. And it has enormous political consequences for us. And the kind of society, the kind of politics that will save us, will have to be aware; more important than any other quality in our politicians, we must demand psychological illumination, psychological awareness because otherwise we get people sparring with their own shadows; otherwise you get nations as we had in 1939 like the Germans projecting their shadows onto the Jews, and then when they were eliminating the Jews, onto the Poles, and God knows whatnot else, you see. And Jung often said to me--he said, "The human being who starts by withdrawing his own shadow from his neighbor is doing work of immense, immediate political and social importance."
VON FRANZ: What you would call the personal shadow of people didn't upset him. He just grumbled and cursed a bit, but that's not the problem of evil. It's that major evil of complete destruction which worried him.
WAGNER: And his real approach to that was the inner work that he did.
VON FRANZ: Yes, the only thing you can do: to confront yourself with it, where you are. All the rest, all the benevolent--if benevolent preaching would help then we would be out of the trouble long ago because we have, we get, a lot of benevolent and reasonable preaching, but it doesn't help. So the only place where you can really put the hand on it and deal with it, body to body, the problem of evil, is in yourself. And there you have to--the hope to change something, but the hope to change the world is a childish illusion.
L. VAN DER POST: As we've seen the collectivist pattern taking over all over society, the paradox get a form of totalitarianism which is producing collectivism. Then you get a kind of creation of greater and greater monopolies of commerce, bigger and bigger business producing a kind of organization man which is the equivalent of the totalitarian organization man where the--where this individual thing disappears. And really, this kind of individual, this kind of politics of individuation which you might call democracy, ceases to exist. And this is the point where we have reached, we've reached at the moment. And at this point, all that's inferior, which Jung used to call the shadow in man, tends to come to the surface.
JUNG: The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man. Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There is no such thing in nature as an H-bomb; that is all man's doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? You see, and so it is demonstrated to us in our days, what the power of the psyche is of man, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever. One thinks, "Oh, he has just what he has in his head. He is all from his surroundings, he is taught such and such a thing, believes such and such a thing, and particularly if he is well housed and well fed, then he has no ideas at all." And that's the great mistake because he is just that as which he is born, and he is not born as tabula rasa, but as a reality.
WAGNER: Jung had a vision at the end of his life of a catastrophe. It was a world catastrophe.
VON FRANZ: I don't want to speak much about it. One of his daughters took notes and after his death gave it to me, and there is a drawing with a line going up and down, and underneath is the last 50 years of humanity. And some remarks about a final catastrophe being ahead. But I have only those notes.
WAGNER: What is your own feeling about it, the world situation?
VON FRANZ: Well, one's whole feeling revolts against this idea but since I have those notes in a drawer, I don't allow myself to be too optimistic. I think, well, we have always had wars and enormous catastrophies, and I have no more personal fear much about that. I mean at my age, if you have anyhow soon to go--so or so egocentrically spoken. But the beauty of all the life--to think that the billions and billions and billions of years of evolution to build up the plants and the animals and the whole beauty of nature--and that man would go out of sheer shadow foolishness and destroy it all. I mean that all life might go from the planet. And we don't know--on Mars and Venus there is no life; we don't know if there is any life experiment elsewhere in the galaxies. And we go and destroy this. I think it is so abominable. I try to pray that it may not happen--that a miracle happens.
WAGNER: Do you find that young people that you see now are aware of that? That it's in their consciousness?
VON FRANZ: Yes, it's partly in their unconscious and partly in their consciousness, and I think in a very dangerous way, namely, in a way of giving up and running away into a fantasy world. You know, when you study science fiction, you see there's always the fantasy of escaping to some other planet and begin anew again, which means give up the battle on this earth, consider it hopeless and give up. I think one shouldn't give up, because if you think of Answer to Job, if man would wrestle with God, if man would tell God that he shouldn't do it, if we would reflect more. That's why reflection comes in.
Jung never thought that we might do better than just possibly sneak round the corner with not too big a catastrophe. When I saw him last, he had also a vision while I was with him, but there he said, "I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But, thank God it's not the whole planet."
I think that if not more people try to reflect and take back their projections and take the opposites within themselves, there will be a total destruction.
VON FRANZ: There are a lot of people who go through life and the unconscious is no reality to them. They say at breakfast, "I had a funny dream," and then in the afternoon they don't know anything about it anymore. But if they paint them and interpret them and think about them, the dream becomes real.
And that's why you have to be lonely so that the unconscious becomes stronger. You--it's like loading up the unconscious, and then it manifests.
Hermes Trismegistos said, in one active imagination, to an alchemist, "I am the friend of whoever is lonely."
We have now, you see, (in the image of Aquarius) it's a man who pours water into the fish. Now the fish is the unconscious. So we have to support the unconscious. It's not enough to, to just have it. We have to actively turn towards it and support it so that it then helps us.
Jung once said, "The toads and the frogs are God's first attempt to make man on the cold blooded level, and then he didn't quite succeed. But he kept the idea, he kept the idea in mind, and made us later."
There are many people who are not in analysis, but if they are naturally gifted, which I would call if they are honest, they can find these things without analysis.
I have lived in this tower sometimes three weeks alone without speaking one word to anybody. And I sometimes thought I was going off my head, but the unconscious became alive. It was my partner.
JUNG: There are no other similar beings like man that are articulate and could give account of their functioning.
Matter of Heart is sponsored by
The C. G. Jung institute of Los Angeles.The interviews excerpted here
are from a 40 hour Archive produced by the
Jung Film Project between 1975 and 1981.Excerpts from interview of C.G. Jung conducted by
Dr. Richard Evans of The University of Houston In August 1957,
Zurich, Switzerland are used with the permission of Dr. Evans.Excerpts from the Collected Works of C.O. Jung and
C.G. Jung Letters (copyright respectively 1959 and 1975 by
Princeton University Press) are used with the permission of
Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul.An excerpt from C.G. Jung Speaking (copyright 01977
by Princeton University Press) is used with the permission of
Princeton University Press and Thames & Hudson.An excerpt from Memories, Dreams, Reflections (copyright
1931, 1982, 1963 by Random House, Inc.) Is used with the
permission of Pantheon Books and Routledge & Kegan Paul.All material is protected by Copyright Laws of the United States and all countries throughout the world.
All rights reserved.Copyright MCMLXXXIII C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
All Rights ReservedA Michael Whitney-Mark Whitney Production
Sources of quotes in order of appearance:
- C.G. Jung, On The Nature of the Psyche" (1946) in collected works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 8 R.F.C. Hull, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollinger' Series XX, (2nd edn., 1968)
- C.G. Jung "Answer to Job" (1952) in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.11 R.F.C. Hull, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX, (2nd edn., 1969)
- C.G. Jung "Aion: Christ, a Symbol of the Self" (1950 In Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, II R.F.C. Hull, trans, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX, (2nd edn., 1968)
- C.G. Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections., Aniela Jaffe, New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 196P
- McGuire Wm. and Hull, R.F.C., (Eds.), C.G. Jung Speaking: interviews and Encounters, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollinger Series XCVII, 1977
- C.G. Jung "The Meaning of Psychology for Modem Man" (1934) In Collected Works Vol. 10 R.F.C. Hull trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX (2nd edn., 1970)
- Emma Jung Anima and Animus (1955) Cary F. Baynes and Hildegard Nagel trans. Zurich: Spring Publications, 1972.
- C.G. Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Richard and Clara Winston trans., New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1961
- C.G. Jung Letter to Ellned Kotschnig (1956) In C.G. Jung Letters Vol. II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCV: 2 1975.
C. G. Jung on Film
Several film sources are collected here from YouTube. The links to these long interviews and documentaries sometimes change, but the content seems to persist in other file locations. If you do not find a specific film, try doing a YouTube search. Several short selections appear on YouTube from time to time, but most are extracted from these major film sources. Go to the Jung on Film collection.