A surefire way to alienate people is to talk about the dream you had last night. In polite society, we’re generally told nobody cares about the goings-on of our subconscious and that it’s probably best to keep quiet.
Nothing, then, quite prepares one for the oneiric delights to be found in Jung’s Life and Work, a new edition of the collected interviews between Professor Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and founder of modern analytic psychology, and his former student, Aniela Jaffé.
The tone is set in the very first interview, where Jung recalls a childhood dream involving a gigantic “erect phallus” reaching “almost to the ceiling” equipped with an all-seeing eye and seated on a plush golden throne. “So much for narrative foreplay,” the juvenile among us might giggle. But for Jung, these visions carried profound, life-altering meaning; dreams were “the guiding words of the soul,” capable of leading an individual to genuine self-knowledge. Jung would later arrive at an even more startling religious revelation through a dream in which God shattered the roof of Basel Cathedral with an enormous piece of falling excrement.
If it seems as if psychoanalysis is nothing but penises and feces, don’t despair just yet. Elsewhere, Jung’s bizarre dreamscapes lead us through elaborate 17th-century libraries packed with esoteric volumes, where he encounters mountain sprites and elfin kings, quests for the Holy Grail and Bibles “bound in fish skin.” It’s all wonderfully wackadoodle, but then so are most works of genius.
These interviews were carried out by Jaffé in the late 1950s but are brought together here in full for the first time by the pre-eminent Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani. They formed the basis for Jung’s “official” autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which became a bestseller after its publication in 1961.
Unlike that earlier autobiography, which carefully arranges Jung’s recollections into a coherent and thematic life story, Jung’s Life and Work preserves the interviews largely as they unfolded. The result is a less logical but more intimate portrait, allowing us to view Jung not as a mad scientist or clinical theoretician, but as a man thinking aloud –sometimes erratically, often arrestingly, and unmistakably in his own voice.
Throughout the book, dreams, symbols, childhood memories, myth, religion and personal confession jostle together without apology or hierarchy. One minute Jung recalls the séances of his youth or his family’s encounters with ghosts, which lead him to ponder the metaphysics of the afterlife; the next he is musing on alchemical symbols, anthropology, or his love of Goethe’s Faust. His reveries are often ecstatic, producing moments of lyrical beauty: “These first imaginations and dreams are like fiery, fluid basalt out of which, later, stone is formed from which one can make something.” Jung seems to be a potent force of creation; the reader is struck by just how much the past, present and future seem to conspire together in his mind.
The difficulty, however, is that there is little contextual framing – either through notes or editorial commentary – for readers unfamiliar with Jung and his method. But for those willing to persevere, this collection becomes something of a biographical treasure trove, containing heaps of exciting new material. (More than half of the original interviews never made their way into Memories, Dreams, Reflections.)
There, Jung often came across as a mystic more at home in an ethereal “otherworld” than in the company of men. Rumors still swirl that he was himself a high-functioning psychotic, not helped by his mischievous comment “Show me a sane man and I’ll cure him for you.” But one of the quieter pleasures of these interviews is the gradual revelation of how unsentimental – and at times downright catty – he could be.
He associated with many great men of his time, including Theodore Roosevelt, the philosopher William James and Albert Einstein. Yet, by his own admission, Jung “snubbed countless people” who failed to pique his interest. Astronomer Percival Lowell and the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli are dismissed as losers with “no friends nor relationships,” while Jung is pleased to report he has “very many.” Even Einstein, whom he met in 1910, was merely “a man who simply consisted of a theory”; when it came to human concerns, “a personality was lacking.” Miaow.
Unexpected yet welcome is Jung’s account of his intercontinental travels, glimpsed only briefly in Memories, Dreams, Reflections but clearly central to his intellectual formation. He visits Istanbul, Athens, Rhodes, Palestine, Egypt, Oxford and the United States. Most evocative of all, however, are his descriptions of India, where he reaches a form of enlightenment, seeming to spend “not months, but nearly decades” there, and of Africa, where “endless primeval time” might be experienced.
It’s baffling that Jung remains something of a comparative obscurity. And yet our current age of anxiety has internalized Jungian theory just as much as it has the psychosexual dramas of Freudian analysis. Parents live in fear they’ll give their child a “complex”; you may well have taken a Myers-Briggs or BuzzFeed quiz which will tell you which “archetype” you are, and everyone and their grandma loves to pronounce whether they’re an “introvert” or “extrovert”: all terms coined by Jung.
This volume goes a long way in revealing the man behind the psychobabble. It also proves Jung quite wrong in his claim that his life did not “contain the matter from which one could make a biography worth reading.” At once hallucinogenic, cryptic, whimsical, gossipy and downright peculiar, this collection of interviews is testament to how rich Jung’s “inner life” really was. Few minds have left such a strange and fertile imprint on how we understand ourselves. If, of course, we ever could.
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