Bump in the Bookshelf

A few weeks ago, we covered the well known story of the breaking point between Jung and Freud that involved two mysterious and startling cracks in the bookcase in Freud’s study. Like the well known scarab dream story, it was a significant point in Jung’s life that affected his future, which ultimately affected many of us who have an interest in signs and symbols and mysteries of the unknown. We posted that story here.

I was reading over the story which we include in our upcoming book, Sensing the Future when it occurred to me how strange Jung’s immediate response was to the incident. He was feeling very angry about Freud’s dismissal of the paranormal and Jung’s interest in pursuing it and holding back his feelings when the first loud explosion erupted from the bookcase.

Both men bolted to their feet, alarmed that the bookcase was about to topple over on them. Jung exclaimed, “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”

Did he really say that? If it happened to me (Rob), I probably would’ve jumped up and shouted, “What the f*ck was that?” But that was another era, and maybe he did exclaim, “Aha, catalytic exteriorization phenomenon, Dr. Freud.” Hm, maybe I’ll try that next something goes bump in the night!

 Amazingly, Jung went on to say that it would happen again…and it did! Was that synchronicity or precognition, psychokinesis? Maybe all three.

 If one of us experienced something like this and wrote about it, it wouldn’t make the impact that it did when Jung related it. What makes it notable is that Freud is considered to be the father of modern psychology and that Jung, whose name is often preceded by the great Swiss psychologist, devoted his career and, ultimately, his entire adult life, to “what Heraclitus called the ‘boundaries of the soul,’” writes Robert Hopcke in There Are No Accidents. “He consistently applied scientific methods to examine so-called ‘irrational’ phenomena and to elucidate the psychological meaning and function of such experiences in human life – paranormal experiences, extrasensory perception, UFOs, psychokinesis and the like.”

I was going to stop there, but it’s worth pointing out that while Freud dissed the paranormal, he certainly thought about what happened that day in his parlor and tried hard to rationalize it. In fact, he wrote Jung a letter in which he attempts to de-mystify the experience. Here it is in part:

“I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that’s obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare.

“At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never heard again after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge.) The phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe, vanished along with the spell of your personal presence; once again, for various inner reasons, it seems to me wholly implausible that anything of the sort should occur. The furniture stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece.”

Maybe Freud continued to experience the reverberation of Jung’s pent up anger that exploded on the scene. Maybe that’s what the cracks he heard later were about.  Notice that he didn’t say that these cracking sounds were something he had been familiar with prior to his meeting with Jung. If you would like to read the complete letter from Freud to Jung on the issue, here it is.