While thumbing through Deirdre’s Bair wonderful biography of Jung, I ran across some fascinating insights into Jung, the mystic.
According to Bair, Jung’s interest in psychiatry as a specialty dated from his first year in medical school, when two inexplicable events happened that led him to “read widely about Spiritualism, then considered a related adjunct to psychiatry.” (Spiritualism – communication with spirits – as a related adjunct to psychiatry? Wow. How times have changed!)
One summer afternoon, Jung was studying in his room when he heard a loud noise, like pistol shots, coming from the dining room. He ran out into the dining room, where a 70-year-old walnut table, a family heirloom, had split down the middle. Bair notes that the split had nothing to do with the constructions or the weather.The day was hot and humid – as opposed to a cold, dry, winter day when “such mishaps might be expected.”
A few weeks later, Jung got home to find his mother, sister and the maid in turmoil. There apparently had been another noise, from a “solid piece of Swiss nineteenth century furniture.” The women had been too frightened to look for the cause, so Jung looked. At the side cupboard, where the bread was usually stored, “there lay a bread knife, its blade neatly severed in several places in a manner that could not have occurred naturally.”
Jung took the knife to a cutler, who insisted the knife could only have been broken intentionally. After this, Jung began to read widely about Spiritualism. Emmanuel Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer was one such book. He also read Zollner, Crookes, and Swedenborg.”…the more he read, the more he was convinced that there had to be something to the worldwide coincidences, where the same seemingly unexplainable phenomena kept being reported over and over. He did not surrender entirely to the total authenticity of these views, but they were nonetheless the first sustained accounts he had read of objective psychic phenomena.”
From descriptions in Bair’s biography, it’s apparent that Jung’s mother, Emilie, was probably psychic. As a youngster, she had visions, and she grew up in a large clan of nephews, nieces, and cousins who had similar visions, “believed in ghosts and visits from various spirits, and some even talked in tongues.” It was Emilie, in fact, who after the first incident with the splitting of the dining room table, spoke in her No. 2 voice: “Yes yes, that means something.”
While growing up, Jung attended seances, experimented with “table tilting,” and Ouija boards. Later, his doctoral dissertation was entitled, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.” The dissertation was well-received by the medical community because Jung was fastidious in presenting established case histories from the writings of William James and others. But he also used one of his relatives as a case history, disguising her with initials, which fooled no one in the family. When the dissertation was published, his family was ticked off.
So here was Jung – the man whose explorations gave birth to terms like synchronicity, the collective unconscious, archetypes – who seemed to have been primed from a very young age for his mystical leanings. In his later years, after he began building his “castle” on the shore of Lake Zurich, Jung had several experiences with spirits. In the winter of 1924, Bair writes, “Jung spent long periods alone at the tower, and he too, experienced ghostly presences. He heard music, as if an orchestra were playing; he envisioned a host of young peasant men who seemed to be encircling the tower with music laughter, singing, and roughhousing.” Jung writes about these experiences in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
Even in a biography as exhaustive as Bair’s, even with all that has been written about Jung, even in his autobiography, he remains elusive, mysterious, unknowable. Even the best writings don’t really reveal the secrets that lay within Jung’s heart. What did he think and feel when he sat beneath a tree that would, on the day of his death, be split in two by lightning? How did he reconcile his relationship with his mistress, Toni Wolff, with his long marriage to Emma? We have hints, but will never really know.
What we have, though, are the kernels of Jung’s brilliance, his inventiveness, his immersion in the greatest mysteries. He left it to the rest of us to figure out!
– Trish
