Jung Starts Talking in Public about What He Found in the Depths

and reveals that during his inner storms he found strength and balance by calling back his boy self

Jung told a seminar in 1925 that “as soon as one begins to watch one’s mind...it is very much as if one stepped out of the protection of his house into an antediluvian forest and was confronted by all of the monsters that inhabited the latter...In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious but it can also be just as real as the tangible world.” [1]

He was talking in public for what may have been the first time about the personal experiences that shaped his most important work – the early brushes with spirits and poltergeists, the rift with Freud, the terrifying stations of his long Underworld journey that he called his “confrontation with the unconscious”. He learned, he told his audience, that there is “something living down there” in the unconscious, both personal and collective. He did not share at the lectern the full drama and horror of what he experienced when he let his mind fall into the depths. Read The Red Book, and you see that he went through hell. He conversed with a Red Devil. He fought an ancient Bull God with science and shrunk him to the size of an egg and raised him up again. He took orders from a woman who called herself his soul to eat the liver of a murdered child. He howled to a dead moon and a dark sea about combining good and evil, but he did not trust his own bawling. He was confined in a madhouse – as might have happened to a lesser mind in ordinary reality. [2] It is appropriate to compare what he survived to a shaman’s ordeals of initiation. [3] He paid the price.

All this was unfolding at a time when he was quite isolated from his previous circle in the wake of his rift with Freud. To find some balance and to lighten his mood, he tried to get back in contact, across time, with his boy self. He decided to “play like a child” in hopes of making himself attractive to that magical child. He messed around building stone villages and miniature castles as he did at ten and eleven. Looking back on this near the end of his life, Jung added that he was amazed at the force of his feelings as he engaged in this play. “Aha,,” he said to himself, “there is still life in these things. The small boy is still around and possesses a creative life which I lack,” It was clear to him that when he chose to “take up once more that child’s life with his childish games, that moment was a turning point in my fate.” [5]

He developed a practice of consciously giving voice – indeed, adding to the voice - of personalities inside himself that he felt were straining to be heard. One was distinctly feminine. She wanted him to view his work as “art” rather than “science”. Jung resisted this suggestion. He could not identify the feminine presence – was this the anima he would make famous? Nor could he hear her very well. He decided this was because her “voice centers” were not as developed as his own. So he invited her to make him her speaker, to take possession of his own voice centers to communicate clearly. “She did and came through with a long statement.”[6]

In the lectures and Q&A sessions of the 1925 seminar, Jung risked taking his most intimate and challenging personal experiences – in some of which, he confessed privately, he had gone insane for a time - to a circle of critical, if sympathetic minds. We sense him watching himself, as observer, while he responds to questions in the pleasant clubhouse at Gemeindestrasse 27. He describes the genesis of his method of active imagination, engaging with the characters and scenes of “fantasy” as if they are real. He trained himself, he told the club in Zurich, “in making communications with split-off portions of the unconscious.”[7]

He laid down a law for such things: “The technical rule with regard to fantasy is to stick to the picture that comes up until all its possibilities are exhausted...Thus one makes the fantasy move on.” Stick to the fantasy and “the play of the images can be watched. …When one watches such a scene one tries to figure out its special meaning for oneself.” [8]

He had already discovered that some of the figures who came alive in “fantasy” are far more than “split-off portions of the unconscious”. For Jung, the most important was the figure named Philemon, who appeared to him as an old man with the horns of a bull and kingfisher blue wings. Philemon, he declared later, taught him “psychic objectivity”: that “there are things in the psyche that have their own life”. He made pictures of Philemon before he could understand him. One of his paintings of Philemon, in brilliant colors, is in The Red Book. He declared that

“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. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies, I held conversations with him. “He said things which I had not consciously thought, for I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said, I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself. But in his view, thoughts were like animals in the forest or people in a room or birds in the air. And added, if you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them. It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. “[9]

References

1. C.G. Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925. [Hereafter 1925 Seminar] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Trans RF.C. Hull, ed. William McGuire, intro by Sonu Shamdasani. P.40

2. C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani trans. Mark Kyburz. John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Liber Secundus chapters 14-16.

3. Robert Moss, Dreaming the Soul Back Home Novato CA: New World Library, 2012 pp.28-37. See also the excellent study by C. Michael Smith, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul / Retrieving the Sacred. Bloomington: Trafford, 2007.

4. 1925 Seminar p.43

5. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [MDR] ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p.174

6. 1925 Seminar, p. 45

7. Ibid p.48

8. Ibid pp.37-38

9. MDR p.183