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Overview
In this, the first full-length biography of the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung is remembered not only for his valuable contribution to psychotherapy and to our understanding of the inner workings of the mind, but for the enduring controversies he sparked. In Frank McLynn's capable hands, readers will come to understand the man who originated what are widely held to be some of the greatest ideas of this century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878501 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/19/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 640 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Frank McLynn is a distinguished biographer who has taken on such varied and challenging subject matters as Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House, 1994), and the European exploration of Africa in Hearts of Darkness (Carroll&Graf, 1993). He lives in England.
Read an Excerpt
Carl Gustav Jung
A Biography
By Frank McLynn
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1996 Frank McLynnAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7850-1
CHAPTER 1
A SWISS CHILDHOOD
To understand Carl Gustav Jung one must first understand Switzerland, and this is no easy matter. People become puzzled when confronted with a republic that has no president but a communal leadership consisting of an executive council. The technicalities of confederation rather than federalism – the technical distinction is that in confederation the central government has powers over the member states but not directly over their citizens – leads to further confusions. Compound this with a geography that produces cis-Alpine, trans-Alpine and inter-Alpine cantons and a political culture not based on a single language and one is already faced with a social complexity that matches the notorious difficulty of Jung's psychological thought. Some observers have even suggested a stricter determinism: that Jung could not have had the theories he had if he had been born elsewhere, since the Swiss constitution is itself 'Jungian'.
Superstitious, xenophobic, conservative, earthbound, introverted, moneyminded – all these epithets have been used to describe Jung, and even more frequently to describe his native country. That Jung was not an untypical 'Switzer' he himself recognized, and he would usually take it in his stride when accused of being 'moralistic', 'mystical', or 'Teutonically confused'. He was quite prepared to admit that he was a bigoted Swiss and even revelled in the idea of being a product of Swiss wooden-headedness.
He conceded that his fellow-countrymen were primitive and said that their love of cattle reminded him of the African: adding that there was still a lot of deeply buried and archaic earth mysticism in Switzerland. As for conservatism, he declared that for the Swiss a new idea was like an unknown dangerous animal which had to be either avoided or else approached with extreme caution – which was why, in his view, the Swiss had such poor intuitive capacity. Their aristocratic posture revealed itself in indifference to the opinions of others. As for introversion, this was a function both of xenophobia and neutrality in the affairs of the world on one hand and the peculiar Swiss political culture on the other, where warlike instincts were channelled inwards into domestic political life.
Jung advanced the paradox that the tolerable social order in Switzerland was a result of having 'introverted' war; Switzerland was ahead of the rest of the world in that it was in a chronic state of mitigated civil war and did not direct its aggression outwards.
The charge of neurosis always upset Jung and he rebutted it as vigorously when laid at the door of his native land as he did when accused of it himself. Although accepting that the Swiss were for geographical and cultural reasons in a precarious position, full of resentments and defence mechanisms (and in this he likened them to the Jews), he thought they had their feet on the ground and their head out of the clouds. It is true that even in the nineteenth century when Jung was born Switzerland had fewer social frictions and less class conflict, but the tendency to melancholy and the high suicide rate were often noted by foreign observers. Above all, the Swiss were thought to be far too interested in money, to have what Jung would later term a 'money-complex'.
'Point d'argent, point de Suisse' were the immortal words in Racine's Les Plaideurs – said to have been the actual words of Swiss mercenaries in the service of French King Francis I in 1521, when they quit because they had not been paid. Jung accepted that there was some truth in this and liked to tell a story about a relative snubbed at a family gathering on the grounds that he was a 'dreadful person'; when Jung asked what crime the man had committed the answer was short and to the point: 'He's living on his capital.'
The peculiarity of Switzerland as geographical entity and political culture can scarcely be overemphasized in its influence on Jung. Geographically, the Swiss are predominantly a mountain people, and it is a commonplace of political science that such 'highlanders' are deeply religious and politically conservative, with a strong sense of independence and self-reliance. Jung frequently referred to the Alps as the central collective image of Switzerland and suggested that a landscape where Nature was mightier than Man produced the characteristic Swiss mixture of obstinacy, doggedness, stolidity and innate pride.
The other salient geographical feature of Switzerland is that it is landlocked – the 'Swiss admiral' has become a stock joke – and to this fact Jung attributed all the qualities of the Swiss, both good and bad: the down-to-earth, limited outlook, the parsimony, stolidity, stubbornness, xenophobia, mistrustfulness, political neutrality and refusal to become involved.
Yet its mountainous and landlocked nature do not exhaust the geographical significance of Switzerland. It is also at the heart of Europe – a fact Jung thought of great significance. This meant that in Switzerland the European was truly at home in his geographical and psychological centre; Switzerland was, so to speak, Europe's centre of gravity. The nodal position of Switzerland has inspired the legend of Saanemoser, a village in Bernese Oberland, where it is said that if you spit into the stream it is an even chance that the fluid will be carried either down various water courses to the Rhone and the Mediterranean or to the Rhine and hence the North Sea.
Yet beyond all these reasons for taking an exceptional pride in his native land, Jung had quasi-mystical reasons of his own for revering Switzerland. As a believer in numerology, astrology and symbols, Jung singled out more obscure aspects of the semiology of Switzerland from which to derive comfort. Obsessed as he was with the dialectical interpenetration of opposites, he pointed to the fact that the red and white in the Swiss flag were themselves 'signs' of the reconciliation he held so dear. Bedazzled by the fact of Switzerland's strength as a nation-state, against all the apparent odds, he liked to point out that the existence of three major languages (Italian, French and German) was no barrier to a sense of nationhood, whereas the received wisdom was that a distinctive language was the sign of nationhood and a special political culture. But language in Switzerland was even more important than this in Jung's view, for there was a fourth tongue, the Romansch dialect, spoken in the remoter Alpine valleys. It was a deeply held belief of Jung's that four was a magic number symbolizing perfection – his work is littered with references to 'the quaternity' – and he saw such quaternities everywhere in Switzerland. The most striking one for him was that Switzerland had four main rivers – the Rhine, Rhône, Ticino and Inn – mirroring the four biblical rivers of Eden (the Euphrates, Gihon, Pison and Hiddekel) – thus establishing his homeland as the true earthly paradise.
Moreover, the Swiss zodiacal sign was an earth sign – Virgo in one tradition, Taurus in another. The stolidity and inaccessibility of the Swiss were, on this view, all marks of the feminine element Virgo. Jung liked to link the Virgo sign to Switzerland's loveliest mountain – the Jungfrau – thus reinforcing his sense of the Alps as a metaphor for perfection.
It is possible to attenuate the deep psychological and cultural impact of one's homeland by exile or emigration, but no-one can shrug off the influence of parents. It is a commonplace that parents are an enduring legacy for good or evil but, beyond this, Jung considered there were two reasons why ancestry was all-important. In the first place he thought that children were condemned to fulfil that portion of a parent's life left undone. Secondly, he believed in a form of atavism: that grandparents could actually have more influence on a child than the parents themselves. This was a particularly important idea in Jung's case, since his grandfathers were more eminent people than his father. Moreover, it is a peculiarity of Swiss history that many of her great figures were sons of pastors who spent their lives wrestling with problems of faith and doubt left unsolved by their fathers. Such were Jakob Burckhardt, Pestalozzi and Durenmatt and so too was Jung. This is what Freud meant when he referred to the 'theological prehistory of so many of the Swiss.'
Jung's ancestry on the paternal side cannot be traced back beyond the early eighteenth century. The Jung family came from Mainz, and it is known that there was a Dr Carl Jung who died there in 1645 and – interestingly in view of Carl Gustav's own later preoccupations – was affiliated to the Rosicrucians, but the early part of the family tree comes to an abrupt end in 1688. In that year, during Louis XIV's siege of Mainz, the municipal archives took a direct hit from cannon fire and were burned to the ground, destroying all previous records of the Jungs. Their history proper begins with Jung's great-grandfather, the physician Franz Ignaz Jung (1759–1831), a Mainz Catholic and an introvert who was known to have had an unhappy marriage with Sophie Ziegler; Jung's 'atavistic theory' links Franz with his own father, Paul Jung (1842–96), since both men had problems with their wife and son. Franz Jung was in charge of a military hospital during the Napoleonic wars, and his brother Sigismund (1745–1824) was Chancellor of Bavaria.
Sophie Ziegler Jung suffered from mental illness whose nature is uncertain. In later life her famous great-grandson analysed her handwriting and found no trace of schizophrenia, detecting instead a 'psychogenic melancholia'; he also speculated that she had an over-intense relationship with her son, which exacerbated the rift with Franz. Partly as a result of Franz's marital discord with Sophie, the rumour sprang up that Sophie had had an illegitimate son by Goethe. The canard was circumstantially plausible, as Sophie and her sister were lively artistic personalities who knew Goethe and did a great deal for the Mannheim theatre (Franz Ignaz transferred the family seat from Mainz to Mannheim), especially at the time of the memorable première of Schiller's Die Rauberin in 1782. In his early career Jung was inclined to credit the rumour, and Freud, whether ironically or not, refers to Goethe as 'your ancestor' in correspondence with Jung. The idea of Goethe as Jung's great-grandfather looks like a classic instance of the common fantasy of having celebrated forebears famously analysed by Freud as the 'family Romance'.At the end of his life Jung advanced a more sober explanation for the role of Goethe in the history of his family in terms of a possible 'transference' to Goethe.
What is known for certain is that Jung's great inspiration, his grandfather Carl Gustav, was born in 1794 and converted to Protestantism in his student years. Carl Gustav attended Heidelberg University where he studied medicine though his first love was poetry. His combative personality and taste for radical causes were almost his undoing, for at twenty-three, with his career barely started, he was arrested and spent a year without trial in the Hansvogtei prison. His political activities led him to befriend genuine revolutionaries, one of whom assassinated the Russian privy councillor Kotzebue; in the ensuing hue and cry a hammer and an axe were found in Carl Jung's rooms and he was held as an accessory. Once released, ruined and embittered, he made his way to Paris where he met the famous naturalist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt took him under his wing, found him a job in the Department of Surgery at the Hôtel-Dieu and spotted him as a potential recruit for the Berne academy. When Berne showed no interest, Humboldt presented his protégé's credentials to the new medical school at Basel, and secured a post for him. Jung left for Switzerland in 1820, took out Swiss nationality and made his career in Switzerland thereafter, becoming professor of medicine at Basel University in 1822.
Like his grandson, Carl Gustav was autocratic and pranksterish. Anticipating Gérard de Nerval with his lobster, he had a small pig as a pet which he took on walks as if it were a dog. A strong personality, active, brilliant, witty, voluble and a great organizer, Carl Gustav senior transformed the Basel medical faculty. Before he arrived the faculty had been in a bad way: for many years the anatomist and botanist Johann Jakob Burckhardt had been the only teacher, and between 1806 and 1814 not a single degree had been awarded. Greatly interested in psychiatry – Carl Gustav tried unsuccessfully to endow a chair in the subject at Basel – he founded an institute for psychologically disturbed and retarded children and spent much of his free time with his charges until his death in 1864. Eventually Rector of Basel University, he was an ardent Freemason, became Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge, published numerous scientific papers and wrote plays. He made great friends with the German theologian Wilhelm de Wette (1780–1849), like himself a political refugee, who had been dismissed as professor of theology at Berlin University for his radical sympathies. It was the German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1766–1834) who brought the two men together and it was through Schleiermacher's influence that he was appointed to the chair at Basel in 1822.
Like all the Jungs, Carl Gustav had a turbulent married life. His first wife died after bearing him three children, whereupon Carl Gustav decided he wanted to marry the daughter of Basel's mayor. When the mayor turned down his suit for his daughter's hand, Carl Gustav decided that to 'spite' the stuffed-shirt dignitary he would marry the first attractive woman he met. He stormed into a tavern and proposed to the waitress there – an exploit that won him notoriety in the university. The hapless waitress died after bearing him two children. Since the mayor's daughter was still unmarried, Carl Gustav decided to try his luck once more, and this time Mayor Frey accepted him. Sophie in turn bore eight children, all of whom remembered their father as a domestic tyrant. The youngest son born to this third marriage was Paul Jung, who was to be the great psychologist's father.
Jung's maternal grandfather was also an astonishing character. Samuel Preiswerk (1799–1871) was a pastor and a Zionist avant la lettre, obsessed with Jewish history and culture. Convinced that Hebrew was the language spoken in Heaven, he gave his children Jewish names and achieved such eminence in Hebrew studies that he was appointed to a lectureship in the subject; his greatest source of satisfaction was the knowledge that he would now be able to read celestial newspapers. At first his career was erratic: he taught Hebrew and Old Testament theology in Geneva, was then recalled to Basel as pastor of St Leonhard's church and finally got tenure at the university there. Preiswerk, who first came to Basel in 1833, married twice: his first wife Magdalene produced just one child before dying, but his second, Augusta Faber, a Württemberg clergyman's daughter, bore him no fewer than thirteen. An occultist and spiritualist, he insisted that his wife stand behind him during his sermons to ward off evil spirits. She took less satisfaction from his dealings with the spirits at home, for Preiswerk liked to set out a chair in his study for his first wife's ghost to sit in; during her weekly visit they would have long conversations. The living wife took less kindly to this and, since she was herself clairvoyant and possessed of the second sight, a battle of the psyches was fought out in the Preiswerk household.
Jung's parents Paul and Emilie were both the youngest in families of thirteen children – a fact the superstitious and numerological Carl Gustav junior did not fail to invest with significance. Paul Jung promised great things in his youth and was a brilliant student of oriental languages (principally Arabic) at Göttingen University, but he was a depressive and found himself in his thirties an obscure pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical in a backwater in Canton Thurgau. Quiet and unassuming in public, he was quarrelsome and bad-tempered in private, and the marriage with Emilie Preiswerk did not prosper, especially as his dreamy, scholarly nature clashed with her 'uncanny' personality – clearly she had inherited a double dose as a 'psychic' from her Preiswerk parents. Their root problem was sexual. Some have speculated that Paul was somewhat lacking in virility, or that Emilie was terrified of sex; possibly both factors were at play, but it was not a happy marriage.
Carl Gustav, who was born on 26 July 1875, was Paul and Emilie's first surviving child. Emilie had given birth to a boy, Paul, in 1873 but he lived just a few days. Sometimes the shadow of such an earlier sibling can affect the surviving child, as the 'first Vincent' did in the case of Vincent Van Gogh, but the deeply introspective Jung never alludes to his ill-fated predecessor. Carl Gustav was born at Kesswil on the southern edge of Lake Constance, but when he was six months old his father moved to a new vicarage at Laufen castle, above the Rhine Falls. Jung had no memory of Lake Constance but he always adored lakes and wanted to live near one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Carl Gustav Jung by Frank McLynn. Copyright © 1996 Frank McLynn. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,1 A Swiss Childhood,
2 Troubled Adolescence,
3 Student Days,
4 Burghölzli Apprenticeship,
5 Sex and Marriage,
6 First Contacts with Freud,
7 Sabina Spielrein,
8 Voyage to America,
9 Stormclouds Gather,
10 The Rift Deepens,
11 The Kreuzlingen Gesture,
12 Guerre à Outrance,
13 The Descent into the Underworld,
14 The Psychology of Types,
15 The Globetrotter,
16 The Doctrine,
17 Valkyries and Other Women,
18 The Shadow of the Nazis,
19 The World of Dreams,
20 America, America,
21 The Lure of the Orient,
22 Freud: Final Accounts,
23 Wartime,
24 The Theologian,
25 The New Age Guru,
26 Last Years,
Bibliography,
Notes,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
"We are indebted to biographer Frank McLynn for pulling together [this] single, logically organized, and well-written volume."