CARL GUSTAV JUNG: A Biography
By Frank McLynn
St. Martin’s Press, 624 pages, $29.95
I took on this review assignment as a way to counter my ignorance of Carl Jung, an ignorance that included a comfortable dismissal of him as Sigmund Freud’s once-brilliant disciple who had betrayed not only him but reason itself to become the champion of every sort of mystic, if not fascistic, sect, practice, person, doctrine and toy (parapsychology, Tarot cards, racism, UFOs, the occult, Zen, spiritualism, numerology, J.B. Rhine, mandalas, you name it).
This assignment, which Jung (I have learned) might have called an enantiodromia (a return to one’s opposite, an immersion in the destructive element), has led to an appreciation, which does not exclude the detestable but includes much, much more. Now it does not seem absurd to me for Jung to be coupled on cultural menus with Freud, if not as “the Swiss Tweedledum” and “the Viennese Tweedledee,” at least as intellectual ham and eggs or bread and butter, a coincidence of opposites who have altered the behavior and thinking of more 20th-Century human beings than all our dictators, philosophers and poets put together.
I owe my reassessment to Frank McLynn’s biography, whose factual density and balanced arraignment of Jungian exposition and anti-Jungian argument is a model of its kind.
Carl Gustav Jung knew–and was himself one of–the great figures of this passing century. He became rich, famous and scandalous, had fascinating opinions about everything and conducted his continuous self-education in books, public lectures and conferences centered in some of the loveliest places on Earth, provided by some of the world’s richest people. He married a rich woman whom he soon instructed in his polygamous needs. He tried “every conceivable trick” to thwart the “tide of little blessings” she produced; they only swelled an already overpopulated world. The reluctant progenitor taught his four daughters and son how to carve wood and stone, and build ships and houses; he took them on hikes in the Bernese Oberland; and amidst authoritarian decrees and cutting remarks, he let them pretty much decide what to believe, where to go and what to do.
From his school years in Basel and grueling, clinical years under Eugen Bleuler (the inventor of the term “schizophrenia”) in Zurich’s Burgholzli hospital, Jung, by marriage to the rich Emma Rauschenbach, was able to more or less make his own schedule, see only those patients he cared to see, write his books and travel (often with that season’s incarnation of his anima, his ideal woman) to his beloved England or America (where his superb English and boisterous charm made him enormously popular) and later to Africa and India (though never to menacing Rome, Freud’s favorite city).
Powerful and huge (half a foot taller than the 5-foot-7-inch Freud), Jung bullied people physically and mentally, dominating conferences, shouting people down, dismissing patients as bores, heckling and sometimes punching out opponents. He ate hugely, drank good wine, attracted women left and right, slept with and discarded those who didn’t serve his larger anima purposes, attacked establishments (“Small is beautiful”), championed individuality (especially his own) and, in short, had the sort of life that makes great stories.
McLynn is less interested in the narrative possibilities of Jung’s life than in Jung’s indubitably fascinating ideas. One story, though, he does tell in detail. It is perhaps the dominant story of Jung’s life, the one that will probably always center discussions of him and his work. This is the story of his relationship to Freud. For Freud, the young Swiss Protestant was the gateway to the larger, Christian world’s acceptance of psychoanalysis. For Jung, Freud was the genius who put the unconscious on the map, and, as well, the first man to whom he could really talk. At their first meeting, on March 3, 1907, Jung talked “non-stop” for 13 hours. Freud later told Ludwig Binswanger, “When the empire I have founded is orphaned, no one but Jung must inherit the whole thing.” But by 1909, when the two men went together to America, where Freud was to receive an honorary doctorate from Clark University in Massachusetts, the tensions between them were already clear. In New York Harbor, at the ship’s railing, Freud, after predicting that America was due for a surprise (i.e. psychoanalysis), said that as for himself he was “the most humble of men and the only one who isn’t ambitious.” To which the sardonic Jung replied, “That’s a big thing to be–the only one.”
Separated by years (Freud was 19 years older), temperament, training, religion, and ideas about sex, family and marriage (Freud was strictly–and to Jung, suspiciously–monogamous; Jung later spread the rumor that Freud slept with his wife’s sister), they were separated even more by their theories and practice of psychoanalysis. For Freud, neurosis was rooted in repressed memories. Therapy consisted of an emotionally charged insight gained through transference, and it was certified by the achievement of a satisfactory heterosexual relationship. Freud’s patients were mostly younger than 35 and Jewish. Jung’s patients were successful Protestant burghers who wanted more out of life than success. Jung saw their neurotic symptoms as signs of a collective, universal unconscious that the great myths and stories and all significant dreams revealed. (When he learned years later that the Elgonyi people of Africa never dreamed, he was devastated until he decided that they’d entrusted their dreaming to the British who ruled them.) The Jungian analyst helped patients conquer the collective psyche. Unlike the Freudian analyst, a sort of tabula rasa on which the patient projected his previously repressed passions and to whom he transferred what he’d been blocked from expressing, the Jungian analyst faced the patient, saw him not five times a week but once, and opened up his own life to him if that was called for. This is but a tithe of the intellectual differences between the two great psychologists. They deepened the already profound personal differences until the familiar, ugly forms of mutual ingratitude, betrayal and rage became war to the death.
McLynn spells out the story in rich detail. He describes the auxiliary people, the wives, the friends and mistresses, those who took one side or the other or who switched from side to side. (The most significant is the beautiful Jewish therapist Sabina Spielrein, a Jung anima who became a Freudian therapist and who later died in a concentration camp.) At Freud’s death in 1939, Jung published a long, abusive repudiation of the man and his work, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” Jung lived another 22 years, pronouncing, often brilliantly, often surprisingly, on gods and men, technology (monstrous) and cabbages, alchemy (a key matrix) and Heidegger (detestable, a rival in Nietzsche-knowledge), Hitler (a recrudescent Wotan on whom Germans projected their suppressed diabolism), Americans (ruthless and naive), interstellar travel, capital punishment (necessary so the punisher can recognize his own criminal tendencies), the Spanish temperament, Franklin Roosevelt (“the limping messenger of the Apocalypse”), and the various subpersonalities that he called complexes and that were the keys to psychosis.
To the end of his 86 years, Jung lived it up. He carved Latin mottos and quadrafoil clusters into his Yeatsian stone-tower retreat at Bollingen, dominated the Jung-heavy Eranos conferences, summoned his maenads for secretarial and other duties. His last recorded words–recorded by one of them–were, “Let’s have a really good red wine tonight.”
