Toward a Visionary Science: Jung’s Notebooks of Transformation
Sonu Shamdasani
Prelude
In 1935, Jung said: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us.”1 By 1913, he had established himself as one of the leading lights in European psychiatry and was president of the burgeoning International Psychoanalytical Association. As he recounted in Liber Novus, “I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me.”2 He had reached a turning point that was to transform his life and work: through this, Jung became Jung, and analytical psychology emerged as a general psychology and as a school of psychotherapy.
This transformation took place through the exploration of the visionary imagination, charted in the Black Books, from 1913 to 1932. These are not personal diaries but the records of a unique self-experimentation that Jung called his “confrontation with his soul” and his “confrontation with the unconscious.”3 He didn’t record day-to-day happenings or outer events in them but rather his active imaginations, depictions of his mental states, and reflections on these. From the fantasies therein, between 1913 and 1916 he composed the Draft of Liber Novus, the Red Book, which he then transcribed in a calligraphic volume, illustrated with paintings. The paintings from 1916 onward in the Red Book relate to Jung’s continued explorations in the later Black Books. Liber Novus and the Black Books are thus closely intertwined. The Black Books cover the period before, during, and after Liber Novus.
Liber Novus was born from the Black Books. It includes Jung’s meditation on his fantasies between 1913 and 1916, and his understanding of the significance of his experiences up to that point. In Jung’s view, his undertaking pertained not just to himself but to others as well; he had come to view his fantasies as stemming from a general mythopoeic layer of the psyche, which he named the collective unconscious. From the notebooks of a self-experimentation, a psychological work in a literary and theogonic form was created. Jung’s continued explorations of the visionary imagination in the Black Books from 1916 chart his evolving understanding and demonstrate how he sought to develop and extend the insights he had gained and embody them in life. At the same time, they enable his paintings from 1916 onward to be understood in the context of the evolution of the iconography of his personal cosmology.
Given the intersection of the Black Books and Liber Novus, particularly between 1913 and 1916, this introduction of necessity reprises in a reworked and expanded form sections from the introduction to Liber Novus, now taken up from a different angle, as both works arise from one context and shared chronology. The introduction at hand focuses more on the unfolding of Jung’s visionary self-experimentation, and provides a fuller contextualization of the later period, 1916 to 1932. Similarly, a share of the notes from the 2009 Norton edition of Liber Novus have been carried over in the first part of this edition. In the early twentieth century, it was not uncommon for a work to be expanded and recast through several editions. A number of Jung’s pivotal publications, such as The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, are prime examples of this. This introduction is part of that genre.
The Intoxication of Mythology
Vocatus atque vocatus, deus aderit: Called or not, God will be present. In 1908, Jung had this proverb carved on the portal of the house he had built in Küsnacht, on the upper shore of Lake Zürich. The statement was from the Delphic oracle, reproduced in the Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus’s Collectanea adagiorum, proverbs from classical authors.4 Jung closely worked on the plans for the house.5 The following year, he resigned his post as senior physician at Burghölzli hospital to devote himself to his growing practice and his research interests. He kept his position as a lecturer in the medical school, where he continued to give courses on the psychology of the unconscious and psychoanalysis.6
His retreat from the Burghölzli coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. These researches culminated in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, published in two installments in 1911 and 1912. It marked a return to Jung’s intellectual roots and to his cultural and religious preoccupations. He found the mythological work exciting and intoxicating. “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making,” he recalled in 1925. “I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.”7 The end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of scholarship in the newly founded disciplines of comparative religion and ethnopsychology. Primary texts were collected and translated for the first time and subjected to historical scholarship in collections such as Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East.8 For many, these works represented an important relativization of the Christian worldview.
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, he contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical. The latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido was an extended study of fantasy thinking, and of the continued presence of mythological themes in the dreams and fantasies of contemporary individuals. Jung reiterated the anthropological equation between the prehistoric, the primitive, and the child. He held that the elucidation of current-day fantasy thinking in adults would concurrently shed light on the thought of children, savages, and prehistoric peoples.9
In this work, Jung synthesized nineteenth-century theories of memory, heredity, and the unconscious and posited a phylogenetic layer to the unconscious, still present in everyone, and consisting of mythological images. For Jung, myths were symbols of the libido and they depicted its typical movements. He used the comparative method of anthropology to draw together a vast panoply of myths, and then subjected them to analytic interpretation. He later termed his use of the comparative method “amplification.” He claimed that there had to be typical myths, which corresponded to the ethnopsychological development of complexes. Following Jacob Burckhardt, he termed such typical myths “primordial images” (Urbilder). One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother. He interpreted the incest motif as an attempt to return to the mother to be reborn. He was later to herald this work as marking the discovery of the collective unconscious, though the term itself was of a later date.10
In his preface to the 1952 revision of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung noted that the work was written in 1911, his thirty-sixth year: “The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.”11 He was conscious of the loss of his collaboration with Freud and was indebted to his wife for her support. After completing the work, he realized the significance of what it meant to live without a myth. One without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.”12
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “what is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. . . . So in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?13
The study of myth had revealed to Jung his mythlessness. He then undertook to get to know his myth, his “personal equation.”14 Thus we see that the self-experimentation that he undertook through exploring his own fantasy thinking was in part a direct response to theoretical questions raised by research that culminated in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
“My Most Difficult Experiments”
In 1912, Jung had some significant dreams that he did not understand. He gave particular importance to two of these, which he felt showed the limitations of Freud’s conceptions of dreams. The first:
I was in a southern town, on a rising street with narrow half-landings. It was twelve o’clock midday—bright sunshine. An old Austrian customs guard or someone similar passes by me, lost in thought. Someone says: That is one who cannot die. He died already 30–40 years ago, but has not yet managed to decompose. I was very surprised. Here a striking figure came, a knight of powerful build, clad in yellowish armor. He looks solid and inscrutable and nothing impresses him. On his back he carried a red Maltese cross. He has continued to exist from the 12th century and daily between 12 and 1 o’clock midday he takes the same route. No one marvels at these two apparitions, but I was extremely surprised.
I hold back my interpretive skills. As regards the old Austrian, Freud occurred to me; as regards the knight, I myself.15
Jung found the dream oppressing and bewildering, and Freud was unable to interpret it.16 The second came half a year later:
I dreamed then (it was shortly after Christmas 1912) that I was sitting with my children in a marvelous and richly furnished tower chamber—an open columned hall—we were sitting at a round table, whose top was a marvelous dark green stone. Suddenly a seagull or dove flew in and landed elatedly on the table. I admonished the children to be quiet, so that they would not scare away the beautiful white bird. Suddenly this little bird turned into a child of eight years, a small blond girl, and ran around playing with my children in the marvelous columned colonnades. Then the child suddenly turned into the gull or dove. She said the following to me: “Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.” With these words the bird flew away and I awoke.17
In 1925, Jung remarked that this dream “was the beginning of a conviction that the unconscious did not consist of inert material only, but that there was something living down there.”18 He added that he thought of the story of the Tabula Smaragdina, the twelve apostles, the signs of the Zodiac, and so on, but he “could make nothing out of the dream except that there was a tremendous animation of the unconscious. I knew no technique of getting at the bottom of this activity; all I could do was just wait, keep on living, and watch the fantasies.”19 These dreams led him to analyze his childhood memories.
While he was engaged in this self-analytic activity, he continued to develop his theoretical work. At the Munich Psycho-Analytical Congress, on September 7–8, 1913, he spoke on psychological types. He argued that there were two basic movements of the libido: extraversion, in which the subject’s interest was oriented toward the outer world, and introversion, in which the subject’s interest was directed toward himself. Following from this, he posited two types of people, characterized by a predominance of one of these tendencies. The psychologies of Freud and Alfred Adler were examples of the fact that psychologists often took what was true of their type as generally valid. Hence what was required was a psychology that did justice to both of these types.20
The following month, on a train journey to Schaffhausen, passing by the Rhine Falls and close to where he spent his early years, Jung experienced a waking vision of Europe being devastated by a catastrophic flood, which was repeated two weeks later, on the same journey. As he later recounted in Liber Novus:
I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.21
After the second occasion, he heard an inner voice say, “Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this.”22 In 1925, he described the event as follows:
I was traveling by train and had a book in my hand that I was reading. I began to fantasize, and before I knew it, I was in the town to which I was going. This was the fantasy: I was looking down on the map of Europe in relief. I saw all the northern part, and England sinking down so that the sea came in upon it. It came up to Switzerland, and then I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect Switzerland. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress, towns and people were destroyed, and the wrecks and the dead bodies were tossing about on the water. Then the sea turned to blood. At first I was only looking on dispassionately, and then the sense of the catastrophe gripped me with tremendous power.23
Commenting on this, he remarked: “I could be taken as Switzerland fenced in by mountains, and the submergence of the world could be the debris of my former relationships.”24 This led him to the following diagnosis of his condition: “I thought to myself, ‘If this means anything, it means that I am hopelessly off.’ I had the feeling that I was an over-compensated psychosis, and from this feeling I was not released till August 1st, 1914.”25 After this experience, Jung feared that he would go mad.26 He recalled that he first thought that the images of the vision indicated a revolution, but as he could not imagine this, he concluded that he was “threatened by a psychosis.”27 After this, he had a similar vision:
In the winter I once stood at the window deep in the night and looked North. There I saw a blood-red glow, stretched from East to West over the northern horizon, like the flicker of the sea seen from far. And someone asked me at that time what I thought about the future of the world. I told him that I hadn’t thought, but I saw blood, streams of blood.28
In the years directly preceding the outbreak of war, apocalyptic imagery was widespread in European arts and literature. For example, in 1912, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote of a coming universal catastrophe. From 1912 to 1914, Ludwig Meidner painted a series of works known as the apocalyptic landscapes, with scenes of destroyed cities, corpses, and turmoil.29 Prophecy was in the air. In 1899, the famous American medium Leonora Piper predicted that in the coming century there would be a terrible war in different parts of the world that would cleanse the world and reveal the truths of spiritualism. In 1918, Arthur Conan Doyle, the spiritualist and author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, viewed this as having been prophetic.30
In Jung’s account of the fantasy on the train in Liber Novus, the inner voice said that what the fantasy depicted would become completely real. It seems probable that what took place was a hypnagogic vision—that is, he entered into a stream of imagery in a state of drowsiness while reading a book. Initially, he interpreted this subjectively and prospectively, as depicting the imminent destruction of his world. His reaction to the experience was to undertake a psychological investigation of himself. In this epoch, self-experimentation was used in medicine and psychology. Introspection had been one of the main tools of psychological research.
Jung came to realize that Transformations and Symbols of the Libido “could be taken as myself and that an analysis of it leads inevitably into an analysis of my own unconscious processes.”31 He had projected his material onto the fantasies of an American woman he had never met, Miss Frank Miller. Up to this point, Jung had been an active thinker and had been averse to fantasy: “as a form of thinking I held it to be altogether impure, a sort of incestuous intercourse, thoroughly immoral from an intellectual viewpoint.”32 He now turned to analyze his fantasies, carefully noting everything, and had to overcome considerable resistance in doing this: “Permitting fantasy in myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man if he came into his workshop and found all the tools flying about doing things independently of his will.”33 In studying his fantasies, Jung realized that he was studying the myth-creating function of the mind.
I recalled that until 1900 I had kept a diary, and I thought that this would be a possibility for me to try to observe myself. This would be an attempt to meditate on myself, and I began to describe my inner states. These represented themselves to me in a literary metaphor: for example, I was in a desert, and the sun shone unbearably (sun = consciousness).34
His first move was to attempt to find imagistic correlates to his emotional states. He picked up his brown notebook, which he had set aside in 1902, and began writing in it.35
He recalled that in his childhood, he used to like to build houses and structures, and he took this up again, to reconnect with that time.36 He built a church with a red pyramidal stone as the altar, gathering stones from the lakeshore at the bottom of his garden. This reminded him of his childhood dream of the underground phallus.37 He would usually do this after lunch, and also sometimes in the evening. It clarified his thoughts and led him to notice fantasies, which he then recorded in the Black Books.38 He had the feeling that he was practicing a rite, as in mythology. Regarding his writing, he recalled in 1925: “For the sake then of trying to achieve the maximum honesty with myself, I wrote everything down very carefully, following the old Greek mandate, ‘give away all thou possessest, then thou shalt receive.’ ” This was from the Mithraic liturgy.39 It occurred to Jung that he could write down his reflections in a sequence. He was “writing autobiographical material, but not as an autobiography.”40 From the time of the Platonic dialogues onward, the dialogical form has been a major genre in Western philosophy. In 387 CE, St. Augustine wrote his Soliloquies, which presented an extended dialogue between himself and “Reason,” who instructs him. The work begins with the following lines:
When I had been pondering many different things to myself for a long time, and had for many days been seeking my own self and what my own good was, and what evil was to be avoided, there suddenly spoke to me—what was it? I myself or someone else, inside or outside me? (this is the very thing I would love to know but don’t).41
While writing Book 2, he posed a question.
I said to myself, “What is this I am doing, it certainly is not science, what is it?” Then a voice said to me, “That is art.” This made the strangest sort of impression upon me, because it was not in any sense my impression that what I was writing was art. Then I came to this: “Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not I, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.” I don’t know why exactly, but I knew to a certainty that the voice that had said my writing was art had come from a woman. . . . Well, I said very emphatically to this voice that what I was doing was not art, and I felt a great resistance grow up within me. No voice came through, however, and I kept on writing. This time I caught her and said, “No it is not,” and I felt as though an argument would ensue.42
He thought that this voice was “the soul in the primitive sense,” which he called the anima (the Latin word for soul).43 “In putting down all this material for analysis, I was in effect writing letters to my anima, that is part of myself with a different viewpoint from my own. I got remarks of a new character—I was in analysis with a ghost and a woman.”44 In retrospect, he recalled that this was the voice of a Dutch patient he had known from 1912 to 1918 who had persuaded a psychiatrist colleague that the latter was a misunderstood artist. The woman had thought that the unconscious was art, but Jung had maintained that it was nature.45 I have previously argued that the woman in question was Maria Moltzer, and that the psychiatrist in question was Jung’s friend and colleague Franz Riklin, who increasingly forsook analysis for painting. In 1913, he became a student of Augusto Giacometti, the uncle of Alberto Giacometti and an important early abstract painter in his own right.46
This first sequence—from November to December 1913—could be characterized as the search for a method. It depicts Jung turning toward his soul and undertaking a reconsideration of his life, a transvaluation of values. Up to this point, he had been successful and had achieved all that he had sought. Then came the vision on the way to Schaffhausen, which provoked him to return to his soul. He considered himself an anchorite in his own desert, trying to find visual metaphors to contain and express his experience.47 He experienced doubt and confusion. There was no movement until December 11, so he had been addressing his soul for a month before receiving a reply.
A dialogue now developed.48 His soul told him that she was not his mother. He should be patient; the way to truth was to those without intentions, and he needed to realize that intentions limit life. He addressed his feeling of self-scorn, and his soul told him that this was out of the question; scorn was only an issue if he was completely vain. She asked if he knew who she was; had he made her into a dead formula? On December 12, as he recounted in his 1925 seminar,
not knowing what would come next, I thought more introspection was needed. When we introspect, we look within and see if there is anything to be observed, and if there is nothing we may either give up the introspective process or find a way of “boring through” to the material that escapes the first survey. I devised such a boring method by fantasizing that I was digging a hole, and by accepting this fantasy as perfectly real.49
Jung had probably actually started by physically digging holes in his garden, down by the water, to release his fantasies. He then began to imagine doing the same, while seated in his library. He descended into the depths and a fantasy sequence unfolded.50 His “I” found himself in a dark cave. He saw a red stone, which he tried to reach through muddy water. The stone covered an opening in the rock. He placed his ear to the opening and heard a stream and saw a person who had been killed float past, as well as a black scarab. A red sun shone at the bottom of the stream and there were serpents on the wall, which crawled toward the sun and eventually covered it. Blood sprang forth and then subsided. This was a striking, horrific image. During what unfolded, he was involved passively, as a spectator.
This process shifted on December 21.51 He encountered the figures of Elijah, the blind Salome, and a serpent. Jung’s “I” looked into a stone and saw in it Eve, followed by Odysseus on his journeys. Elijah told Jung’s “I” that Salome was his daughter and that they had been companions since eternity. Salome told Jung’s “I” that she loved him. Elijah told him that Salome loved a prophet and announced the new God to the world. Jung’s “I” was shocked at all this. He heard wild music. He wondered if Salome loved him because he had murdered the hero.52 He had further encounters with Elijah and Salome on December 22 and 25.
These critical fantasies signaled a breakthrough from passive witnessing to active engagement. He had broken through a barrier; a method had been found and consolidated. Trusting to his soul’s vision, he entered into an exchange with the figures, listened to them, and allowed himself to be instructed. This became his Via Regia to the imaginal world. The fantasies in the Black Books may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form. As one reads them, the impact of Jung’s mythological studies becomes clear. Some of the figures and conceptions derive directly from his readings. The form and the style of his fantasies bear witness to his fascination with the world of myth and epic. In these entries, Jung was both a participant in and scribe of his interior imaginal dramas, bearing witness to what he encountered. The first phase of his undertaking may be characterized as a religious quest, an effort to recover a sense of meaning in his life.
In December 1913, he referred to this first Black Book as the “book of my most difficult experiments.”53 In retrospect, he recalled,
My “scientific” question went: what would happen if I switched off consciousness? I noticed from dreams that something stood in the background, and I wanted to give this a fair chance to come forward. One submits to the necessary conditions—as in a mescaline experiment—so that it emerges.54
In a later entry in his dream book, on April 17, 1917, he noted: “since then, frequent exercises in the emptying of consciousness.”55 These statements indicate that his interest was in studying what emerged when one emptied consciousness and allowed whatever was in the background to emerge. His procedure was clearly intentional—while its aim was to allow psychic contents to spontaneously emerge. He recalled, “Sometimes it was as if I heard with ears. Sometimes I felt it in the mouth, as if my tongue formulated words, and then it came, that I heard myself whisper a word to myself. Under the threshold of consciousness everything was living.”56
Jung had had extensive experience studying mediums in trance states, during which they were encouraged to produce waking fantasies and visual hallucinations, and he had conducted experiments with automatic writing. Practices of visualization had also been used in various religious traditions. For example, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s fifth spiritual exercise instructs individuals to “see with the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth and depth of hell” and to experience this with full sensory immediacy.57 Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) engaged in “spirit writing.” An entry in his spiritual diary reads:
26 Jan., 1748.—Spirits, if permitted, could possess those who speak with them so utterly, that they would be as though they were entirely in the world; and indeed, in a manner so manifest, that they could communicate their thoughts through their medium, and even by letters; for they have sometimes, and indeed often, directed my hand when writing, as though it were quite their own; so that they thought it was not I, but themselves writing.58
From 1909 onward in Vienna, the psychoanalyst Herbert Silberer conducted experiments on himself in hypnagogic states. Silberer attempted to allow images to appear. These images, he maintained, presented symbolic depictions of his immediately preceding thought. Silberer corresponded with Jung and sent him offprints of his articles.59
In 1912, Ludwig Staudenmaier (1865–1933), a professor of experimental chemistry, published a work entitled Magic as an Experimental Science. Staudenmaier had embarked on self-experimentations in 1901, commencing with automatic writing. A series of characters appeared, and he found that he no longer needed to write to conduct dialogues with them.60 He also induced acoustic and visual hallucinations. The aim of his enterprise was to use his self-experimentation to provide a scientific explanation of magic. He argued that the key to understanding magic lay in the concepts of hallucination and the “underconsciousness” (Unterbewußtsein), and he placed particular importance on the role of personification.61 Thus we see that Jung’s procedure closely resembled a number of historical and contemporary practices with which he was familiar.62
The “Experimentum Crucis”
During this period, two women entered Jung’s life, both of whom were to play important roles in what followed. The first was Maria Moltzer, who had come to Switzerland from Holland, and the second was Toni Wolff.
Moltzer’s family owned the Bols liqueur company, and she had become a nurse in protest of alcohol abuse.63 She had taken some courses at the University of Lausanne. Jung first mentioned her in a letter to Freud of September 8, 1910, relating that she was berating herself for painting too black a picture of Martha Böddinghaus, adding that “between the two ladies there is naturally a loving jealously over me.”64 Moltzer became an analyst.
In 1911, Jung gave a paper at a congress in Brussels on the psychoanalysis of children. As he was not working directly with children, he presented the case of a child analyzed by Moltzer, whom he described as his assistant. He reproduced this in “The Theory of Psychoanalysis,” lectures presented at Fordham University the following year, which Moltzer cotranslated with Edith Eder. In an entry in his dream book in 1917, Jung noted the “idea of M. M. [Maria Moltzer] that she inspired in me the libido work”—presumably a reference to Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.65 In April 1912, judging by a letter she sent to Freud on Jung’s letterhead, Moltzer was dealing with his correspondence every other day in a secretarial capacity while he was away in Italy.66 According to Freud, Jung had an affair with Moltzer. When Jung wrote to Freud that in contrast to Freud, he had been analyzed, Freud wrote to Sándor Ferenczi: “The master that analyzed him could only have been Fräulein Moltzer, and he is so foolish as to be proud of this work of a woman with whom he is having an affair.”67 Whatever the nature of their relationship at this point in time, it is clear that it was close and significant.
In an entry on November 15, 1913, Jung’s “I” said to his soul: “I caught sight of a woman three years ago, whose soul seemed to me more valuable than my marital anxiety. I conquered my fear out of love for her.”68 The woman in question was Toni Wolff. Only a few fragments of her diaries from this period (1912–13) have surfaced. Regrettably, those spanning 1913–24 have not survived, with the exception of some theoretical notes from 1916. The diaries from 1924 onward center around the trials and tribulations of her relationship with Jung. There are illuminating retrospective comments, as well as entries from which one can extrapolate to some extent on the nature of their collaboration during this critical period.
On September 20, 1910, at the age of twenty-three, Toni Wolff was brought by her mother to see Jung. According to her sister Erna, he had successfully treated the son of a friend of her mother’s, who consequently recommended Jung.69 According to Jung’s pupil and biographer, the analyst Barbara Hannah, Toni Wolff was “suffering from depression and disorientation much accentuated by the death of her father.”70 Her father had died the previous year. Much later, in an active imagination with her father, on September 7, 1937, Toni Wolff said to him, “I became ill after your death—melancholic—completely unreal and sunk in the inner world.”71 Toni Wolff had audited courses at the University of Zürich on philosophy, literature, theology, and history but was not formally enrolled there. According to Hannah, “Jung immediately realized that she needed a new goal to reawaken her interest in life,” and so he put her to work doing some research for what eventually became Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. She was stimulated by the material, which had a salutary effect on her depression and disorientation.72 Years later, she recalled walking in her youth near the Burghölzli with her parents and thinking: “there would be a doctor who had significance for me. Perhaps I wanted to become crazy for that reason—indeed I ended up with C[arl]. I knew exactly what I wanted from him—relationships with genuine people.”73
On August 29, 1911, Jung mentioned her in a letter to Freud as “a new discovery of mine. . . . a remarkable intellect with an excellent feeling for religion and philosophy.”74 That autumn, he took her, with Moltzer and his wife, to the International Psychoanalytic Conference in Weimar. A diary entry from January 18, 1912, indicates that she attended a discussion session at Jung’s house in Küsnacht.75 She noted that Jung read from Transformations and Symbols of the Libido and that the interpretation of the tree and the cross as mother symbols and the discussion of sacrifice and renunciation fully described her own conflict with her mother.76
She then cited lines from Faust describing the exhilaration of being lifted off the earth in a fiery chariot to new spheres of activity.77 She added that she had experienced this and now had to make it all come true. She was experiencing a sense of renewal and the opening up of new vistas. The entry continues:
Eventually, Dr.78 deals with the sacrifice. Perhaps I must experience this for him—with mother and maybe also with him. I must experience it—that way I was always able to deliver him the problems that he had not thought through to the end—I lived them first—with him—for him—then knowledge. Now it is conscious.
Her reference is to the final chapter of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. This passage indicates that she saw her work for Jung as not purely scholarly but also existential, involving living through and experiencing something for him. This dimension was clearly significant for her. She further noted: “I must come again much closer to Dr., inwardly he is now far from me.” At this point, she saw her contribution to his endeavor in the following way: “I think that he has got a lot of Symbols [Transformations and Symbols of the Libido] from me—I inspired it—the revision—I brought him a lot of it. He probably doesn’t know that.” She then noted that she herself had ended the analysis, adding that Jung had only fleetingly indicated the course and the sublimation, which she now had to find herself. In an entry on the following day, she noted that the work bound her to Jung—that a spiritual marriage had developed—but that she had to go further.
In November 1912, Jung returned from his New York lectures. In a diary entry of December 29, 1924, Toni Wolff noted that twelve years before, on Jung’s return from America, she went to him and “spoke of relationship.”79 In the November 15, 1913, entry in Book 2, following his account of the dream around December 1912 of the dove that transformed itself into a small girl and then back into the dove, Jung noted, “My decision was made. I had to give all my faith and trust to this woman.”80 In March 1913 he went to America again for five weeks. Decades later, Toni Wolff noted in her diary, “The feeling is somehow similar to 1913, when C[arl] went to America and we separated—and yet we couldn’t do it afterward.”81 This suggests a separation may have taken place at this time.
On January 30, 1914, Toni Wolff and Maria Moltzer became lay members of the Zürich Psychoanalytical Society. The minutes noted that for two years, they had intensively participated in the life of the society.82
Years later, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffé concerning the relationship with Toni Wolff. He said that he was faced with the problem of what to do with her after her analysis, which he said he had ended, despite feeling involved with her. A year later, he dreamed that they were together in the Alps in a valley of rocks, and that he heard elves singing, and that she was disappearing into a mountain, which filled him with dread. After this, he wrote to her. He noted that after this dream, he knew that a relationship with her was unavoidable, and that his life was in danger. On a later occasion, while swimming, he found himself with a cramp and vowed that if it went away and he survived, he would give in to the relationship.83
In a diary entry of March 4, 1944, Toni Wolff referred to “31 years of relationship and 34 years of acquaintance.”84 This confirms that her relationship with Jung began sometime in 1913.
To Aniela Jaffé, Jung recalled:
At the beginning of her analysis T.W. had the most incredible fantasies, a whole eruption of the wildest fantasies, some even of cosmic nature. But at that point I was so preoccupied with my own material that I was scarcely able to take on hers. But her fantasies entered exactly into my line of thought.85
Concerning her attraction to Jung, toward the end of her life Toni Wolff recalled that she had her first transference to Friedrich Schiller, in 1905, then to Goethe, and then to Jung, as a “productive genius.”86
In retrospect, she reflected on her analysis with Jung:
When C. begins to participate with my psychic material perhaps I have got what I need—the nurturing and supporting substance? I suspect myself of having insufficient confidence in him, because my analysis back then was intermingled with his problems—although it was also good for me.87
At the inception of their relationship, Toni Wolff was not interested in marriage and having children. She was critical of what she had observed of marriage: it seemed to make men less active and less enterprising—merely content with being fathers. It made both men and women less interested in culture. After having children, women often didn’t need their husbands, and their own problems tended to return. Her mother hadn’t learned to work and had consequently plagued her children with unused libido. Toni Wolff was also critical of the bondage of marriage.88
Emma Jung came to accept the relationship between her husband and Toni Wolff. By all accounts, the triangular situation was not easy, but a respectful modus vivendi was found.89 Jung would have dinner with Wolff on Wednesdays at her home,90 and she came to Küsnacht on Sundays. In retrospect, Jung recalled the role that she played for him during this period as follows:
T. W. was experiencing a similar stream of images. I had evidently infected her, or was the déclencheur [trigger] that stirred up her imagination. My phantasies and hers were in a participation mystique. It was like a common stream, and a common task. Gradually I became conscious and gradually I became the center; and in the measure to which I attained these insights, she also found her center. But then she got stuck somewhere along the way, I remained too much the center that functioned for her. Therefore I was never permitted to be other than she wanted me to be, or than she needed to have me be. At that time she was entirely drawn into this terrible process in which I was involved, and she was just as helpless as I was.91
Toni Wolff’s active imaginations during this period have not survived. However, her diaries from 1924 onward indicate that she clearly had a facility for this. Furthermore, there are instances that bear out Jung’s comments concerning their fantasies being in a “participation mystique.” An important figure in Jung’s fantasies was that of Ka, from Egyptian mythology.92 Wolff had her own figure of Ka, and also had dialogues with Jung’s Ka. In an active imagination on January 11, 1926, Wolff’s “I” had a dialogue with Thot, the Egpytian God of writing. Thoth instructed her how to invoke someone’s “Ka”: “So call loudly thrice, You Ka, you Ka, you Ka of so and so, come here and move into my heart. Space has been made for you. Your Ba expects you and you should move in.” She followed his instructions: “You Ka, you Ka, you Ka of C., come here, move into my heart. Space has been made for you. Your Ba expects you and you should move in.”93 On January 30, she noted:
earlier: C.’s Ka to me
mine not received by him
C.’s Ka speaks about the
abyss and the death he sees.
I want to let myself drop down.94
Such entries indicate a liminal, imaginal permeability, in which she would interact with some of Jung’s figures. One may infer that similar imaginal exchanges took place in the critical period from 1913 onward. On several subsequent occasions, Toni Wolff referred to their relationship as an “experimentum crucis.”95 As such, it was clearly linked to Jung’s self-experimentation.
At the same time, Emma Jung continued to play a central role in Jung’s life. She ran the household, raised their children, and maintained the human dimension for him, while also facilitating and accompanying him in his self-experimentation.96 In 1910, she began an analysis with Jung, and she worked with Leonhard Seif in 191197 and later with Hans Trüb (who was married to Toni Wolff’s sister Susanne).98 She played an active role in the Association for Analytical Psychology and later practiced analysis, also studying physics, mathematics, Greek, and Latin.99 The languages later enabled her (in contrast to Toni Wolff) to accompany Jung in his explorations into alchemy. She undertook her own research, which culminated in her work on the Grail legend.100 From around 1914, she began to do active imagination in the form of dialogues, paintings, and poems.
Enter Philemon
From December 26, 1913, through May 24, 1914, Jung continued to follow the same procedure of inducing fantasies in a waking state and entering into dialogue with the figures that emerged. An important figure was Philemon, who first appeared on January 27, 1914, as a pensioned magician from whom Jung’s “I” had sought to learn the art of magic.101
In retrospect, Jung recalled that Philemon represented superior insight and was like a guru to him. He would converse with him in the garden. He recalled that Philemon evolved out of the figure of Elijah, who had previously appeared in his fantasies:
Philemon brought with him an Egyptian-Gnostic-Hellenistic atmosphere, a really Gnostic hue, because he really was a pagan. He was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He had showed this dissociation between me and my intellectual object. . . . He formulated this thing which I was not, and formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought.102
In the years that followed, Jung sought instruction from this imaginal figure and tried to fathom his nature.
The fantasies between December 26 and the first half of the entry for April 19 form the basis of the second book of Liber Novus, Liber Secundus. The material from the second half of the entry of April 19 onward would later form the basis of the third book, Scrutinies.103 The fact that Jung would later end the manuscript of Liber Secundus here indicates that this marked something of a culmination of the process that he had been engaged in. The entries up to the first half of the entry for April 19 lead to a return to and acceptance of his being alone with himself. His soul had ascended to heaven, and he was left alone with his “I,” which he now had to learn to live with. This suggests that a certain self-acceptance had been achieved. The following day, April 20, 1914, Jung resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Ten days later, he resigned from the medical faculty of the University of Zürich, where he had been a lecturer. In Memories, he recalled that he felt that he was in an exposed position at the university, and that he had to find a new orientation, as it would otherwise be unfair to teach students.104
The entries in the Black Books that immediately follow take up the task of the confrontation with his “I,” of learning of how to live with himself. In May he attempted to reconnect with his soul, seeking further counsel as to how to proceed. In June and July 1914, he had a thrice-repeated dream of being in a foreign land and having to return home quickly by ship, followed by the descent of an icy cold. In Liber Novus, he recounted these as follows:
In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times: I was in a foreign land, and suddenly, overnight and right in the middle of summer, a terrible cold descended from space. All seas and rivers were locked in ice, every green living thing had frozen.
The second dream was thoroughly similar to this. But the third dream at the beginning of July went as follows:
I was in a remote English land. It was necessary that I return to my homeland with a fast ship as speedily as possible. I reached home quickly. In my homeland I found that in the middle of summer a terrible cold had fallen from space, which had turned every living thing into ice. There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost. I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng.105
On July 10, 1914, the Zürich Psychoanalytical Society voted 15–1 to leave the International Psychoanalytic Association. The reason given in the minutes for the secession was that Freud had established an orthodoxy that impeded free and independent research.106 The group was renamed the Association for Analytical Psychology. Jung was actively involved in this association, which met fortnightly. He also maintained a busy therapeutic practice. During 1913 and 1914, he had between one and nine consultations per day, five days a week, with an average of five to seven patients. He also worked on Saturdays, having no or few patients on Thursdays. In 1918, he switched his free day to Saturday.
The minutes of the Association for Analytical Psychology give no indication of the process that Jung was going through. He did not refer to his fantasies, and he continued to discuss theoretical issues in psychology. The same holds true in his surviving correspondences during this period.107 Each year, he continued his military service duties.108 He maintained his professional activities and family responsibilities during the day, and dedicated his evenings to his self-explorations. Indications are that this partition of activities continued during the next few years. In Memories, Jung recalled that during this period his family and profession “always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I was normal and really existed.”109
In July 1914, Jung was in England to present some lectures. The question of different ways of interpreting fantasies, such as Jung’s own, was the subject of a talk he presented on July 24 before the Psycho-Medical Society in London, “On psychological understanding.” He contrasted Freud’s analytic-reductive method, based on causality, with the constructive method of the Zürich school. The shortcoming of the former was that through tracing things back to antecedent elements, only half of the picture was dealt with, and the living meaning of phenomena could not be grasped. Attempting to understand Goethe’s Faust using Freud’s method would be like trying to understand a Gothic cathedral through its mineralogical aspect.110 The meaning “only lives when we experience it in and through ourselves.”111 Inasmuch as life was essentially new, it could not be understood merely retrospectively. Hence it was useful to look at “how, out of this present psyche, a bridge can be built into its own future.”112 Jung called this the constructive standpoint. This paper can be read both as Jung’s rationale for not embarking on a causal and retrospective analysis of his fantasies and as a caution to those who might be tempted to do so. Presented as a critique and reformulation of psychoanalysis, Jung’s new mode of interpretation linked back to the symbolic method of Swedenborg’s spiritual hermeneutics.
On July 28, Jung gave a talk on “The importance of the unconscious in psychopathology” at a meeting of the British Medical Association in Aberdeen.113 He argued that in cases of neurosis and psychosis, the unconscious attempted to compensate the one-sided conscious attitude. The unbalanced individual defends himself against this, and the opposites become more polarized. The corrective impulses that present themselves in the language of the unconscious should herald the beginning of a healing process, but the form in which they break through makes them unacceptable to consciousness.
A month earlier, on June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated by the student Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb. On August 1 war broke out. Jung returned from Scotland by ship. He first went to Holland, concerned for the safety of Maria Moltzer, and accompanied her back to Switzerland. As he narrated in Liber Novus,
In reality, now, it was so: At the time when the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe, I found myself in Scotland, compelled by the war to choose the fastest ship and the shortest route home. I encountered the colossal cold that froze everything, I met up with the flood, the sea of blood, and found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bittersweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.114
Years later, he told Mircea Eliade:
As a psychiatrist I became worried, wondering if I was not on the way to “doing a schizophrenia,” as we said in the language of those days. . . . I was just preparing a lecture on schizophrenia to be delivered at a congress in Aberdeen, and I kept saying to myself: “I’ll be speaking of myself! Very likely I’ll go mad after reading out this paper.” The congress was to take place in July 1914—exactly the same period when I saw myself in my three dreams voyaging on the Southern seas. On July 31st, immediately after my lecture, I learned from the newspapers that war had broken out. Finally I understood. And when I disembarked in Holland on the next day, nobody was happier than I. Now I was sure that no schizophrenia was threatening me. I understood that my dreams and my visions came to me from the subsoil of the collective unconscious. What remained for me to do now was to deepen and validate this discovery. And this is what I have been trying to do for forty years.115
Jung thought that his fantasy had depicted what would happen not to himself but to Europe—that it was a precognition of a collective event: what he would later call a “big” dream. After this realization, he attempted to see whether and to what extent this was true of the other fantasies that he experienced, and to understand the meaning of this correspondence between his private fantasies and public events.
He took the outbreak of the war as a sign that his fear of going mad was misplaced. It is no exaggeration to say that had war not been declared, Liber Novus would in all likelihood not have been compiled. In 1954, while discussing active imagination, Jung said that “the reason why the involvement looks very much like a psychosis is that the patient is integrating the same fantasy-material to which the insane person falls victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed up by it.”116
What of Jung’s fantasies did he regard as precognitive? It is important to note that there were around twelve separate events:
1–2. October 1913: Repeated vision of flood and death of thousands, and the voice that said that this will become real.
3. Vision of the sea of blood covering the northern lands.
4. December 12, 1913: Image of a dead hero.
5. December 15, 1913: Slaying Siegfried in a dream.
6. December 25, 1913: Image of the foot of a giant stepping on a state, and images of murder and bloody cruelty.
7. January 2, 1914: Image of a sea of blood and enormous dying.
8. January 22, 1914: His soul comes up from the depths and asks him if he will accept war and destruction. She shows him images of destruction, military weapons, human remains, sunken ships, destroyed states, and so forth.
9. May 21, 1914: He hears a voice saying that the sacrificed fall left and right.
10–12. June–July 1914: Dream (repeated three times) of being in a foreign land and having to return quickly by ship, and the descent of the icy cold.117
The Composition of Liber Novus
The outbreak of the war had given Jung a completely new understanding of his fantasies. In Liber Novus, he wrote: “And then the War broke out. This opened my eyes about what I had experienced before, and it also gave me the courage to say all of that which I have written in the earlier part of this book.”118 A critical part of this shift was that he no longer viewed his fantasies as purely personal. In Liber Novus he wrote (commenting on an entry of May 23, 1914), “I wanted to understand it all as personal experiences within me, and consequently I could neither understand nor believe it all, since my belief is weak.”119
It is likely that at this stage he reread the entries of November 12, 1913–July 21, 1914, in Books 2–4. He now conceived of the idea of a work exploring the correspondence between his fantasies and what was taking place in the world, at literal and symbolic levels. This was to become Liber Novus. He transcribed and edited most of the entries from Books 2–4 covering November 12, 1913–April 19, 1914. In the main, he tended to omit material that depicted his emotional states. He reproduced the fantasies faithfully while omitting the dates. The sequence of Liber Novus nearly always corresponds exactly to that of the Black Books. Jung maintained a “fidelity to the event.” What he was writing was not to be mistaken as fiction. At the same time, he closely copyedited the fantasies, making a number of small revisions. The changes served to clarify matters at certain junctures and present a smoother sequence, and they also made the material less personally revealing. The main difference between the Black Books and Liber Novus is that the former were written for Jung’s personal use, and can be considered the records of an experiment, while the latter was addressed to a public and presented in a form to be read by others. The revisions to the material mark the passage from personal notebook to public work. Dated entries became chapters. A sizable share of Jung’s “confrontations with the unconscious” actually consisted of his transcription of and editorial work on and copyediting of his own material. In this edition, most of the significant changes have been noted, which enables the reader to follow Jung as editor of his own material.
In Liber Novus, to each of the entries Jung reproduced, he added a section explaining the significance of the episode, combined with a lyrical elaboration. He arranged the work into a series of chapters: for the most part, the chapters corresponded to individual entries. The Draft begins with the address “My friends,” a recurring phrase.
In November 1914, Jung closely studied Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–91), which he had first read in his youth. He later recalled that “then suddenly the spirit seized me and carried me to a desert country in which I read Zarathustra.”120 It strongly shaped the structure and style of Liber Novus. Like Nietzsche in Zarathustra, Jung divided the material up into a series of books comprised of short chapters. But whereas Zarathustra proclaimes the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul. There are also indications that Jung read Dante’s Commedia, which also informs the structure of the work.121 Liber Novus depicts Jung’s descent into hell. But whereas Dante could utilize an established cosmology, Liber Novus is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology. The role of Philemon in Jung’s work has analogies to that of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s work and Virgil in Dante’s.
In the Draft, about 50 percent of the material is drawn directly from the Black Books. There are approximately thirty-five new sections of lyrical elaboration and commentary. Here Jung was the exegete of his own imaginal visions. He attempted to derive general psychological principles from his fantasies, and to understand to what extent the events portrayed in them presented, in symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world. In 1914, he had introduced a distinction between interpretation on the objective level, in which dream objects were treated as representations of real objects, and interpretation on the subjective level, in which every element concerns the dreamers themselves.122 As well as interpreting his fantasies on the subjective level, one could characterize his procedure here as an effort to interpret his fantasies on the “collective” level. He does not try to interpret his fantasies reductively but, rather, as depicting the functioning of general psychological principles in him (such as the relation of introversion to extraversion, thinking and pleasure, and so forth), and as depicting literal or symbolic events that are going to happen. Thus the “second layer” of the Draft represents the first major and extended development and application of his new constructive method. It is itself a hermeneutic experiment. It provides an interpretive reading of the entries in the Black Books in the concentrated five-month period beginning in November 1913.
This work of understanding encompassed a number of interlinked threads. Jung wanted to understand himself and to integrate and develop the various components of his personality; to understand the structure of the human personality in general and the relation of the individual to present-day society and to the community of the dead; to fathom the psychological and historical effects of Christianity; and to grasp the future religious development of the West. He discussed many other themes, including the nature of self-knowledge, the nature of the soul, the relation of thinking and feeling and the psychological types, the relation of inner and outer masculinity and femininity, and the uniting of opposites. He also treated solitude, the value of scholarship and learning, the status of science, the significance of symbols and how they are to be understood, and the meaning of the war. He touched on madness, divine madness, and psychiatry, how the Imitation of Christ is to be understood today; the death of God; the historical significance of Nietzsche; and the relation of magic and reason.
The overall theme of Liber Novus is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theogenic cosmology. Liber Novus presents the prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process, which he held to be the universal form of individual psychological development. Thus the work itself can be understood on one hand as depicting Jung’s individuation process, and on the other as his elaboration of this concept as a general psychological schema. At the beginning of the book, he refinds his soul and embarks on a sequence of fantasy adventures, which are linked to form a consecutive narrative. He realized that until then, he had served the spirit of the time, characterized by use and value. In addition to this, there existed a spirit of the depths, which led to the things of the soul. In terms of Jung’s later biographical memoir, the spirit of the times corresponds to personality no. 1, and the spirit of the depths corresponds to personality no. 2. Hence this period may be seen as a return to the values of personality no. 2.123
The entries from the Black Books, now recast as chapters, follow a particular format: they begin with the exposition of dramatic visual fantasies. In them Jung’s “I” encounters a series of figures in various settings and enters into conversation with them. He is confronted with unexpected happenings and shocking statements. He then attempts to understand what transpired and to formulate the significance of these events and statements into general psychological conceptions and maxims. Jung held that the significance of these fantasies was that they stemmed from the mythopoeic imagination, which was missing in the present rational age. The task of individuation lay in establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures—or the contents of the collective unconscious—and integrating them into consciousness, hence recovering the value of the mythopoeic imagination, which had been lost to the modern age. Through this, the spirit of the time would be reconciled with the spirit of the depths. This task was to form a leitmotif of his subsequent scholarly work.
After completing the handwritten Draft, Jung had it typed and edited it. On one manuscript, he made alterations by hand (I refer to this manuscript as the Corrected Draft). From the annotations on the Corrected Draft, it appears that he gave this to someone (the handwriting is not that of Emma Jung, Toni Wolff, or Maria Moltzer) to read. That reader commented on Jung’s editing, indicating that some sections that he had intended to cut should be retained.124
Sometime in 1915, Jung decided to retranscribe the typescript of Liber Novus in the form of a medieval illuminated manuscript in calligraphic script on parchment. He titled the first book “The Way of What Is to Come” and placed beneath the title some citations from the book of Isaiah and from the Gospel according to John. Thus the text was presented as a prophetic work. He completed the transcription of the first section of the work, effectively Liber Primus, on parchment. Initially, and throughout this section, the paintings and historiated initials represented scenes from the fantasies. Possibly for technical reasons (the parchment pages show a lot of bleed-through), he now continued to transcribe and illustrate the work in a large folio volume of more than 600 pages, bound in red leather, from the bookbinders Emil Stierli. The spine bears the title Liber Novus (New Book). He inserted the parchment pages into the folio volume, which continues with Liber Secundus. In the course of the transcription into the folio volume, he altered some of the titles to the chapters, added others, and edited the material once again. The cuts and alterations were predominantly to the “second layer” of interpretation and elaboration.
The entries and fantasies reproduced in Liber Novus are confined to a condensed period of time. In certain regards, Jung’s commentary in the second layer reflects his understanding of the changes that happened to him in the period as a whole rather than only referring to the fantasies in question. A reading of the material later featured in Liber Novus as it originally unfolded in the Black Books enables one to see and to follow the phenomenology of Jung’s experiences during the course of his self-experimentation.
Return to the Depths
In the summer of 1915, we find the first entry in Book 5 after an interval of nearly a year. In a later annotation, Jung added here: “During this time the I & II part were written. Immediately after the beginning of the war.”125 He reproduced the opening of this entry in the third section of Liber Novus, Scrutinies, as follows:
From there on the voices of the depths remained silent for a whole year. Again in summer, when I was out on the water alone, I saw an osprey plunge down not far from me; he seized a large fish and rose up into the skies again clutching it. I heard the voice of my soul, and she spoke: “That is a sign that what is below is borne upward.”126
In Book 5, Jung noted a dream in which an extreme cold had again descended in the midst of the summer.127
On the same day, he commenced a theoretical exchange with his colleague the psychiatrist Hans Schmid (1881–1932) on the topic of psychological types. The correspondence was initially intended for publication, following the model of Jung’s correspondence with Rudolf Löy, Timely Psychotherapeutic Questions, which had appeared the previous year. A rich dialogue ensued. However, rather than reaching a consensus, Jung and Schmid diverged, and the tone of their exchange grew heated. On September 4 Jung wrote to Schmid, who replied a few weeks later. In the interim, Jung began writing in Book 5 again, in a series of entries dated September 14, 15, 17, and 18. In Liber Novus, he noted concerning these entries: “Soon after this on an autumn night I heard the voice of an old man (and this time I knew that it was Philemon).”128
These entries mark the return of Philemon: but this is no longer simply the Philemon of Liber Secundus, the pensioned magician, but an elevated teacher of the mysteries who has come to instruct Jung’s “I.” Philemon informs him that he wants to master him. Philemon spoke of how he himself needed to disavow what he had taught, as otherwise those he had taught would have simply received rather than taken. Jung noted that he who fathoms Philemon fathoms himself. Philemon continued to speak of the nature of giving, and against the tyranny of self-forgetting virtue. The work of redemption is first done on one’s self, and through uniting with the self, we reach “the God, which unites heaven and hell in itself.”129 Serving oneself is divine service.
This critical shift of register, and the shift in the relation to others counseled by Philemon, is marked in Jung’s reply on November 6 to Schmid’s letter of September 28. Parts of this letter are only understandable when seen in the light of the renewed dialogue with Philemon. Jung began: “Your letter strengthens my conviction that reaching an agreement on the fundamental principles is impossible, because the point seems to be precisely that we do not agree.”130 He then adopted an irate tone, summarizing his views. Switching register, he wrote that it was through studying Birgitta of Sweden (1302–1373) that he grasped that “the devil is the devourer. To understand = comprendere = katasyllambanein, and also to devour.”131 Within the ethical and human desire to understand lurked the devil’s will. This could lead to a veritable soul murder, as the “core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is ‘grasped.’ That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets, they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom.”132 The symbol itself wanted to protect itself against Freudian interpretations. It was particularly important in the latter stages of analysis to “help the other to come to those hidden and un-openable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell.” Jung related a dream he had once had and only now understood: “I was standing in my garden, and I had dug open a rich spring of water, which gushed forth mightily. Then I had to dig a trench and a deep hole, in which I collected all the water and let it flow back into the depths of the earth again.”133 From this he drew a conclusion:
In this way salvation is given to us in the un-openable and unsayable symbol, for it protects us by preventing the devil from swallowing the seed of life. . . . We must understand the divine within us, but not the other, insofar as he is able to go and stand on his own. . . . We should be confidants of our own mysteries, but chastely veil our eyes before the mysteries of the other, insofar as he does not need “understanding” because of his own incapability.134
Setting aside “destructive’ ” understanding, realizing the necessity of allowing symbols to remain “un-openable” and “unsayable,” and the task of being “confidants of our mysteries”: this letter marked a turning point—a return to Jung’s encounter with the spirit of the depths.
From this point onward, there is a notable shift in Jung’s active imaginations. Those from the winter of 1913 to the summer of 1914 were characterized by a suspension of judgment and interpretation and an attempt to explore what instruction the situations and characters could bring. From the outbreak of the war, Jung had, in retrospect, come to view his fantasies as being not purely personal. In layer two of the commentary that he added in Liber Novus, he had attempted to understand this intersection between his fantasies and what was happening in the world, literally and symbolically. This then formed the guiding assumption of his new active imaginations. In his view, this practice could lead not only to enhanced self-knowledge but also deeper insight into the spirit of the depths at work in the world, which had broken through the everyday with such shattering force. Once he had come to view his fantasies as having more than personal significance, he came to see his undertaking as having wider relevance. On October 16, 1916, he wrote to his colleague the psychiatrist Alphonse Maeder, “I must find the way through the unconscious. People who have trusted me need my insight, not only I myself. Therefore I had to exclusively dedicate myself to this work, which was very time-consuming and terribly demanding.”135
The Return of the Dead
Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1916, the Psychological Club was founded in Zürich, through a gift of 360,000 Swiss francs from Edith Rockefeller McCormick. She had come to Zürich to be analyzed by Jung in 1913. The Club was initially housed in a sumptuous property on Löwenstrasse 1. At its inception, it had approximately sixty members—some indication that, having left the psychoanalytic movement, the Zürich school was flourishing. For Jung, the aim of the Club was to study the relation of individuals to the group, and to provide a naturalistic setting for psychological observation to overcome the limitations of one-to-one analysis, and to provide a venue where patients could learn to adapt to social situations. Emma Jung became the first president. At the same time, a professional body of analysts continued to meet together as the Association for Analytical Psychology.136 The distinction between these two bodies is outlined in a letter of Jung’s to his colleague Poul Bjerre of April 2, 1917:
we have founded in Zürich a psychological Club with circa 60 members, in which namely the human-social side of our psychology is taken care of. In addition we have meetings of about 10 analysts which take place every 14 days, where we attempt to understand all of the great novelties which the exploration of the collective unc. has necessitated.137
One of the key themes in layer two of Liber Novus was the realization of the need to encounter the dead. Jung had come to see that chaos was not formless but filled with the dead, “not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past.”138 The task of encountering the dead had its effects upon one and was best done in private: “When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead.”139 The dead needed to be accepted, and they needed salvation. It was necessary to heed their lament and accept them with love but not to be “their blind spokesman.”140 He realized that in satisfying the demands of the dead, “I gave up my earlier personal striving and the world had to take me for a dead man.”141 In the Draft, he summed up his understanding of the importance of this undertaking: “Not one iota of Christian law is abrogated, but instead we are adding a new one: accepting the lament of the dead.”142 Coming to the right relation to the dead was no easy task. Returning to his confrontation with his soul in the winter of 1915, Jung tried to establish this right relation. On December 26, his soul informed him that “Community with the dead is what both you and the dead need.”143
In a critical entry of January 16, 1916, his soul presented an elaborate theogenic cosmogony.144 She described her own nature, the nature of the daimons, the heavenly mother, and the Gods. Of particular significance was Abraxas, the powerful and fearful self-renewing God of the cosmos. She characterized the nature of man as striving for absolute individuality, through which he concentrated and countered the dissolution of the Pleroma, or the “all.” Jung drew a schematic diagram of this system. At some point later, he proceeded to paint it, and titled the work Systema Mundi Totius, system of all the worlds. On the back of it, he wrote in English: “This is the first mandala I constructed in the year 1916, wholly unconscious of what it meant.”145
At the beginning of 1916, Jung experienced a striking series of parapsychological events in his house. In 1923, he narrated the events to Cary de Angulo (later Baynes). She recorded it as follows:
One night your boy began to rave in his sleep and throw himself about saying he couldn’t wake up. Finally your wife had to call you to get him quiet & this you could only do by cold cloths on him—Finally he settled down and went on sleeping next morning he woke up remembering nothing, but seemed utterly exhausted, so you told him not to go to school, he didn’t ask why but seemed to take it for granted. But quite unexpectedly he asked for paper and colored pencils and set to work to make the following picture—a man was angling for fishes with hook and line in the middle of the picture. On the left was the Devil saying something to the man, and your son wrote down what he said. It was that he had come for the fisherman because he was catching his fishes, but on the right was an angel who said, “No you can’t take this man, he is taking only bad fishes and none of the good ones.” Then after your son had made that picture he was quite content. The same night, two of your daughters thought that they had seen spooks in their rooms. The next day you wrote out the “Sermons to the Dead,” and you knew after that nothing more would disturb your family, and nothing did. Of course I knew you were the fisherman in your son’s picture, and you told me so, but the boy didn’t know it.146
In Memories, Jung recounted that at around five in the afternoon, the front door bell began ringing, and the maids were in the kitchen. The front door could be seen from the kitchen.
Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the door bell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew something had to happen. The whole house was as if there was a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.
Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing was written. As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghastly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.147
The dead had appeared in a fantasy on January 17, 1914, and had said that they were about to go to Jerusalem to pray at the holiest sepulchre.148 Their trip had evidently not been successful. They returned and posed metaphysical questions. Jung’s response was to address the questions of the dead and instruct them, through elaborating to them the cosmogony that his soul had described to him. This took place between December 30, 1916, and January 8, 1917. The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) can be regarded as a culmination of the fantasies of this period. It is a psychological cosmogony cast in the form of a Gnostic creation myth. In Jung’s fantasies, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, Abraxas. Jung understood this symbolically. He saw this figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God with Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image. It was in 1952, in Answer to Job, that Jung elaborated on this theme.
He had studied the literature on Gnosticism in the course of his preparatory reading for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. In early 1913, he read Dieterich’s Abraxas, still from the perspective of his libido theory. In January and October 1915, while doing military service, he studied the works of the Gnostics intensively. He was struck by the closeness of these texts and his own Liber Novus, and also with what he saw as the similarity between the modern epoch and the time of early Christianity. After writing the Septem Sermones in the Black Books, Jung recopied it in a calligraphic script into a separate book, slightly rearranging the sequence. He added the following inscription under the title: “The seven instructions of the dead. Written by Basilides in Alexandria, the city where the East touches the West.”149 He then had this privately printed, adding to the inscription: “Translated from the Greek original into German.” This legend indicates the stylistic effects on Jung of late nineteenth-century classical scholarship. He recalled that he wrote it on the occasion of the founding of the Psychological Club and regarded it as a gift to Edith Rockefeller McCormick for founding the Club.150 He gave copies to friends and confidants. He inscribed a copy to Adolf Keller: “This little book, that I entrust to your well meaning and friendly forbearance, brings a wish with it: it would like to have a good cover in this cold world weather. / The non-author and copyist.”151 Presenting a copy to Alphonse Maeder, he wrote:
I could not presume to put my name to it, but chose instead the name of one of those great minds of the early Christian era which Christianity obliterated. It fell quite unexpectedly into my lap like a ripe fruit at a time of great stress and has kindled a light of hope and comfort for me in my bad hours.152
Toward Analytical Psychology
In 1916, Jung wrote several essays and a short book in which he began to attempt to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language, and to reflect on the significance and the general applicability of his activity. Significantly, it was in these works that he presented the first outlines of the main components of his mature psychology. He attempted to translate what he had learned from the spirit of the depths into the language of the spirit of the times. A full account of these papers is beyond the scope of this introduction. The following overview highlights elements that link most directly with Liber Novus and the Black Books.
In his works between 1911 and 1914, Jung had principally been concerned with establishing a structural account of general human functioning and of psychopathology. In addition to his earlier theory of complexes, he had already formulated conceptions of a phylogenetically acquired unconscious peopled by mythic images, of a nonsexual psychic energy, of the general types of introversion and extraversion, of the compensatory and prospective function of dreams, and of the synthetic and constructive approach to fantasies. While he continued to expand and develop these conceptions in detail, an additional concern begins to emerge strongly in these papers: the attempt to provide a temporal account of higher development, which Jung termed the individuation process. This presents the central theoretical result of Jung’s self-experimentation. The full elaboration of the individuation process, and its historical and cross-cultural comparison, would come to occupy him for the rest of his life.
In 1916, he presented a lecture to the Association for Analytical Psychology entitled “The Structure of the Unconscious,” which was first published in a French translation in Théodore Flournoy’s Archives de Psychologie.153 Here he differentiates two layers of the unconscious. The first, the personal unconscious, consisted of elements acquired during one’s lifetime, together with elements that could equally well be conscious.154 The second was the impersonal unconscious or collective psyche.155 While consciousness and the personal unconscious were developed and acquired in the course of one’s lifetime, the collective psyche was inherited.156 In this essay, Jung discussed the curious phenomena that resulted from assimilating the unconscious. He noted that when individuals annexed the contents of the collective psyche and regarded them as personal attributes, they experienced extreme states of superiority and inferiority. He borrowed the term “godlikeness” from Goethe and Adler to characterize this. This state arose from fusing the personal and the collective psyche, and represented one of the dangers of analysis.
Jung wrote that it was difficult to differentiate the personal and the collective psyche. One impediment was the persona—one’s “mask” or “role”—which represented the segment of the collective psyche often mistakenly regarded as individual. When one analyzed the persona, the personality dissolved into the collective psyche, which resulted in the release of a stream of fantasies: “All the treasures of mythological thinking and feeling are unlocked.”157 The difference between the state that ensued from this and insanity lay in the fact that the former was intentional. Two possibilities presented themselves: one could attempt to regressively restore persona, and return to the prior state. However, it was impossible to get rid of the unconscious. Alternatively, one could accept the condition of godlikeness. A third way presented itself, which consisted of the hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies, which resulted in a synthesis of the individual and the collective psyche, revealing the individual lifeline. This was the process of individuation. In a subsequent undated revision of this paper, Jung introduced the notion of the anima as a counterpart to that of the persona. He regarded both of these as “subject-imagoes.” He defined the anima as “how the subject is seen by the collective unconscious.”158
The vivid description of the vicissitudes of the state of “godlikeness” can be taken as representing some of Jung’s affective states during his self-experimentation. The notion of the differentiation of the persona and its analysis corresponds to the first entries of Book 2, where Jung set himself apart from his role and achievements and attempted to reconnect with his soul. The release of mythological fantasies is precisely what ensued in his case, and the hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies was what he presented in layer two of Liber Novus. The differentiation of the personal and impersonal unconscious provided a theoretical understanding of his mythological fantasies: it suggests that he did not view them as stemming from his personal unconscious but from the inherited collective psyche. If so, his fantasies stemmed from a layer of the psyche that was a collective human inheritance; they were not simply idiosyncratic or arbitrary.
In October of the same year, Jung presented two talks to the Psychological Club on adaptation and individuation. The first was titled “Adaptation.” The process took two forms: adaptation to outer and inner conditions. “Inner” was understood to designate the unconscious. Adaptation to the inner led to the demand for individuation, which was contrary to adaptation to others. The answering of this demand and the corresponding break with conformity led to a tragic guilt, which required expiation and called for a new “collective function.” This was because the individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. These new values enabled the reparation of the collective. Individuation was for the few. Those who were insufficiently creative should reestablish collective conformity with a society. Not only had the individual to create new values, he had to create socially recognizable values, as society had a “right to expect realizable values.”159
Read in terms of Jung’s situation, this suggests that his break with social conformity to pursue his “individuation” had brought him to the view that he had to produce socially realizable values as an expiation. His self-experimentation had to result in a work that presented new values in a socially recognizable manner. This led to a dilemma: would the form in which Jung embodied these new values in Liber Novus be socially acceptable and recognizable?
The second talk was “Individuation and Collectivity.” Jung argued that these two states were a pair of opposites related by guilt. Society demanded imitation. In analysis, “Through imitation the patient learns individuation, because it reactivates his own values.”160 It is possible to read this as a comment on the role of imitation in the analytic treatment of those of his patients whom Jung had now encouraged to embark on similar processes of development. The claim that this process evoked the patient’s preexisting values was a counter to the charge of suggestion.
In November, while he was on military service in Herisau, Jung wrote a paper called “The Transcendent Function.”161 He depicted the method of eliciting and developing fantasies that he later termed active imagination and explained its therapeutic rationale in psychological language. Strikingly, there is no indication in it of the wider cosmological, metaphysical, and theological exploration that he himself was engaged with. He noted that a critical problem confronting analysis was the fact that the new attitude gained from it subsequently became obsolete. Unconscious materials were needed to supplement the conscious attitude, and to correct its one-sidedness. But since energy tension was low in sleep, dreams were inferior expressions of unconscious contents. Thus other sources had to be turned to—namely, spontaneous fantasies. There are few dreams noted in the Black Books. A recently recovered dream book contains a series of dreams from 1917 to 1925.162 Close comparison of it with the Black Books of this period indicates that Jung’s active imaginations did not derive directly from his dreams, and that these two were generally independent streams.
Jung described his technique for inducing spontaneous fantasies: “The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness.”163 One commenced by concentrating on a particular mood and attempting to become as conscious as possible of all fantasies and associations that came up in connection with it. The aim was to allow fantasy free play, but without departing from the initial affect in a free-associative process. This led to a concrete or symbolic expression of the mood, which had the result of bringing the affect nearer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable. Merely doing this could have a vitalizing effect. Individuals could draw, paint, or sculpt, depending on their propensities:
Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image will be produced. As a rule such a fantasy-image will actually appear—perhaps hypnagogically—and should be carefully noted down in writing. Audio-verbal types usually hear inner words, perhaps mere fragments or apparently meaningless sentences to begin with. . . . Others at such times simply hear their “other” voices. . . . still rarer, but equally valuable, is automatic writing, direct or with the planchette.164
Once these fantasies had been produced and embodied, two approaches were possible: creative formulation and understanding. Each needed the other, and both were necessary to produce the transcendent function, which arose out of the union of conscious and unconscious contents.
For some people, Jung noted, it was simple to note the “other” voice in writing and to answer it from the standpoint of the I: “It is exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between two human beings . . .”165 Dialogue led to the creation of the transcendent function, which resulted in a widening of consciousness. His descriptions of the use of inner dialogues and the means of evoking fantasies in a waking state match his own undertaking in the Black Books. The interplay of creative formulation and understanding corresponds to his work in Liber Novus, which contains both elements.
In 1917, Jung published a short book with a long title: The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes: An Overview of the Modern Theory and Method of Analytical Psychology. In his preface, dated December 1916, he proclaimed:
The psychological processes, which accompany the present war, above all the incredible brutalization of public opinion, the mutual slanderings, the unprecedented fury of destruction, the monstrous flood of lies, and man’s incapacity to call a halt to the bloody demon—are suited like nothing else to powerfully push in front of the eyes of thinking men the problem of the restlessly slumbering chaotic unconscious under the ordered world of consciousness. This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian. . . . But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation. The great problems of humanity will never be solved through general laws, but always only through the renewal of the attitude of the individual.166
War made visible the chaotic unconscious. While collective events could release the demons of the unconscious, the only resolution lay on an individual level. In a language that recalled William James’s essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he asserted: “Every individual needs revolution, inner division, dissolution of the prevailing and renewal.” This would be achieved through self-reflection and a return of the individual to the “ground of the human essence.”167 Understood in this manner, analysis could furnish the basis for cultural renewal. This articulated the intimate interconnection between individual and collective events that was at the center of Liber Novus. For Jung, the conjunction between his precognitive visions and the outbreak of war had made apparent the deep subliminal connections between individual fantasies and world events—and hence between the psychology of the individual and that of the nation. What was now required was to work out this connection in more detail.
Jung noted that after one had analyzed and integrated the contents of the personal unconscious, one came up against mythological fantasies that stemmed from the phylogenetic layer of the unconscious.168 The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes provided an exposition of the collective, suprapersonal, absolute unconscious—these terms being used interchangeably. He argued that one needed to separate oneself from the unconscious by presenting it visibly as something separate. It was vital to differentiate the “I” from the non-“I”—namely, the collective psyche or absolute unconscious. To do this, “man must necessarily stand upon firm feet in his I-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty toward life completely, so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of society.”169 Both of these tasks—separating from the unconscious by presenting it visibly, and at the same time maintaining one’s worldly duties and responsibilities—were what he had been endeavoring to do in this period.
In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung had called the contents of this unconscious typical myths or primordial images. He also called them “dominants”: “the ruling powers, the Gods, that is, images of dominating laws and principles, average regularities in the sequence of images, that the brain has received from the sequence of secular processes.”170 One needed to pay particular attention to these dominants. Especially important was the “detachment of the mythological or collective psychological contents from the objects of consciousness, and their consolidation as psychological realities outside the individual psyche.”171 This enabled one to come to terms with the activated residues of our ancestral history. The differentiation of the personal from the nonpersonal resulted in a release of energy.
These comments represent another description of his activity: the attempt to differentiate the various characters that appeared and to “consolidate them as psychological realities.” The notion that these figures had a psychological reality in their own right, and were not merely subjective figments, was the main lesson that he attributed to the imaginal figure of Elijah: psychic objectivity.172
Jung argued that the era of reason and skepticism inaugurated by the French Revolution had had the effect that religion and irrationalism had been repressed. This had serious consequences, which had led to the outbreak of irrationalism represented by the world war. It was thus a historical necessity to acknowledge the irrational as a psychological factor. The acceptance of the irrational forms one of the central undertakings in the Black Books.
In The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, Jung developed his concept of psychological types. He noted that the psychological characteristics of the types were commonly pushed to extremes. By what he termed the law of enantiodromia, or the reversal into the opposite, the opposing function entered in—namely, feeling, for the introvert; and thinking, for the extravert. These secondary functions were found in the unconscious. The development of the contrary function led to individuation. As the contrary function was not acceptable to consciousness, what was required to come to terms with it was production of the transcendent function. The unconscious was a danger when one was not at one with it. But with the establishment of the transcendent function, the disharmony ceased. This allowed access to the productive and beneficent aspects of the unconscious. The unconscious contained the wisdom and experience of untold ages and served as an unparalleled guide. The development of the contrary function is portrayed in the “Mysterium” section of Liber Novus, dealing with the December 1913 encounters with Elijah and Salome.173 The attempt to gain the wisdom stored in the unconscious is portrayed throughout the Black Books. Jung’s “I” asks his soul to tell him what she sees and the meaning of his fantasies. The unconscious is here viewed as a source of higher wisdom. Jung concluded the essay by indicating the personal and experiential nature of his new conceptions: “Our age is seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good.”174
The Emergence of Phanes
The seventh sermon had culminated in an evocation of a star God:
At immeasurable distance a lonely star stands in the zenith. This is the one God of this one man, this is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity. In this world man is Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world.
This star is the God and the goal of man, this is his one guiding God, in him man goes to his rest, toward him goes the long journey of the soul after death, in him everything that man withdraws from the greater world shines resplendently.
To this one God man shall pray.175
The entries from the autumn of 1916 further elaborate on this figure, who is revealed as Phanes. Phanes first emerged as a golden bird from the tree of light. Jung’s soul identified him as the “ultimate and highest.” In the autumn of 1917, Philemon described his luminous splendor in entries that could be considered as further sermons.176
In 1919, Jung painted his portrait in Liber Novus as a divine child, noting, “I called him PHANES, because he is the newly appearing God.”177 He considered the emergence of this figure as denoting a spiritual transformation that was occurring in the world. In 1919 he wrote to an English pupil, Joan Corrie:
in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises. Please don’t speak of these things to other people. It could do harm to the child. The child is fate and amor fati & guidance and necessity—and peace and fulfillment (Isa[iah] 9.6). But don’t allow yourself to be dispersed into people and opinions and discussions. The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don’t know it. He is a “spiritual” God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities.178
During this period, Jung’s soul sought to instruct him with regard to his relations with women. Between 1916 and 1918, reference is made to the “white one” and the “black one,” respectively. The contexts seem to suggest that these refer to Maria Moltzer and Toni Wolff, respectively.179 In an entry in his dream book of July 2, 1917, Jung referred to his “impersonal love” of both women and noted that with them his soul was “complete, fulfilled.”180 On September 27, 1916, his soul advised as follows: “Let the black one go. No excessively deep relation. She is also empty and lives through you. She can’t give to you what you need.”181 The following day, his soul added, apropos the black one:
I understand that you love her, but I would like to get rid of her. . . . Women are my most dangerous opponents, since they have my qualities. That’s why you can confuse me so easily with the black one. I also have golden goat eyes and a black coat. I place myself between her and you. The white one is less dangerous to you, since she is completely unlike me and of such an adverse nature that you can’t at all lose yourself there.182
A year later, his soul had shifted her position with regard to the black one. On October 22, 1917, she advised: “Love less. The knife, do you hear, you need the knife. Cut off what is no good. Not the black one—she is good for you. She is quiet and accompanies you. She is necessary for you. She can be happy, if things go well with you.”183 She advised the opposite concerning the white one. On February 28, 1918, she said, “For a long time I had already advised you to separate from the white one.”184 What was emerging during this period was Jung’s understanding of the figure of the anima, man’s feminine soul, and the necessity of recognizing the anima as an internal component rather than seeing her in women. In technical terms, he referred to this as withdrawing and integrating the projection of the anima from women.
Between June 11 and October 2, 1917, Jung was on military service in Château d’Oex, as commander of the English military war internees. Around August, he wrote to Smith Ely Jelliffe that his military service had taken him completely away from his work, and that on his return he hoped to finish a long paper about the types. He concluded: “With us everything is unchanged and quiet. Everything else is swallowed by the war. The psychosis is still increasing, going on and on.”185
From the beginning of August to the end of September, he drew a series of mandalas in pencil in his army notebook, which he preserved.186 The first is titled “Phanes” and bears the legend “transformation of matter in the individual.”187 This image may be seen as an attempt to depict the “newly arising God” and his relation to the individual. These mandalas are linked to the concurrent fantasies noted in the Black Books. A number featured complex hieroglyphics that emerged and were in turn elucidated in dialogues with the black magician Ha in the autumn of 1917.188 Jung then painted them in the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus, but they bear no relation to the text. They more properly accompany the autumn dialogues in the Black Books.
Jung later recalled that he did not understand these mandalas but felt that they were very significant. Beginning on August 20, he drew a mandala on most days. This gave him the feeling that he had taken a photograph of each day, and he observed how these figures changed. He recalled that he received a letter from “this Dutch woman”—Moltzer—“that got on my nerves terribly.”189 Moltzer argued that “the fantasies stemming from the unconscious possessed artistic worth and should be considered as art.”190 Modern painters were attempting to make art out of the unconscious, and Moltzer’s point troubled him because it was not stupid and made him question whether his fantasies were spontaneous and natural. He drew a mandala the next day and a piece of it was broken off, and the symmetry was destroyed:
Only now did I gradually come to what the mandala really is: Formation, transformation, / The eternal mind’s eternal recreation. And that is the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which, when everything is well, is harmonious, but which can bear no self deception. My mandala images were cryptograms on the state of my Self, which were delivered to me each day.191
The mandala appears to be that of August 6, 1917.192 The citation is from Goethe’s Faust, 2, act l, ll. 6287ff.). Mephistopheles is addressing Faust, giving him directions to the realm of the Mothers:
MEPHISTOPHELES: A glowing tripod will finally show you
that you are in the deepest, most deepest ground.
By its light you will see the Mothers:
the one sits, others stand and walk,
as it may chance. Formation, transformation
the eternal mind’s eternal recreation.
covered in images of all creatures,
they do not see you, since they only see shades.
Then hold your heart, since the danger is great,
and go straight to that tripod,
touch it with the key!
The letter to which Jung referred has not come to light. However, in a subsequent letter, from November 21, 1918, sent from Château d’Oex, Jung wrote that “M. Moltzer has again disturbed me with letters.”193
He reproduced the mandalas in the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus. A decade later, in 1929, he anonymously described this sequence in his “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower”:
I know a series of European mandala drawings in which something like a plant seed surrounded by membranes is shown floating in the water. Then, from the depths below, fire penetrates the seed and makes it grow, causing a great golden flower to unfold from the germinal vesicle.194
There, he gave the following interpretation of this sequence:
This symbolism refers to a quasi-alchemical process of refining and ennobling. Darkness gives birth to light; out of the “lead of the water region” grows the noble gold; what is unconscious becomes conscious in the form of a living process of growth. (Indian Kundalini yoga offers a perfect analogy.) In this way the union of consciousness and life takes place.195
On July 30, 1917, Fanny Bowditch Katz, who had analysis both with Jung and Moltzer, wrote notes of her discussion with Moltzer in which she spoke candidly of how Moltzer saw her relationship with Jung and their struggle, and how she had been to visit him in Château d’Oex during this period:
Of this hour it’s hard to write—I had perfect rapport and stayed 13/4 hours with her—at the end of the time I felt lifted into another world and almost as if I had been in a divine presence. She spoke wonderfully, as if inspired, and I saw more clearly than ever before what she is working for—what her struggle with Dr. Jung means. How wonderfully she spoke of the work she felt she and Dr. J. were to do together, for which they are only the instruments. Small atoms in the great universe—of our duty to life—of the subjection of self for the benefit of all—all these feelings are coming to me now as never before. She spoke of the great struggle going on now in the world, the great agony, which is the collective expression of the individual struggle. . . . She spoke of Isis—whose son took her crown from her head and threw it on the ground—after which a new crown appeared on her head, a cow with the sun and moon between her horns—is this not what is happening to her through Dr. Jung’s treatment. . . . The next day we talked for almost an hour in the dining room. She in her pink kimono perched on the table. Shall I ever forget it? She spoke of going to Château d’Oex to tell Dr. J. of his injustice to her—on one side he is so fine and on the other almost a charlatan playing to the gallery. / His attitude toward their differences is the attitude of the intellectual man—the historical man. . . . Then she said—and oh how she said it—with that wonderful far away look in her eyes, that she felt that somewhere way down deep there must be an affinity between her and me and that it is meant that I should do for R. what she is doing for Dr. J.! . . . she evidently feels that R. has a great value which I can bring out.—and she spoke of her overcoming the personal in order to do this—she certainly has with Dr. Jung!196
By early 1918, the difficulties between Moltzer and Jung had intensified. On April 14, 1918, Jung wrote to Josef Lang regarding a letter he had received from Moltzer in which she had accused him of trying to destroy her relationship with Lang in a “thirst for revenge.”197 Jung asked Lang to indicate to Moltzer that he had not analyzed Lang’s relation to her and didn’t know or care about it. He said that he had no desire for revenge, and that Moltzer simply couldn’t accept what he said. He told Lang that he regretted that someone as valuable as Moltzer had such idiotic fantasies and had been projecting rubbish onto him. He said he had broken off relations with her months ago. Moltzer, Jung told Lang, claimed that Jung had an unresolved transference to her. This indicated to Jung that she was paranoid. He said that she also maintained that he couldn’t recognize her independence. Jung considered that the problem was that she held a “deeply degrading” conception of human nature, and always imputed the basest motive—that was why he had drawn back from her. Despite everything, she still wanted his friendship. While Moltzer claimed that Jung was projecting onto her, Jung maintained that the opposite was the case: he had left her in peace, while she bombarded him with insults.
Soon after, Moltzer resigned from the Club. This caused consternation and lengthy debate at a meeting on June 1.198 On receiving her letter of resignation, Emma Jung, the Club’s president, had tried to persuade her to remain, to no avail. So had Adolf Keller. Emma Jung noted that Moltzer had been critical of the Club for some six to eight weeks, an antipathy that actually dated from the previous summer. Moltzer’s letter criticized the intellectualism of the Club, and the fact that it had been taken over by conflict over the question of types. While regretting her departure, Emma Jung did not feel that the reasons Moltzer offered for leaving were the real ones. Martha Sigg suggested that Moltzer had been influenced by her patients against the Club, which Jung thought was probable. Some members thought that the reason for her withdrawal was the deficiency of her collective function. Sarah Barker, one of her analysands, suggested that the fact that Moltzer found the Club “so unanalytical that she could no longer give it her sanction and support” was a serious matter.199 She argued that it was a mistake to believe, as had been asserted, that “her attitude had been influenced by countless resistances brought about by her patients.” Barker noted that from the outset, Moltzer had maintained that “the Club was not founded or conducted in accordance with analytical principles.”200 In a letter of August 1, 1918, Moltzer wrote to Bowditch Katz:
Yes, I resigned from the Club. I could not live any longer in that atmosphere. I am glad I did. I think, that in time, when the Club really shall become something, the Club shall be thankful I did. My resignation has its silent effects. Silent, for it seems that it belongs to my path, that I openly don’t get the recognition or the appreciation for what I do for the development of the whole analytic movement. I always work in the dark and alone. This is my fate and must be expected.201
On October 19, Jung informed Lang that he had fired Moltzer as his assistant and broken off all connection with her. She had accused him of exploiting her and not recognizing her independence. On his side, he felt that she was not capable of treating him as someone of equal standing and instead always regarded him as a little boy. He had evidently followed the advice of his soul regarding the white one.202 Jung’s break with Moltzer was a significant turning point. He later recalled to Aniela Jaffé: “I can say the air cleared when I showed the door to the Dutch woman who wanted to suggest to me that what I was making was art, and secondly when I started to understand the mandala drawings.”203
It was during this period that a living idea of the self first came to Jung. He recalled to Aniela Jaffé: “It is in accordance with the microcosmic nature of the soul and it seemed to me like the monad which I am, and which is my world. The mandala represents this self.”204 He did not know where this process was leading, but he began to grasp that the mandala represented the goal of the process: “Only when I began to paint the mandalas did I see that all the paths I took, all the steps I made, all led back to the one point, that is, to the center. The mandala became the expression of all paths.”205
Moltzer continued to live and work in Zollikerberg and maintained her friendship with Lang. Years later, a rapprochement was attempted, with Lang and Moltzer inviting Jung for a meeting. Jung thanked Lang for their invitation but declined it: “I know that one could look back with regrets or a certain longing on those unconscious times which were still pregnant with the future. But those times have since given birth, the covers are torn, and new realities have come into being whose immediacy does not allow me to look backward. Nothing from the past can be brought back unless it has been reborn in a creative life.”206
Scrutinies
There are indications that Jung discussed the material from his self-experimenation with colleagues. In March 1918 he wrote to Lang, who had sent him some of his own fantasies:
as you have observed correctly yourself, it is very important to experience the contents of the unconscious before forming any opinions about it. I very much agree with you that we have to grapple with the knowledge content of Gnosticism and neo-Platonism. These are the systems that contain the materials which are destined to become the foundation of a theory of the unconscious. I’ve been working on this myself for quite some time, and also have had ample opportunity to compare my experiences at least partially with those of other people. That’s why I was very pleased to hear pretty much the same opinions from you. I am glad that all on your own you have discovered this area of work waiting to be tackled. Up to now, I lacked any co-workers, and I am happy that you want to join forces with me.
I consider it very important that you extricate your own material in an unbiased way from the unconscious, as carefully as possible. My own material is very voluminous, very complicated, and in part I’ve worked it through up to almost complete, very vivid clarifications. But what’s completely missing, is modern material to compare it with. Zarathustra has been formed too consciously. Meyrink retouches the material in an aesthetic way; furthermore, I feel he is lacking in religious sincerity.207
During this period, Jung continued transcribing the Draft into Liber Novus and adding paintings. After 1918, the fantasies in the Black Books became more intermittent. The Draft of the first two sections of Liber Novus had contained fantasies from October 1913 to February 1914. In the winter of 1917, Jung wrote a fresh manuscript called Scrutinies, which began where he had left off. In this, he transcribed fantasies from April 1914 through June 1916.208 He included the Sermones, now with commentaries on each by Philemon. Philemon indicated that his teaching compensated or made up for what the dead lacked, through providing precisely those conceptions which they needed.209 In Scrutinies, there is no clear separation between a first layer of fantasies and a second layer of commentary, and the text is not formally divided into distinct chapters. Here and there, Jung added some passages linking the fantasies to paragraphs that depicted his subsequent understanding of their significance.
The realization of the significance of the self is portrayed in Scrutinies. On September 18, 1915, Jung wrote, “Through uniting with the self we reach the God.”210 In the autumn of 1917, he added, “I must say this not with reference to the opinions of the ancients or that authority, but because I have experienced it.”211 This unshakable experience was nothing less than the experience of God: “The self is not God, although we reach the God through the self.”212 He realized that he had to serve the self, and that this service was also service of God and of mankind. At the same time, he had to free his self from God, since “the God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination, he is more than wisdom, he is also meaninglessness, he is more than power, he is also powerlessness, he is more than omnipresence, he is also my creature.”213 This description of Jung’s experience of God corresponds to the vision of Abraxas in the Sermones. The realization of the significance of the self for Jung was not only a conceptual but also an experiential matter. Jung had some powerful experiences: on June 27, 1917, he wrote to Emma Jung that three days prior, he was on Pointe de Cray (a mountain just northwest of Château d’Oex), “It was a glorious day. On the summit I had a wonderful ecstatic feeling. Last evening I had a most remarkable mystical experience, a feeling of connection of many millennia. It was like a transfiguration. Today I’m probably going down to hell again for this. I want to cling to you, since you are my center, a symbol of the human, a protection against all daimons.”214 This letter underscores the centrality of Emma Jung in his life.
In Scrutinies, he realized that much of the earlier part of the book (Liber Primus and Liber Secundus) had been given to him by Philemon.215 This represented a disidentification: there was a prophetic wise old man in him, someone whom he was not identical to.216 A critical task of Jung’s “working over” of his fantasies consisted in the differentiation of voices and characters. The following are examples. In the Black Books, it is Jung’s “I” who speaks the Sermones to the dead; in Scrutinies, it is not Jung but Philemon. In the Black Books, the main figure Jung’s “I” has dialogues with is his soul; in some sections of Liber Novus, it is the serpent or the bird. In one conversation in January 1916, his soul explained to him that when the above and below are not united, she falls into three parts—a serpent, the human soul, and the bird or heavenly soul, which visits the Gods. Thus Jung’s revisions, in which he now differentiated the soul into serpent, human soul, and bird, here can be seen to reflect his understanding of the tripartite nature of his soul.217
New Scrutinies
Jung’s fantasies did not end with Scrutinies. If he had gone on to prepare a further section for publication, it is likely that he would have edited them in a similar way, as New Scrutinies, adding linking paragraphs and clarifications. While he continued to question his soul, seeking knowledge and understanding from her, she characterized her limitations and his need for her in the following way: “I can grasp for you only what you already have but don’t know. The beyond from which I bring knowledge to you is your beyond. I am able to grasp what you have. But you aren’t. That’s why you need me.”218 The subsequent fantasies circle around themes already enunciated earlier, but in ever deepening spirals.
In the fantasies after Scrutinies, one sees a continued further differentiation of Jung’s cosmology. New characters emerge, such as Phanes, Atmavictu, Ha, Ka, the black bird, a divine Arab youth, the spirit of gravity, and Wotan. Characters who had appeared earlier return, such as Elijah, Salome, and Philemon. However, in concert with the development of Jung’s “I,” they too have developed. These entries depict the metamorphoses of the characters, and Jung’s deepening understanding of their interrelation in a complex shifting (and not entirely consistent) genealogy. For example, the figure of Atmavictu went through a number of incarnations, as an old man, a bear, an otter, a newt, a serpent, then simultaneously a man and an earth serpent. He was Izdubar, and became Philemon. The black magician, Ha, was the father of Philemon. Ka was the father of Salome, and also the brother of the Buddha. Ka was Philemon’s shadow. Philemon further identified himself with Elijah and Khidr and claimed that he would become Phanes. In the form of Jung’s emerging psychological concepts, all of these figures would be viewed as aspects of the self. As such, these sections can be seen as forming the experiential core of Jung’s understanding of the structure of the self that he explored decades later in chapter 14 of Aion: Contributions to the Symbolism of the Self (1951).219
A major theme that Jung was preoccupied with here was finding the right relation to the higher powers, the Gods, and understanding the role of mankind in relation to them. He came to see that it was critical that one did not give oneself over to the Gods but maintained one’s human perspective. On March 1, 1918, his soul informed him that what was necessary was maintaining simultaneously a respect and disdain for the Gods, and that this began with respect and disdain for oneself.220 This was critical not only for humanity; Jung now realized that “man would be the mediator in the transformation process of God.”221 It was a cardinal insight, and it is the center of his later work Answer to Job. Toward the end of his life, in a chapter of Memories entitled “Late Thoughts,” he formulated it as follows:
That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of his creation, and man conscious of himself. / That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades.222
One can trace the inception and development of this “explanatory myth” in the Black Books.
During the same period, Jung continued to distill his fantasies into a psychological vocabulary suitable for a medical-scientific audience. Thus we see two parallel movements: a continued elaboration and differentiation of his cosmology, accompanied by a process of condensation of his psychology. In his paper “On the Psychological Aspects of the Figure of the Kore” (1941), the observation of products of the unconscious revealed certain regularities, types of situations and types of figures that frequently recurred.223 Chief among these were the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother, the maiden, and the anima and animus. In this regard, he was attempting to determine precisely where these typicalities lay, through establishing the connections between his own material, that of his patients, and the historical record. Viewing and understanding such fantasies in this way as opposed to regarding them in a disconnected, episodic, serial manner gave them order and coherence. For Jung, they depicted the narrative of transformation and self-healing that he called the individuation process.
On one hand, Jung elaborated his personal visionary iconography, his own cosmology and mythology, and encouraged his patients to do likewise. On the other, he developed a hermeneutic system by which to interpret this symbolic language. When read in conjunction with his published psychological works, the Black Books enable one to follow the conjoint development of these two languages.
During this period, Jung continued to transcribe the text of Liber Novus into the calligraphic volume and to paint in it. However, after the sequence depicting the regeneration of Izdubar,224 the paintings bear no relation at all to the text of Liber Novus but are linked to further fantasies in the Black Books. After the 1917 mandala sequence, we have around twenty-one major images in the calligraphic volume. At the same time, Jung also made a number of related freestanding paintings and carvings.225 These images are active imaginations in their own right. At times, they depict and refer to characters and episodes in the concurrent fantasies in Books 6 and 7. At other times, they form links in the sequence. So while these paintings are in the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus, they directly relate to and accompany the text of Books 6 and 7.
The Way to the Self
In 1918, Jung wrote a paper entitled “On the Unconscious.” He noted that all of us stood between two worlds: the world of external perception and the world of perception of the unconscious. This depicts his experience at this time. He wrote that Schiller had claimed that the approximation of these two worlds was through art. By contrast, Jung argued, “I am of the opinion that the union of rational and irrational truth is to be found not so much in art as in the symbol per se; for it is the essence of the symbol to contain both the rational and irrational.”226 Symbols, he argued, stemmed from the unconscious, and the creation of symbols was the most important function of the unconscious. While the compensatory function of the unconscious was always present, the symbol-creating function was only present when we were willing to recognize it. Here, we see him continuing to eschew viewing his productions as art. It was not art but symbols that were of paramount importance. The recognition and recovery of this symbol-creating power is portrayed in Liber Novus. It depicts Jung’s attempt to understand the psychological nature of symbolism and to view his fantasies symbolically. He concluded that what was unconscious in any given epoch was only relative, and changing. What was required now was the “remolding of our views in accordance with the active forces of the unconscious.”227 Thus the task confronting him was one of translating the conceptions gained through his confrontation with his soul, and expressed in a literary and symbolic manner in Liber Novus, into a language compatible with the contemporary outlook of the spirit of the times.
The following year, he presented a paper in England before the Society for Psychical Research on “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits.”228 Here, he differentiated between two situations in which the collective unconscious becomes active. In the first, an individual experiences a crisis and the collapse of his or her hopes and expectations. In the second, a time of great social, political, or religious upheaval occurs. At such moments, whatever has been suppressed by prevailing attitudes necessarily accumulates in the collective unconscious. Strongly intuitive individuals become aware of what has been suppressed and try to translate the material into communicable ideas. If they succeed, the results are salutary. Either way, the contents of the unconscious had a disturbing effect. If they remain suppressed, Jung said, there is the danger that the collective unconscious will replace reality, which is pathological. If instead the collective unconscious is activated as a result of collective processes, the individual may feel disorientated, but the state is not pathological.
Jung’s differentiation of these two possibilities suggests that he viewed his own confrontation with the unconscious as falling under the second heading—namely, activation of the collective unconscious due to general cultural upheaval. His initial fear of impending insanity in 1913 lay in his failure to realize this distinction at that time.
Throughout this period, Jung was engaged in historical research on the type problem. Beginning in 1916, he gave presentations on the subject before the Association for Analytical Psychology and the Psychological Club. These were developed and expanded in Psychological Types, which appeared in 1921 to widespread acclaim. The English edition appeared in 1923 and received many laudatory reviews.229
As regards the working over of themes of Liber Novus, the most important section of Psychological Types was chapter 5, “The Type Problem in Poetry.” The basic issue discussed was how the problem of opposites could be resolved through the production of the uniting or reconciling symbol. The chapter presents a far-ranging historical overview of the issue. Jung offered detailed analysis of the resolution of the problem of opposites in Hinduism, Taoism, Meister Eckhart, and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work of Carl Spitteler. This chapter can also be read in terms of a meditation on some of the historical sources that directly informed Jung’s conceptions in Liber Novus. Finally, it heralded the introduction of an important method. Rather than directly discuss the issue of the reconciliation of opposites in Liber Novus, he sought out historical analogies and commented upon them.
In 1921, the self emerged as a psychological concept. Jung defined it as follows:
Inasmuch as the I is only the center of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely a complex among other complexes. Hence I discriminate between the I and the self, since the I is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my totality: hence it also includes the unconscious psyche. In this sense the self would be an (non-material) extension which embraces and includes the I. In unconscious fantasy the self often appears as the super-ordinated or ideal personality, as Faust is in relation to Goethe and Zarathustra to Nietzsche.230
He equated the Hindu notion of Brahman/Atman with the self. At the same time, he provided a definition of the soul. He argued that the soul possessed qualities that were complementary to the persona, and in that sense had what the conscious attitude lacked. The complementary character of the soul also affected its sexual character: a man had a feminine soul, or anima, and a woman had a masculine soul, or animus.231 This corresponded to the fact that men and women had both masculine and feminine traits. He also noted that the soul gave rise to images that were assumed to be worthless from the rational perspective. There were four ways of using them:
The first possibility of making use of them is artistic, if one is in any way gifted in that direction; a second is philosophical speculation; a third is quasi-religious, leading to heresy and the founding of sects; and a fourth way of employing the dynamis of these images is to squander it in every form of licentiousness.232
From this perspective, the psychological utilization of these images would represent a “fifth way.” For it to succeed, psychology had to distinguish itself clearly from art, philosophy, and religion. This indicates the various possibilities Jung rejected.
In terms of publications, the next few years were some of the quietest in Jung’s career. He contributed to a symposium at the British Psychological Society, “The Question of the Therapeutic Value of ‘Abreaction,’ ” in 1921;233 1922 saw the publication of a lecture to the Society for German Language and Literature in Zürich, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Literary Artworks.”234 There were no new publications in 1923 and 1924.
Travels235
In 1920, he accompanied his friend Hermann Sigg236 on a business trip to North Africa. His intention was “to see for once the European from the outside, reflected by a milieu which was foreign in every respect.”237 He held that the only way of gaining an understanding of one’s own national peculiarities was through becoming aware of how others viewed them. Hence traveling was the gateway to a comparative ethnopsychology. Given his understanding of the historical layering of the collective unconscious, his geographical voyages were a form of phylogenetic time traveling.
Africa made an overpoweringly deep impression on him: it meant encountering the historical past as a living present. To Emil Medtner, he wrote in March: “The most mysterious here are the nights of the waxing moon that wanders in indescribably silver clarity across the dark clear sky of Africa. The symbol of the Punic tombs of Carthage, 
Astarte herself, came close to me, when I saw the moon slowly descend over the tops of the palm trees for the first time. I came here according to inner necessity, already prepared by the unconscious, a symbolic act of the grandest style, nevertheless the meaning is still dark.”238 Jung felt that the people he encountered had an intensity that Europeans lacked, and which he believed himself to be psychically infected by.239 While in Tunis, he had a powerful dream:
The night before we embarked for Marseilles I had a dream which, I sensed, summed up the whole experience. This was just as it should be, for I had accustomed myself to living always on two planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to express something and could not formulate it any better than by a dream.
I dreamt that I was in an Arab city, and as in most such cities there was a citadel, a casbah. The city was situated in a broad plain, and had a wall all around it. The shape of the wall was square, and there were four gates.
The casbah in the interior of the city was surrounded by a wide moat (which is not the way it really is in Arab countries). I stood before a wooden bridge leading over the water to a dark, horseshoe-shaped portal, which was open. Eager to see the citadel from the inside also, I stepped out on the bridge. When I was about halfway across it, a handsome, dark Arab of aristocratic, almost royal bearing came toward me from the gate. I knew that this youth in the white burnoose was the resident prince of the citadel. When he came up to me, he attacked me and tried to knock me down. We wrestled. In the struggle we crashed against the railing; it gave way and both of us fell into the moat, where he tried to push my head under water to drown me. No, I thought, this is going too far. And in my turn I pushed his head under water. I did so although I felt great admiration for him; but I did not want to let myself be killed. I had no intention of killing him; I wanted only to make him unconscious and incapable of fighting.
Then the scene of the dream changed, and he was with me in a large vaulted octagonal room in the center of the citadel. The room was all white, very plain and beautiful. Along the light-colored marble walls stood low divans, and before me on the floor lay an open book with black letters written in magnificent calligraphy on milky-white parchment. It was not Arabic script; rather, it looked to me like the Uigurian script of West Turkestan, which was familiar to me from the Manichaean fragments from Turfan. I did not know the contents, but nevertheless I had the feeling that this was “my book,” that I had written it. The young prince with whom I had just been wrestling sat to the right of me on the floor. I explained to him that now that I had overcome him he must read the book. But he resisted. I placed my arm around his shoulders and forced him, with a sort of paternal kindness and patience, to read the book. I knew that this was absolutely essential, and at last he yielded.240
In retrospect, Jung reflected as follows on this dream:
In this dream, the Arab youth was the double of the proud Arab who had ridden past us without a greeting. As an inhabitant of the Casbah he was a figuration of the self, or rather, a messenger or emissary of the self. For the Casbah from which he came was a perfect mandala: a citadel surrounded by a square wall with four gates. His attempt to kill me was an echo of the motif of Jacob’s struggle with the angel; he was to use the language of the Bible like an angel of the Lord, a messenger of God who wished to kill men because he did not know them.
Actually, the angel ought to have had his dwelling in me. But he knew only angelic truth and understood nothing about man. Therefore he first came forward as my enemy; however, I held my own against him. In the second part of the dream I was the master of the citadel; he sat at my feet and had to learn to understand my thoughts, or rather, learn to know man.
Obviously, my encounter with Arab culture had struck me with overwhelming force.241
Encountering Wotan
The dream continued to echo for Jung, and two years after his return to Europe, he would encounter the figure again, in a fantasy of January 6, 1922.242 His soul saw and described the figure and informed his “I” that the figure was a God and that he would hear from him again. The God needed to hear from him, as otherwise they both couldn’t live. His soul informed his “I” that he would reach the God again through solitude, coupled with reverence for the sun, moon, and earth, which stood for the masculine, the feminine, and the body, respectively.
A year later, when Jung was in Castagnola, the figure returned once more.243 He had been with the dead and had seen Jung’s dead: his dogs and his father. He stated that he was a wanderer who changed the form in which he appeared. However, he wanted to know who he really was, and he asked Jung’s “I” to tell him this, as it would free him.
On the following day, Jung’s “I” asked his soul about him.244 She indicated that the first time she saw him, he had a terrifying beauty, like Dionysus. On the second occasion, he had a deathly pallor. Jung’s “I” wondered if this was the self, the Pleroma, which led to the question of how it could appear in human form. Furthermore, he couldn’t understand why it wanted to be overcome and made determinate. Two days later the figure returned, this time as a red-haired bearded hunter, wrapped in animal skins.245 The figure reiterated his question, asking Jung’s “I” to tell him who he really was. The “I” replied that he was a God. As to why he overcame him in the dream of three years earlier, the “I” thought that this was because the God couldn’t remain in a state of unknowing but had to learn wisdom.
Two nights later he appeared again, this time as a sick pubescent boy who had taken the form of Jung’s son.246 The boy suffered from a burning rash and requested treatment. The sickness had arisen from a dream. The boy had been wearing a mangy wolf fur and hunting with hounds. He had wanted to play with a bear cub, and got the sickness from his wolf fur. Jung’s “I” informed the boy that this was no ordinary wolf but a spirit wolf who brought sickness, and that this wasn’t an ordinary dream but something that had actually occurred. The boy had been his own father, the “red-beard, the hunter of wolves and men.”
Years later, recalling his encounter with this figure and describing it as a dream, Jung noted, “I suddenly knew: the Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul.” A few days later he heard the news that his mother had died. He realized that “It was Wotan, the god of my Alemannic forefathers, who had gathered my mother to her ancestors negatively to the ‘wild horde,’ but positively to the ‘sälig lüt,’ the blessed folk.”247
Jung’s encounter with Wotan was to reverberate in his writings, and it shaped his understanding of the social and political upheaval occurring in Germany in the 1930s. In 1936, he attributed these to the reactivation of the archetype of Wotan.248 The presence of this figure was not restricted to Germany but was “an international phenomenon.”249 The reemergence of Wotan in the present was a phenomenon that he himself had directly experienced. As further evidence for his hypothesis, he referred to Nietzsche’s elevation of Dionysus, claiming that biographical evidence suggested that the God he really had in mind was Dionysus’s cousin—namely, Wotan. This part of Jung’s argument, which played a critical role in his understanding of Nietzsche and the reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in his seminars in the 1930s, was clearly shaped by his own encounter with this figure. In a seminar in February 1936, Jung described Wotan’s attributes as follows:
He is the god of oracles, of secret knowledge, of sorcery, and he is also the equivalent of Hermes psychopompos. And you remember he has, like Osiris, only one eye; the other eye is sacrificed to the underworld. Therefore. he is an exceedingly apt symbol for our modern world in which the unconscious really comes to the foreground like a river, and forces us to turn one eye inward upon it, in order that we may be adapted to that side also; we feel now that the greatest enemy is threatening us, not from without but from within. So on account of all his qualities, Wotan expresses the spirit of the time to an extent which is uncanny, and that wisdom or knowledge is really wild—it is nature’s wisdom. Wotan is not the God of civilized beings but a condition of nature.250
The Psychology of the Religion-Making Process
On January 5, 1922, Jung had a conversation with his soul concerning his vocation. She urged him to publish his material, as it was “a matter of revelation.” He had to serve his calling, which was “the new religion and its proclamation.”251 He balked at this. Three days later, his soul informed him that the new religion
expresses itself visibly only in the transformation of human relations. Relations do not let themselves be replaced even by the deepest human knowledge. Moreover, a religion doesn’t consist only in knowledge, but at its visible level in a new ordering of human affairs. Therefore expect no further knowledge from me. You know everything that is to be known from the revelation offered to you, but you are not yet living out everything that is to be lived at this time.252
Jung’s “I” replied: “I can well understand and accept this. However, just how the knowledge could be implemented in life is dark to me. You must teach me this.” His soul said: “There is not much to say about this. It is not as rational as you are inclined to think. The way is symbolic.”253
During this period, an increasing number of people from England and America made their way to Zürich to work with Jung, forming an informal expatriate group. On August 22, 1922, Jaime de Angulo wrote to Chauncey Goodrich issuing “a challenge to all brother-neurotics—go, my brethren, go to the Mecca, I mean to Zürich, and drink from the fountain of life, all ye who are dead in your souls, go and seek new life.”254
In 1922, Jung wrote a paper on the relation of analytical psychology to literary works. He differentiated two types of work: the first, which sprang entirely from the author’s intention, and the second, which seized the author. Examples of the latter were Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the second part of Goethe’s Faust. He held that these works stemmed from the collective unconscious. In such cases, the creative process consisted of the unconscious activation of an archetypal image. The archetypes released in us a voice that was stronger than our own:
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers . . . he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.255
Artists who produced such works educated the spirit of the age and compensated the one-sidedness of the present. In describing the genesis of these symbolic works, it appears that Jung had his own activities in mind. Thus while he refused to regard Liber Novus as art, his reflections on its composition were nevertheless a critical source of his subsequent conceptions and theories of art. The implicit question that this paper raised was whether psychology could now serve the function of educating the spirit of the age and compensating the one-sidedness of the present. From this period onward, Jung came to conceive of the task of his psychology in precisely such a manner.256
On November 25, 1922, Jung, Emma Jung, and Toni Wolff left the Club.257 In July 1923, Jung gave a series of seminars in Polzeath, Cornwall, England. The Analytical Psychology Club in London had been founded the previous year. The seminar was organized by Peter Baynes and Esther Harding, and twenty-nine people attended.258 Jung gave a dozen lectures over a fortnight. The seminar had two main themes: the technique of analysis and the historical psychological effects of Christianity.
During this period, the themes of the psychology of religion and the relationship between religion and psychology became increasingly prominent in Jung’s work. He attempted to develop a psychology of the religion-making process. His interest lay not in proclaiming a new prophetic revelation but in the psychology of religious experiences. The task was to depict the translation and transposition of the numinous experience of individuals into symbols, and eventually into the dogmas and creeds of organized religions, and, finally, to study the psychological function of such symbols. For such a psychology of the religion-making process to succeed, it was essential that analytical psychology, while providing an affirmation of the religious attitude, did not succumb to becoming a creed.259 In Polzeath he drew a sharp distinction between the teaching of Christ and ecclesiastical Christianity. He argued that the attitudes of the latter had led to the psychological exclusion and repression of the world of nature and the flesh, the animal, the inferior man, and creative fantasy and freedom. Consequently, these matters were constellated in the unconscious, and we were faced with the return of the repressed.
Toward the end of the seminar, Jung reflected on the theme of the “invisible church.” While Christ had been a flame that had kindled the greater part of the world, this had been put out by the institutionalization of the Church. He argued that such a process was inevitable, and that the same fate lay in store for analysis. Reflecting on this, he noted:
Around Eckhart grew up a group of Brethren of the Free Spirit who lived licentiously. The problem we face is: Is analytical psychology in the same boat? Are the second generation like the Brethren of the Free Spirit? If so, it is the open way to Hell, and analytical psychology has come too soon and it will have to wait for a century or two.260
Religious experiences led to new forms of personal relation. Jung noted that “no individual can exist without individual relationships, and that is how the foundation of your church is laid.”261 This, then, was the task that confronted analytical psychology: to form an invisible church, without succumbing to institutionalization. Jung was also here drawing together the notion, from Liber Novus, that “the anointed of this time” was a God who would appear in the spirit, as opposed to the flesh—“through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb.”262 As his soul had explained to him the previous year, this new religion would manifest itself through transformed human relations.263 Evidently Jung’s relations with his wife and Toni Wolff, the “experimentum crucis,” was related to this. Decades later, he would write, “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’ ”264 Individuation required conscious relationship.
Following the Polzeath seminar, Cary de Angulo wrote a paper on “Individual Relationships.” She began by noting:
In the last two or three sessions of our summer school at Polzeath, we discussed the possible contribution to be made by Analytical Psychology to the “church” of the future. We meant by this ill-omened word church, the inevitable form which will be assumed by the ideas of today that tend toward a new synthesis of subjective experience. . . . The special contribution of analysis was thought to be the building up of the right sorts of relationships, both individual and collective, and the vision of a future in which one came into full self-expression through relationships instead of skulking into them hemmed by a thousand fears, was very enticing.265
As she saw it, for there to be real relationships, a higher degree of consciousness than had hitherto been possible was necessary, and it was the task of analytical psychology to facilitate it. She proposed a written symposium on the subject and circulated her paper. Emma Jung wrote a response, indicating that she was essentially in agreement but thought that further consideration needed to be given to “the complications that arise when the principles should come into life.”266 She highlighted the need for a maximum of consciousness, mutual equality, and candor, describing unconsciousness as the “only sin.” The value of a relationship, she said, could be measured by “the ability it has of making appear and live the individuality of the persons involved.”267 For Jung and his close circle, such questions were existential as well as theoretical.
On April 30, 1923, Eugen Schlegel, a lawyer and member of the Club, recommended that the Club try to involve Jung again. A correspondence ensued later that year between Jung and Alphonse Maeder in this regard. Jung’s position was that he would return only if his collaboration was clearly and unanimously desired. There was heated discussion within the Club.268 In February 1924, Hans Trüb stepped down as president, and a letter was sent to Jung asking him to return, which he did a month later.269
In May 1924, Jung gave a series of three lectures on “Analytical Psychology and Education” in London under the auspices of the New Education Fellowship (NEF).270 The fellowship had been founded by Beatrice Ensor, a Theosophical educationalist. She had met Jung the previous year at the conference organized by the NEF on “Education for creative service” at Montreux, where he had spoken.
In the midtwenties, publication of Liber Novus seems to have been one of the foremost issues in Jung’s mind. At the beginning of 1924, he asked Cary Baynes to make a fresh typed transcription of the text and discussed publication. She noted in her diary:
So then you said I was to copy down the contents of the Red Book—once before you had had it copied, but you had since then added a great deal of material, so you wanted it done again and you would explain things to me as I went along, for you understood nearly everything in it you said. In this way we could come to discuss many things which never came up in my analysis and I could understand your ideas from the foundation.271
Jung discussed with his colleague Wolfgang Stockmayer the form that publication might take.272 He went back to the Corrected Draft and edited it again, deleting and adding material on approximately two hundred fifty pages. His revisions served to modernize the language and terminology.273 He also revised some of what he had already transcribed into the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus, as well as material that had been left out.
New Mexico
In January 1925, Jung visited the Pueblo Indians in Taos, New Mexico. He thought that when he was in the Sahara, he had been with a civilization that had the same relationship to Western civilization that Roman antiquity did. This led him to want to continue the historical comparison “by descending to a still deeper cultural level.”274 In the twenties, many artists and writers went to New Mexico in recognition of the bankruptcy of American civilization. The Indians were viewed as people who had maintained their cultural integrity and were rooted in communities with living traditions. Thus they were looked to as a source of renewal for white culture.275
Jung’s visit was arranged by Jaime de Angulo, a linguist, ethnologist, ethnomusicologist, writer, and patron saint of the Beat Generation. In December 1924, Jung visited America.276 Shortly after the trip, Jaime de Angulo wrote to Mabel Dodge about how he managed to take Jung to Taos, and of what ensued:
I made up my mind that I would kidnap him if necessary and take him to Taos. . . . It was a revelation to him, the whole thing. Of course I had prepared Mountain Lake. He and Jung made contact immediately and had a long talk on religion. Jung said that I was perfectly right in all that I had intuited about their psychological condition. He said that evening[,] “I had the extraordinary sensation that I was talking to an Egyptian priest of the fifteenth century before Christ.”277
Two issues appeared to have particularly struck Jung. The first was Mountain Lake’s view of the white man:
I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
He replied: “They say that they think with their heads.”
“Why of course. Where do you think?” I asked him in surprise.
“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.
I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man.278
The second was the role of the sun in Pueblo religion and cosmology: “He said, pointing to the sun, ‘Is not he who moves there our father: How can anyone say differently: How can there be another god. Nothing can be without the sun.’ ”279 Mountain Lake added, “We are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise.”280
Jung was impressed to encounter a solar monotheism. It seemed to him to correspond to a spiritual disposition that was several thousand years old. By contrast, the mythic and cosmological embeddedness of the Pueblo Indians showed us precisely what we had lost, he believed, and our spiritual poverty. Of the Pueblo Indian, he said, “Such a man is in the fullest sense of the word in his place.”281 Solar mythology plays a significant role in the Black Books. It is likely that Jung would have been reminded of his dream of praying to the sun in his encounter with Ammonius, Izdubar’s longing for the sun and regeneration through becoming the sun, and the role of the sun God, Helios, in the Septem Sermones.282
The 1925 Seminar
In 1925, Peter Baynes prepared an English translation of the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. It was privately published by Watkins in England; Jung was not identified as the author. Jung gave copies to some of his English-speaking students. In a letter that is presumably a reply to one from Henry Murray, thanking him for a copy, Jung wrote:
I am deeply convinced, that those ideas that came to me, are really quite wonderful things. I can easily say that (without blushing), because I know, how resistant and how foolishly obstinate I was, when they first visited me and what a trouble it was, until I could read this symbolic language, so much superior to my dull conscious mind.283
It is possible that Jung may have considered the publication of the Sermones a “trial” for publication of Liber Novus. There are indications that he was ambivalent about publication of the Sermones. Barbara Hannah claims that he regretted publishing it and that “he felt strongly that it should only have been written in the Red Book.”284
While engaged in her transcription of Liber Novus, Cary Baynes urged Jung to do a seminar on the work.285 It is not known whether this took place. However, it is likely that the discusssions at this time played a role in his decision to speak openly in public for the first time about his self-experimentation and some of the fantasies in the Black Books.
Toward the end of 1924 and into 1925, he gave a series of seminars in German at the Psychological Club on the psychology of dreams.286 After this, he gave an extended seminar series in English under the title “Analytical Psychology.” While these were held at the Psychological Club, they were not formally “Club seminars.” Of the fifty-two members and three guests of the Club in 1925, only a handful attended them. There was greater continuity between those who attended Jung’s Polzeath seminars and these. Thus there was a division between the locally based members of the Club, who had only recently readmitted Jung, and the more international audience of his English-language seminars. In the years to come, the latter would play the dominant role in dissemination of his work.
Strikingly, Jung began this seminar by giving an account of the development of his concepts from the time he became interested in the “problems of the unconscious.”287 He talked about his intellectual development and his collaboration with Freud, following this with a detailed presentation of his self-experimentation, focusing on the initial period: October–December 1913. His discussion of these episodes by no means replicates his commentary on them in the second layer of Liber Novus, and can be considered a third layer of commentary. The lyrical and evocative language of the second layer of Liber Novus here gave way to his psychological concepts, which, he said, he derived from his reflections upon these encounters. As he tellingly noted, “I drew all of my empirical material from my patients, but the solution of the problem I drew from the inside, from my observations of the unconscious processes.”288 At the same time, his presentation served a pedagogical function. The audience was largely composed of people he was working with, and we may presume that the practice of active imagination played a key part in their work. Thus he was in effect using his own material as a teaching exemplar, showing how his personal psychological typology was portrayed and played out in his fantasies, how he encountered and came to terms with the figures of the anima and the wise old man, and the genesis of the transcendent function as a resolution of the conflict of opposites. In addition, a significant part of the discussion in the seminar centered around modern art and how it could be understood psychologically. The question of situating his own creative work appears to have been in the background of Jung’s mind.
A few weeks following the conclusion of this seminar on July 6, Jung went to England to deliver a further English-language seminar series in Swanage, Dorset, between July 25 and August 7. The seminar was organized again by Peter Baynes and Esther Harding. The subject was dream analysis, and there were about one hundred participants.289 Jung began by presenting a history of dream interpretation; this was followed by an analysis of a series of dreams recounted to him by a fifty-three-year-old widow.
Africa
Given Jung’s phylogenetic perspective, a journey to Africa, held to be the source of mankind, had particular significance. Moreover, the desert was one of the key imaginal locations in the Black Books. For this trip, Jung traveled with H. G. Baynes and George Beckwith. Their group was called the Bugishu psychological expedition. Later, they were joined by an Englishwoman, Ruth Bailey. The trip led Jung to understand that “within the soul from the primordial beginning there has been a longing for light and an irresistible urge to rise out of its primordial darkness. . . . The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.”290 His journey itself became an imitatio of the supposed origins of consciousness. He said of his voyage up the Nile:
The myth of Horus is the story of the newly risen divine light. It would have been told after the deliverance out of the primordial darkness of prehistoric times through culture, that is to say through the revelation of consciousness. Thus the journey from the interior of Africa to Egypt became for me like a drama of the birth of light, which was intimately connected with me, with my psychology.291
In Jung’s fantasies in 1922, Egyptian mythology had played a significant part in formulating the role and the tasks that he, his wife, and Toni Wolff had to fulfill.292 He gave further indication of the connection between his travels and his own psychology in a passage omitted from the published version of Memories:
My experiences during the years 1913–1917 had burdened me with a tangle of problems whose nature demanded that I should study the psychic life of non-Europeans. For I suspected that the questions put to me were just so many compensations for my European prejudices. What I had seen in North Africa, and what Ochwiay Biano [Mountain Lake] told me, were the first clues to an adequate explanation of my experiences.293
Thus Jung’s travels were directly connected to the material in the Black Books and Liber Novus, and formed part of an attempt to understand these, by placing them within a wider historical and geographical context.294 His statement here indicates that what he personally went through could also be conceived of as a de-Europeanization. Extrapolating from this, the import for Westerners of the exploration of the collective unconscious could also be conceived of from this perspective. The task was one of reaching a balanced synthesis of the Western and the primitive.
Transforming Psychotherapy
The Black Books and Liber Novus are of critical significance in grasping the emergence of Jung’s new model of psychotherapy. In 1912, when he wrote Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, he considered the presence of mythological fantasies—such as are present in the Black Books—to be the signs of a loosening of the phylogenetic layers of the unconscious, and indicative of schizophrenia. Through his self-experimentation, he radically revised this position: what he now considered critical was not the presence of any particular content but the attitude of the individual toward it, and in particular whether an individual could accommodate such material in his or her worldview. This explains why he commented in his afterword to Liber Novus that to the superficial observer, the work would seem like madness, and could have become so, if he had failed to contain and comprehend the experiences.295 In an entry of January 17, 1914, he presented a critique of contemporary psychiatry, highlighting its incapacity to differentiate religious experience or divine madness from psychopathology.296 If the content of a vision or fantasy had no diagnostic value, he held that it was nevertheless critical to view it carefully.
Out of his experiences, he developed new conceptions of the aims and methods of psychotherapy. Since its inception through the rise of hypnotic and suggestive therapies at the end of the nineteenth century, modern psychotherapy had been primarily concerned with the treatment of functional nervous disorders, or neuroses, as they came to be known. From the First World War onward, Jung reformulated the practice of psychotherapy. No longer solely preoccupied with the treatment of psychopathology, it became a practice to enable the higher development of the individual through fostering the individuation process. This was to have far-reaching consequences not only for the development of analytical psychology but for psychotherapy as a whole.297
Jung attempted to show that the processes described in the Black Books and Liber Novus were not unique, and that the ideas he was developing were applicable to others. To study what his patients produced, he built up an extensive collection of their paintings. He would generally ask them to make copies of the work for him so that they would not have to part with their images.298 He was struck by the similarity between some of the motifs in imagery of the active imaginations of his patients, which led him to consider that the conceptions that he had arrived at through studying his own material were relevant for them as well. In 1929 he described his aim as being one of bringing about “a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature.”299 Clearly his own self-experimentation, and its results, were the template of this therapeutic practice.
During this period, he continued to instruct his patients in how to induce visions in a waking state. In 1926, Christiana Morgan came to Jung for analysis. She had read Psychological Types and turned to him for assistance with her problems with relationships and with depression. In a session in 1926, she noted Jung’s advice to her on how to produce visions:
Well, you see these are too vague for me to be able to say much about them. They are only the beginning. You only use the retina of the eye at first in order to objectify. Then instead of keeping on trying to force the image out you just want to look in. Now when you see these images you want to hold them and see where they take you—how they change. And you want to try to get into the picture yourself—to become one of the actors. When I first began to do this I saw landscapes. Then I learned how to put myself into the landscape, and the figures would talk to me and I would answer them. . . . People said he has an artistic temperament. But it was only that my unconscious was swaying me. Now I learn to act its drama as well as the drama of the outer life & so nothing can hurt me now. I have written 1000 pages of material from the unconscious (Told the vision of a giant who turned into an egg).300
He described his own experiments in detail to his patients and told them to do as he had done. His role was one of supervising them in experimenting with their own stream of images. Jung went so far as to suggest that some of his patients prepare his or her own Liber Novus. Morgan noted him saying:
I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. If you do that with these eyes for instance they will cease to draw you. You should never try to make the visions come again. Think of it in your imagination and try to paint it. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.
In a letter to J. A. Gilbert, in 1929, he commented on his procedure:
I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their “mythology.”301
Philemon’s Sanctuary
In the mid-1920s, the distinction between his dream book and the Black Books increasingly become blurred, and we find more notations of dreams in the Black Books in this period. Jung’s interest eventually shifted from the transcription of Liber Novus and the elaboration of his mythology in the Black Books to working on his tower in Bollingen.
In 1920, he had purchased some land on the upper part of Lake Zürich in Bollingen. Prior to this, he and his family would sometimes spend holidays camping in the delta at the upper end of the lake. He felt the need to represent his innermost thoughts in stone and to build a completely primitive dwelling: “Bollingen was a great matter for me, because words and paper were not real enough. I had to put down a confession in stone.”302 The tower was a “representation of individuation.” Over the years, he painted murals and made carvings on the walls. The tower may be regarded as a three-dimensional continuation of Liber Novus: its “Liber Quartus.” At the end of Liber Secundus, Jung wrote: “I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages—within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of—others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out.”303 Significantly, the tower was deliberately built as a structure from the Middle Ages, with no modern amenities. It was an evolving work. He carved an inscription on the wall that read: “Philemonis sacrum—Fausti poenitentia” (Philemon’s Shrine—Faust’s Repentance). (One of the murals in the tower is a portrait of Philemon.) On April 6, 1929, he wrote to Richard Wilhelm: “Why are there no worldly cloisters for men, who should live outside the times!”304
The Integration of the Anima
A critical chapter in Jung’s self-experimentation was what he termed the integration of the anima. Toni Wolff saw this as one side of the story, as it also involved the process by which he had “introjected” her. In 1944, apropos a dream, she noted that Jung placed undue stress on the subjective level, “because he had to realize the anima, but he thereby introjected me and took my substance.”305
On January 5, 1922, Jung’s soul advised as follows: “You should not break up a marriage, namely the marriage with me, no person should supplant me, least of all Toni. I want to rule alone.”306 The following day, she added, “You must let Toni go until she has found herself and is no longer a burden to you.”307 On the next day, his soul elucidated the symbolic significance of the relations between Jung, Emma Jung, and Toni Wolff in terms of Egyptian mythology.308
On December 23–24, 1923, Jung had the following dream:
I am on military service. Marching with a battalion. In a wood by Ossingen309 I come across excavations at a crossroads: 1 meter high stone figure of a frog or a toad without a head. Behind this sits a boy with a toad’s head. Then the bust of a man with an anchor hammered into the region of his heart, Roman. A second bust from around 1640, the same motif. Then mummified corpses. Finally there comes a barouche in the style of the XVII century. In it sits someone who is dead, but still alive. She turns her head, when I address her as “Miss”; I am aware that “Miss” is a title of nobility.310
A few years later, he grasped the significance of this dream. He noted on December 4, 1926:
I now see for the first time that the dream of 23/24 December 1923 means the death of the anima (“She does not know that she is dead.”) This coincides with the death of my mother. . . . Since the death of my mother, the A. [Anima] has fallen silent. Meaningful!311
He continued to note a few further dialogues with his soul, but his confrontation with the anima had effectively reached a closure at this point.
In contrast to a marriage, Toni Wolff saw her relationship with Jung as an “individual relation.” On December 20, 1924, she noted: “Marriage is socially, legally, psychologically accepted. Nothing new can come from there; it can only be transformed, also individually, through individual relationships. That is why the individual relationship is a symbol of the soul.”312 On September 13, 1925, she noted that their relationship stood under the “sign of Philemon.”313 In retrospect, she reflected on the role she played for him:
What C. has achieved now is all based on me. Through my faith, love, understanding and loyalty I have kept him and brought him out. I was his mirror, as he told me right at the beginning. / But my entire feeling, phantasy, mind, energy, responsibility worked for him. I have an effect—but I don’t have substance. I didn’t know how to “play.” I gave him his life. Now he should give me mine and be a mirror to me.314
She understood this mirroring through her medial function, in the terms of the typology of the feminine that she developed: “Through my medial side, I am like C.’s hollow form and therefore I always wanted to be filled in by him.”315 Wolff was extremely dependent upon Jung during these years. On April 10, 1926, she noted, “Had a psychological scurvy through C.’s absence. Vitamin C.”316 The following day, she added a further analogy: “It is the same with me as with the Elgonyi: C. is not only vitamin. Also, when I am with him the rising sun is good, relaxing, everything destructive has gone. When I am on my own, it eats away at me.”317 She repeatedly tried, but failed, to be more independent of him. She felt that his fame and success were increasingly taking him away from her and resented “his works, ideas, patients, lectures, E. [Emma], children.”318 This was cause for bitterness: “Again some resistance, when I think how he realized all his famous ideas through the relationship with me (which he only admits occasionally) and how famous he is now, and that E. is with him instead of me, and how I can never accompany him there.”319 An entry of 1937 simply states, “Ariadne on Naxos,”320 implicitly likening her situation to that of Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos after leading Theseus through the labyrinth.
In dedicated copies of his books, Jung gave private acknowledgment of her involvement. Her copy of Psychological Types bears the dedication:
This book, as you know, has come to me from that world which you have brought to me. Only you know out of which misery it was born and in which spirit it was written. I put it in your hands as a sign of gratitude, which I cannot express through words321
Likewise, her copy of Psychology and Alchemy (1944) bears a dedication to his “soror mystica.”322 In public, he acknowledged her active role in all the phases of analytical psychology in his introduction to her collected papers.323
The Culmination
On January 2, 1927, Jung had a dream set in Liverpool:
I am with several young Swiss in Liverpool, down by the docks. It is a dark rainy night, with smoke and clouds. We walk up to the upper part of town, which lies on a plateau. We come to a small circular lake in a centrally located garden. In the middle of this there is an island. The men speak of a Swiss who lives here in such a sooty, dark dirty city. But I see that on the island stands a magnolia tree covered with red flowers illuminated by an eternal sun, and think, “Now I know why this Swiss fellow lives here. He apparently also knows why. I see the city map.”324
He then painted a mandala based upon this map. He attached great significance to this dream, later commenting:
This dream is my inner situation. I still now see this yellow-gray raincoat, shining with the moisture of the rain, and everything was terribly unpleasant. That is how I felt about myself. But I had the inner vision of this heavenly beauty, and thanks to that, one can live. And then I saw: that is conclusive, that is the goal. One cannot go above the middle. The middle is the goal and everything was directed toward this. From this I recognized that the self is an archetype of orientation and of meaning. The one Swiss is the I. He lives in one of the filthy streets in one of the carrefours. He is a small replica of the center. I know that the I is not the center, it is not the self, but from there I have a sight of the divine wonder. I certainly did not live there, but I lived “excentrically.” The small light appeared to me as the likeness of the great light: so there was also something in the excentric aspect which recalled the original vision for me. After this dream I gave up painting or drawing mandalas. I then understood that there was no straight-line of development, but that development first led up from below, onto the mountain. That is one straight line development. But if one is initially above, one sees the great expanse with the lake, the island and the tree of light within it. . . . This dream described the apex of the whole unconscious process of development. It completely satisfied me, since it fully expressed my situation. I was utterly lonely then. I knew that I was occupied with something quite great, but which no one understood. This clarification through the dream made it possible for me to consider objectively what filled me. For me, the small sidelight was the I, it was like a recollection of the magnificent tree in the middle. The others did not see the tree, only I saw it. It was as if the sun shone there, but it was also as if the flowers were self-illuminated. It was as if this tree stood in sunlight. It was bright day there, and unbelievably beautiful. Where we stood was dark, cold and showery night. My life would have actually lost its meaning without such a vision. But the meaning was expressed here.325
The realization was that the self was the goal of the process of individuation. Progression was not linear but involved a circumambulation of the self. This realization gave him strength, for “otherwise the whole experience would have driven me crazy, or would have driven other people crazy.”326 He felt that the mandala drawings showed him the self “in its saving function” and that this was his salvation. The task now was one of consolidating these insights into his life and science.
In his 1926 revision of The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, he highlighted the significance of the midlife transition. He argued that the first half of life could be characterized as the natural phase, in which the prime aim was establishing oneself in the world, earning an income, and raising a family. The second half, the cultural phase, involved a reevaluation of earlier values. The goal in this period was one of conserving previous values while recognizing their opposites. This meant that individuals had to develop the undeveloped and neglected aspects of their personality.327 The individuation process was now conceived as the general pattern of human development. He argued that there was a lack of guidance for this transition in contemporary society, and he saw his psychology as filling this lacuna. Outside of analytical psychology, Jung’s formulations had an impact on the field of adult developmental psychology. Clearly his crisis experience formed the template for this conception of the tasks of the two halves of life. The Black Books and Liber Novus depict his reappraisal of his previous values, and his attempt to develop the neglected aspects of his personality. Thus they formed the basis of his understanding of how the midlife transition could be successfully navigated.
In 1928, as we have seen, he published The Relations between the I and the Unconscious. It was a small book, expanding on his 1916 paper “The structure of the unconscious.” Jung wrote about the “interior drama” of the transformation process. He enlarged upon his earlier discussion and added a section dealing in detail with the process of individuation. He noted that after one had dealt with the fantasies from the personal sphere, one met with fantasies from the impersonal sphere. These were not simply arbitrary but converged upon a goal. Hence these later fantasies could be described as processes of initiation. For this process to take place, active participation was required: “When the conscious mind participates actively and experiences each stage of the process . . . then the next image always starts off on the higher level that has been won, and purposiveness develops.”328
After the assimilation of the personal unconscious, the differentiation of the persona, and the overcoming of the state of godlikeness, the next stage was the integration of the anima for men and of the animus for women. Jung argued that just as it was essential for a man to distinguish between what he was and how he appeared to others, it was essential to become conscious of “his invisible relations to the unconscious” and hence to differentiate himself from the anima. He noted that when the anima was unconscious, it was projected. He laid out the following sequence in the development of the anima and its relation to the man’s mother:
The first bearer of the soul-image is always the mother; later it is borne by those women who arouse the man’s feelings, whether in a positive or negative sense. Because the mother is the first bearer of the soul-image, separation from her is a delicate and important matter of the greatest educational significance.329
For a man, the mother “protects him against the dangers that threaten from the darkness of his soul.”330 Subsequently, the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife: “his wife has to take over the magical role of the mother. Under the cloak of the ideally exclusive marriage, he is really seeking his mother’s protection, and thus he plays into the hands of his wife’s protective instincts.”331 What is ultimately required is the “objectification of the anima.” A successful engagement and integration led to
the overcoming of the anima as an autonomous complex, and her transformation into a function of relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Through this process the anima forfeits the daemonic power of an autonomous complex; that means she can no longer exercise possession, since she is depotentiated.332
To achieve this depossession, one needed to enter into dialogue with her and pose questions, through inner dialogue or active imagination. Everyone, he claimed, had this ability to hold dialogues with him- or herself. Active imagination would thus be one form of inner dialogue, a type of dramatized thinking. It was critical to disidentify from the thoughts that arose, and to overcome the assumption that one had produced them oneself.333 What was most essential was not interpreting or understanding the fantasies but experiencing them. This represented a shift from his paper on the transcendent function, in which he had emphasized creative formulation and understanding. He argued that one should treat the fantasies completely literally while one was engaged in them, but symbolically when one interpreted them.334 This was a direct description of his procedure in the Black Books. The task of such discussions was to objectify the effects of the anima and become conscious of the underlying content while integrating these into consciousness. When one had succeeded in doing this, the anima then became a function of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, enabling communication between the two, as opposed to working as an autonomous complex. Again, this process of the integration of the anima was the subject of Liber Novus and the Black Books. It also highlights the fact that the fantasies here should be read symbolically and not literally. To take statements from them out of context and to cite them literally would represent a serious misunderstanding. Jung noted that this process had three effects:
The first effect is that the range of consciousness is increased by the inclusion of a great number and variety of unconscious contents. The second is a gradual diminution of the dominating influence of the unconscious. The third is an alteration in the personality.335
After one had achieved the integration of the anima, one was confronted with another figure—namely, the “mana personality.” Jung argued that when the anima lost her “mana,” or power, the man who assimilated it must have acquired this and so become a “mana-personality,” a being of superior will and wisdom. However, this figure was “a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the powerful man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine man, and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of gods.”336 Thus in integrating the anima and attaining her power, one inevitably identified with the figure of the magician, and one faced the task of differentiating oneself from this. He added that for women, the corresponding figure was that of the Great Mother. If one gave up the claim to victory over the anima, possession by the figure of the magician ceased, and one realized that the mana truly belonged to the “midpoint of the personality”—that is, the self. The assimilation of the contents of the mana personality led to the self. His description of the encounter with the mana personality, the identification and subsequent disidentification with it, corresponds to his encounter with Philemon. Of the self, he wrote: “It might as well be called ‘god in us.’ The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted to this point, and all our highest and deepest purposes seem to be striving toward it.”337 His description of the self conveys the significance of his realization following his Liverpool dream:
The self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inner and outer. . . . the self is also the goal of life, because it is the most complete expression of that fateful combination we call individuality. . . . With the experiencing of the self as something irrational, as an indefinable being to which the I is neither opposed nor subjected, but in a relation of dependence, and around which it revolves, very much as the earth revolves about the sun—then the goal of individuation has been reached.338
In the Black Books in the 1920s, one finds the lengthening shadows of death, commencing with Jung’s grief at his mother’s death, followed by the premature deaths of close friends (Hermann Sigg in 1927, and Hans Schmid in 1932) and patients (George Porter and Jerome Schloss in 1927).339 In an entry of 1927, Jung referred to thoughts regarding the death of his wife and himself. Jung’s father had died at the age of fifty-four; in 1929, Jung himself reached this age. The proximity of mortality brought with it intimations of immortality. That year, he wrote in his “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” that as a physician he attempted to “strengthen the conviction of immortality,” especially with older patients. Death, he argued, should be seen as a goal rather than an end, and he designated the latter part of life as “life toward death.”340 Two years later, in his paper “The Turning Point of Life,” he elaborated on this theme, characterizing the psychological transformations of the midlife transition. He noted that the notion of life after death was a primordial image, and that it made sense to live in accordance with this. From the perspective of a doctor of souls, he argued, it made sense to regard death as only a transition.341 Three years later, he wrote a paper on “Soul and death,” characterizing religions as systems for the preparation for death. He argued that, given the collective soul of humanity, death might be regarded as the fulfilment of life’s meaning. Belief in an afterlife was anthropologically normative, and it was rather secular materialism that viewed death as a pure cessation. This was an aberrant development, viewed from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. The issue of death became particularly acute at midlife. From then, “only those remain living who are willing to die with life. Since what happens in the secret hour of the midday of life is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death.”342 The Black Books chart how Jung negotiated the “reversal of the parabola.” Seen from this perspective, his personal transformation, his individuation, was a preparation for death.
The Confrontation with the World
In 1928, Jung painted a mandala of a golden castle in the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus.343 It struck him that the mandala had something Chinese about it. Shortly afterward, Richard Wilhelm sent him The Secret of the Golden Flower, asking him to write a commentary on it. Wilhelm had spoken at the Psychological Club in 1921 on the I Ching, and Jung later got to know him at Count Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in Darmstadt. Jung was struck by the text and its timing:
the text gave me an undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. This was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with someone and something.344
The significance of this is reflected in the lines he wrote beneath the painting of the Yellow Castle.345 Jung was struck between the correspondences between the imagery and conceptions of this text and his own paintings and fantasies, and the fate that had brought him and Wilhelm together. On May 25, 1929, he wrote to Wilhelm: “Fate appears to have given us the role of two bridge pillars which carry the bridge between East and West.”346 It was only later that he realized that the alchemical nature of the text was important.347 On September 10, 1929, he wrote to Wilhelm: “I am thrilled by this text, which stands so close to our unconscious.”348
Jung’s commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower was a turning point. It was his first public discussion of the significance of the mandala. For the first time, he anonymously presented three of his own paintings from Liber Novus as examples of European mandalas and commented on them.349 To Wilhelm, he wrote on October 28, 1929, concerning the mandalas in the volume: “the images amplify one another precisely through their diversity they give an excellent image of the effort of the unconscious European spirit to grasp Eastern eschatology.”350 This connection between the “European unconscious spirit” and Eastern eschatology became one of the major themes in Jung’s work in the 1930s. He explored it through further collaborations—with the Indologists Wilhelm Hauer and Heinrich Zimmer.351 At the same time, the form of the work was crucial: rather than revealing the full details of his own experiment or those of his patients, Jung used the parallels with The Secret of the Golden Flower as an indirect way of speaking about it, much as he had begun to do in chapter 5 of Psychological Types. This allegorical method now became his preferred form. Rather than write directly of his experiences, he commented on analogous developments in esoteric practices, most of all in medieval alchemy.
Shortly afterward, Jung abruptly left off working on Liber Novus. The last full-page image was left unfinished, and he stopped transcribing the text. In 1932, he stopped writing in the Black Books. He later recalled: “When I had arrived at this central point (Tao), the confrontation with the world began: I began to give many lectures and to write small essays. At that time I gave lectures in many places.”352 A number of these were collected together in the edited volumes Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928) and Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart [Problems of the Soul in the Present Time] (1931).353 Thus his confrontation with his soul drew to a close, and the confrontation with the world began. He saw these activities as a form of compensation for the years of inner preoccupation.354 In 1932, he received the literature prize of the City of Zürich. On November 25, he wrote to Ruth Bailey, “Since I’m getting dangerously famous in this old continent I’ve no peace and leisure anymore. The Negro spiritual says, ‘Steal away to Jesus,’ and I say, ‘Steal away to Bollingen’ if I can help it.”355
The Comparative Study of the Individuation Process
In November 1928, Jung convened a seminar at the Psychological Club on the subject of dream analysis.356 It took the form of an extended study of the dreams of an irritable, anxious, forty-five-year-old businessman who was estranged from his wife. The seminar ran till June 1930. That October, Jung gave a week-long seminar at the Hotel Sonne in Küsnacht for twelve German doctors.357 The seminar was held in response to a request from the participants to hear him speak on “the development and meaning of unconscious images.”358 He described the active imaginations of a thirty-year-old American woman subsequently identified as Christiana Morgan.
After this, he had intended to continue with his English dream analysis seminar. Asked to repeat the seminar in English, he instead proposed an alternative, “the development . . . of the transcendent function out of dreams and visions, and the actual representations of those images which ultimately serve in the synthesis of the individual: the reconciliation of the pairs of opposites and the whole process of symbol formation.”359 On November 31 he asked Christiana Morgan’s permission to use her material to “explain the secrets of unconscious initiation processes.” He added that he had already used it in his German seminar, “from a purely impersonal point of view naturally, hiding any personal inferences,” and it was “really of rare beauty, and an almost unique case in its completeness and accuracy of vision, far more so than we expected, when we were personally dealing with it.”360
Rather than present his own material, he had found an example through which he could show a process parallel to what he himself had undergone, thus vindicating its clinical application and showing its replicability. This seminar can in part be regarded as an indirect commentary on Liber Novus. To demonstrate the empirical validity of the conceptions that he derived in Liber Novus, he had to show that the processes described therein were not unique. This seminar was to run for four years, coming to a halt when Christina Morgan’s identity became apparent. Thereafter, at the students’ request, he turned to the subject of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, viewing it through the lens of his own self-experimentation, and reading the work as if it were Nietzsche’s Liber Novus.361
In October 1931, Jung ran a seminar in German at the Hotel Sonne.362 He spoke again regarding active imagination, drawing this time on a series of different cases. This appears to have attracted a much larger audience than the one he had drawn the previous year, with about 40 percent of the participants being from Germany. He followed this with a collaborative seminar with Wilhelm Hauer on Kundalini yoga. Hauer presented the topic in seminars in German and English, and Jung provided psychological commentary on its symbolism, emphasizing the emergence of the imagery among contemporary American and European patients. In working with Hauer, Jung was in effect continuing his collaboration with Richard Wilhelm, exploring the cross-cultural symbolism of the individuation process, and how Eastern esoteric practices and the “unconscious initiation processes” of the psychotherapy of individuation could illuminate each other. Hauer and Jung also worked with Heinrich Zimmer in his seminars in Berlin in 1933.363
Jung also began to get involved in psychotherapy organizations. In 1930, he became vice president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which was predominantly German. After Ernst Kretschmer’s resignation in 1933, he became the acting president, and then president in 1934. Some of his associates, including Cary Baynes, had strongly advised him against this. He was criticized for taking on the position but saw his aim as one of “trying to get a still young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake.”364 He set about internationalizing the society and protecting the status of Jewish practitioners as independent members. He was also heavily criticized for comments contrasting Aryan and Jewish psychology at this time.365
In the mid-1930s Jung took up the study of alchemy in earnest. His acquaintance with it went back to his research for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido. In his view, alchemists had been engaged in something akin to what he called the process of active imagination. Furthermore, alchemical symbols depicted the process of individuation. At a historical level, the work had further significance, as the symbolic material was precisely what was excluded by ecclesiastical Christianity and thus had the function of a compensatory undercurrent. For example, Jung’s vision of the God Abraxas bore striking parallels to the figure of Mercurius in alchemy.366 He noted in retrospect that “my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.”367 The Gnostic material he had studied had been too remote from the present, and he believed that alchemy formed the historical bridge between Gnosticism and the psychology of the unconscious. If his thesis was correct, he would be able to demonstrate that the results of his undertaking were not limited to himself, close associates, and patients but had wider historical and cultural significance. Had he simply published his patients’ material, their cases could easily have been dismissed as the product of autosuggestion or suggestion, rather than constituting firm empirical evidence. His philological deciphering of alchemy took place in a series of eight notebooks and an index volume.368 He wrote out extensive excerpts from alchemical texts and underlined key phrases, which he then recorded in the index volume. Call slips in these volumes indicated that he initially conducted extensive research in the Basel University library back in the winter of 1935. His work in the Black Books and the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus now ceded place to his work in his alchemy notebooks.
In 1935 he wrote “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” and included as an epigraph the following lines from Virgil’s Aeneid:
. . . facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est . . . (VI, 126–29)
Easy is the descent to Avernus:
night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open;
but to recall your steps and pass out to the upper air,
this is the task, this is the toil.369
These lines are spoken by the Sibyl at Cumae, cautioning Aeneas, who ardently desires to descend to the underworld to see the face of his father once more. The citation can be read as a riposte to Freud’s citation of the Aeneid at the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud quotes Juno, who is thwarted by Aeneas: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (If I can not bend the upper powers, I will move the Acheron).370 The publication heralded a critical turn, as Jung was to spend the next twenty years of his life immersed in the study of alchemy. The epigragh spoke to his situation, for he had completed his descent into the underworld, his “confrontation with the unconscious,” and had stopped writing in the Black Books and had chosen not to publish Liber Novus at this juncture. Hence he was faced with finding another way of presenting the insights gleaned in his self-experimentation. The return to the upper air, by means of comparative historical scholarship, was to be his task and his toil. As he commented to Aniela Jaffé years later,
For something like fifteen years long I read books, to find a sort of clothing material for this primal revelation, that I myself could not manage. It cost me forty-five years, so to speak, to bring the things that I once wrote down somewhat under control in the vessel of my work.371
While Liber Novus had been an attempt to present the meaning of the revelation, he now had to come back from the “human side”—from science. The cost was considerable: “I paid with my life, and I have paid with my science.”372 Alchemy now presented him with a mode to present his researches in an allegorical manner. Hence his works on the psychology of alchemy were double-sided—while they present original historical research and formidable scholarship, they were by no means purely academic studies, as in many ways the key referent was not what the alchemists may or may not have been engaged with, but Jung’s presentation of his conception of the individuation process and its depiction in symbols. In an encrypted manner, images and conceptions from Liber Novus and the Black Books surfaced, contextualized and amplified.
From the 1930s onward, Jung looked for a way to rediscover, through historical scholarship, the concepts he had independently arrived at. There were two main settings in which this project unfolded. In 1933, after an interval of two decades, he returned to the university, lecturing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was appointed a professor there in 1935. Between 1933 and 1941, he lectured over the course of fourteen semesters, presenting a historical overview of modern psychology and, above all, a comparative study of the individuation process, focusing on Patanjali’s yoga sutras, the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Buddhist mediation, and Western alchemy.373 The lectures were open to the general public. The critical insight that enabled these linkages and comparisons was Jung’s realization that these practices were all based on different forms of active imagination, and that they all had as their goal the transformation of the personality. He understood the latter as the process of individuation. Thus Jung’s ETH lectures provide a comparative history of active imagination, the practice he had developed in the Black Books.
The lectures went hand in hand with his regular participation at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, established in 1933 by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn.374 The conferences ran for two weeks each year. They focused on the history of religion and culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation between East and West. Jung advised Froebe-Kapteyn concerning themes and speakers to invite but was careful to avoid the conferences becoming simply a vehicle for his school.
Scholars who participated in the conferences included Henry Corbin, Heinrich Zimmer, Victor White, D. T. Suzuki, Ernesto Buonaiuti, Giuseppi Tucci, Wilhelm Hauer, Louis Massignon, Gilles Quispel, Erwin Rousselle, Mircea Eliade, Paul Radin, Louis Massignon, Karl Kerényi, and Adolf Portmann. They served as an informal peer group and a critical audience to whom Jung’s works from the mid-1930s were addressed. The comparative study of the individuation process with which he was engaged required the collaboration of experts in the field of comparative religion. On the other hand, for many of these scholars, the links that he was trying to establish between psychology and their fields of expertise opened the possibility of unexpected applications of their work outside the confines of academia.
In conclusion, the Black Books provide a unique window into the creative process of a major psychologist. At a textual level, they enable one to follow how Jung’s scholarly reading provided resources that inspired his fantasy, moving him to imagine in a mythic way. By reflecting on these resources, he attempted to divine broad insights from them, first cast in a lyrical form in Liber Novus and subsequently in conceptual and theoretical forms in his scholarly writings. As a document humain and psychological record, the Black Books chart Jung’s attempt to resolve the twentieth-century crisis of meaning in his own person, and distill from this a means through psychotherapy for others to do likewise. In short, the Black Books and Liber Novus together form the core of analytical psychology, and enable its historical genesis to be studied from its inception. Jung’s work may now be seen in the round, and the intimate connections between the esoteric visionary cycles and the exoteric psychology may be grasped. Jung later recalled that his “entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. . . . Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”375 Thus the Black Books enable one to enter the private laboratory of analytical psychology and follow the genesis of a visionary science: that is, how a psychology was born of the visionary imagination, which in turn could form a science of visions.
1. Lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) on June 14, 1935, in Barbara Hannah, ed., Modern Psychology, Vols. 1 and 2: Notes on Lectures Given at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, by Prof. Dr. C.G. Jung, October 1933–July 1935, 2nd ed. (Zürich, privately printed: 1959), p. 223.
2. LN, p. 127.
3. MP, p. 252; Memories, chapter 6. Jung first used the latter expression publicly in 1916, in “The Transcendent Function” (CW 8, § 183).
4. Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia, II-3 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), pp. 240–41.
5. See Andreas Jung, Regula Michel, Arthur Rügg, Judith Rohrer, and Daniel Ganz, The House of C.G. Jung: The History and Restoration of the Residence of Emma and Carl Gustav Jung-Rauschenbach (Zürich: Stiftung C.G. Jung Küsnacht, 2009).
6. Between 1909 and 1914, Jung gave courses under the following titles: “Course on Psychotherapy with Demonstrations,” “Psychopathology of Hysteria,” “Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” and “Psychology of the Unconscious” (Staatsarchiv, Zürich).
7. Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925, rev. ed. Sonu Shamdasani; original ed. William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Philemon Series, 2012), p. 24.
8. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1910, 50 vols. Jung possessed an almost complete set.
9. Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes (CW B, § 36). In his 1952 revision of this text, Jung qualified this (Symbols of Transformation, 1952, CW 5, § 29).
10. “Address on the Founding of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich, 24 April, 1948,” CW 18, § 1131.
11. CW 5, p. xxvi.
12. Ibid., p. xxix.
13. Ibid.
14. Cf. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 25.
15. Book 2, p. 160.
16. For Jung’s subsequent understanding of this dream, see ibid., n. 53.
17. Book 2, p. 155.
18. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42.
19. Ibid., p. 43. To the psychiatrist E. A. Bennet, his friend and biographer, he recalled, “At first he thought the ‘twelve dead men’ referred to the twelve days before Christmas for that is the dark time of the year, when traditionally witches are about. To say ‘before Christmas’ is to say ‘before the sun lives again,’ for Christmas day is at the turning point of the year when the sun’s birth was celebrated in the Mithraic religion. . . . Only much later did he relate the dream to Hermes and the twelve doves” (Meetings with Jung: Conversations Recorded by E. A. Bennet during the Years 1946–1961 [London: Anchor Press, 1982/Zürich: Daimon Verlag, 1985], p. 93). In “On the Psychological Aspects of the Figure of the Kore” (1941), Jung presented some material from Liber Novus (describing it as part of a dream series) in an anonymous form (“Case Z.”), tracing the transformations of the anima. He noted that the dream recounted here “shows the anima as elflike, i.e., only partially human. She can just as well be a bird, which means that she may belong wholly to nature and can vanish (i.e., become unconscious) from the human sphere (i.e., consciousness)” (CW 9, pt. 1, § 371).
20. “On the Question of Psychological Types,” CW 6.
21. LN, p. 123.
22. Ibid., p. 124.
23. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 44.
24. Ibid., p. 47.
25. Ibid., p. 48.
26. Barbara Hannah recalls, “Jung used to say in later years that his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity should have been allayed by the amount of success he was having at the same time in the outer world, especially in America” (C.G. Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir [New York: Perigree, 1976], p. 109).
27. MP, p. 23.
28. Draft, JFA, p. 8.
29. Gerda Breuer and Ines Wagemann, Ludwig Meidner: Zeichner, Maler, Literat 1884–1966 (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 124–49. For a detailed study of this theme, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145–77.
30. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation and The Vital Message (London: Psychic Press, 1918), p. 9.
31. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 28.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. MP, p. 23.
35. The subsequent notebooks are black. Hence Jung referred to them as the Black Book.
36. Memories, p. 197.
37. Ibid., p. 27.
38. MP, pp. 156–57.
39. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 51. He had cited the same lines on August 31, 1910, in a letter to Freud, posing them as a motto for psychoanalysis (William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G.Jung [Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1974], p. 350).
40. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 48.
41. St. Augustine, Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul, ed. and trans. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), p. 23. Watson notes that Augustine “had been through a period of intense strain, close to a nervous breakdown, and the Soliloquies are a form of therapy, an effort to cure himself by talking, or rather, writing” (p. v).
42. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 45. Jung’s account here suggests that this dialogue took place in the autumn of 1913. But that is not certain, as the dialogue itself does not occur in the Black Books, and no other manuscript has yet come to light. If this dating is followed, and in the absence of other supporting material, it would appear that the voice was commenting on the November entries in Book 2, not to the subsequent text or paintings in LN.
43. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 48.
44. Ibid., p. 50.
45. MP, p. 171.
46. Riklin’s paintings generally followed the style of Augusto Giacometti: semifigurative and fully abstract works, with soft floating colors (private possession, Peter Riklin). One painting of Riklin’s from 1915–16, Verkündigung, in the Kunsthaus in Zürich, was donated by Maria Moltzer in 1945.
47. Book 2, p. 164.
48. Ibid., p. 165.
49. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 51.
50. Book 2, pp. 168ff.
51. Ibid., p. 179.
52. Siegfried, whom he had recently slain in a dream (ibid., p. 174).
53. Ibid., p. 171.
54. MP, p. 381.
55. JFA, p. 9.
56. MP, p. 145.
57. St. Ignatius of Loyola, “The Spiritual Exercises,” in Personal Writings, trans. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 298. In 1939–40, Jung presented a psychological commentary on these spiritual exercises at the ETH (ed. Martin Liebscher, Princeton University Press/Philemon Series, forthcoming).
58. This passage was reproduced by William White in his Swedenborg: His Life and Writings (London and Bath, 1867), vol. 1, pp. 293–94. Jung marked the second half of the passage with a line in the margin in his copy of this work.
59. See Silberer, “Bericht über eine Methode, gewisse symbolische Halluzinations-Erscheinungen hervorzurufen und zu beobachten,” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 2 (1909): 513–25.
60. Staudenmaier, Die Magie als experimentelle Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1912), p. 19.
61. Jung had a copy of Staudenmaier’s book and marked some passages in it.
62. There are also similarities with theurgic practices of ritual invocation. The locus classicus for this was Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries, with which Jung later became familiar. He had a 1497 edition of Iamblichus’s work, which he cited in 1934 in “A Study in the Process of Individuation” (CW 9, pt. 1, § 573). On Iamblichus and theurgy, see Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
63. McGuire’s footnote, Freud/Jung Letters, p. 351.
64. Freud/Jung Letters, p. 352. Martha Böddinghaus came to Jung from Munich for analysis in 1910 and thereafter became an analyst. She married Hermann Sigg the year she arrived. He became a close friend of Jung’s (see Book 7, p. 238, n. 252).
65. “Dreams,” JFA, p. 4. See Book 6, p. 285, n. 321.
66. Moltzer to Freud, April 24, 1912, Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
67. Freud to Ferenczi, December 23, 1912, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908–1914, ed. Ernst Falzeder, trans. Peter Hoffer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 1993), p. 446. Jung’s pupil Jolande Jacobi recalled, “I heard from others, about the time before he [Jung] met Toni Wolff, that he had a love affair there in the Burghölzli with a girl—what was her name? Moltzer” (Jacobi interview, CLM, p. 110).
68. Book 2, p. 155.
69. Cited in Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 104.
70. Ibid.
71. Diary K, p. 143.
72. Hannah, C.G. Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir, p. 104.
73. April 14, 1930, Diary H, pp. 75–76.
74. Freud/Jung Letters, p. 440.
75. Diary A.
76. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, §§ 358ff.
77. Faust, 1, act 1, ll. 702–19.
78. That is, Jung.
79. Toni Wolff, Diary B, p. 98.
80. Book 2, p. 156.
81. Toni Wolff, Diary K, September 25, 1937, p. 151.
82. MZS, p. 47.
83. MP, p. 98.
84. Toni Wolff, Diary M, p. 84.
85. MP, p. 171.
86. Wolff, Diary O, February 18, 1951, p. 102. On April 26, 1936, Wolff noted in her diary: “I still transfer father symbols onto C. That is why I am never entirely with myself and am no counter-weight to him” (Toni Wolff, Diary J, p. 101).
87. Wolff, Diary K, March 11, 1937, p. 77.
88. Wolff, Diary A, January 30–31, 1913.
89. See especially Susanne Trüb and Fowler McCormick, interviews with Gene Nameche, CLM.
90. Susanne Trüb, interview with Gene Nameche, CLM, p. 31.
91. MP, p. 173.
92. See Book 7, pp. 163ff.
93. Wolff, Diary E, January 11, 1926, p. 17. Regarding the Egyptian concept of the Ba, E. A. Wallis Budge noted, “To that part of man which beyond all doubt was believed to enjoy an eternal existence in heaven in a state of glory, the Egyptians gave the name ba, a word which means something like ‘sublime,’ ‘noble’ and which has always hitherto been translated by ‘soul.’ The ba is not incorporeal, for although it dwells in the ka, and is in some respects, like the heart, the principle of life in man, still it possesses both substance and form: in form it is depicted as a human-headed hawk, and in nature and substance it is stated to be exceedingly refined or ethereal. It revisited the body in the tomb and re-animated it, and conversed with it; it could take upon itself any shape that it pleased; and it had the power of passing into heaven and of dwelling with the perfected souls there. It was eternal” (The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum [London: Longmans & Co, 1895], p. lxiv).
94. Wolff, Diary F, January 30, 1926, p. 25.
95. Wolff, Diary C, September 13, 1925, p. 95; Diary F, February 7, 1926, p. 37.
96. Ximena Roelli de Angulo, Cary Baynes’s daughter, recalled, “I think that Emma must have always played just as large a part in his creative life as Toni did—just a different part” (interview with Gene Nameche, Jung biographical archive, CLM, p. 54).
97. Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, September 12, 1912, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 160.
98. Suzanne Trüb, interview with Gene Nameche, Jung biographical archive, CLM, p. 5.
99. MP, p. 174.
100. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, trans. Andrea Dykes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
101. Book 4, p. 228.
102. MP, pp. 23–24.
103. Book 5, p. 215.
104. Memories, p. 219.
105. LN, p. 124.
106. MZS, p. 61.
107. This is based on a study of Jung’s correspondence at the ETH and in other archives and collections.
108. Between 1913 and 1917, these were: 1913, 16 days; 1914, 14 days; 1915, 67 days; 1916, 34 days; 1917, 117 days. In 1915 and 1916, he served as an army physician in a cavalry regiment.
109. Memories, p. 214.
110. Jung, “On Psychological Understanding,” CW 3, § 396.
111. Ibid., § 398.
112. Ibid., § 399.
113. CW 3, §§ 438–65.
114. LN, p. 125.
115. Combat interview (1952) in William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (London: Picador, 1980), pp. 233–34.
116. Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, § 756.
117. See above, pp. 17–19; Book 2, pp. 169, 174, 194; Book 3, p. 115; Book 4, p. 220; Book 5, p. 226; above, p. 35.
118. LN, p. 474.
119. LN, p. 470.
120. ZS, p. 381. On Jung’s reading of Nietzsche, see Paul Bishop, The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995); Martin Liebscher, Libido und Wille zur Macht. C.G. Jungs Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche (Basel: Schwabe, 2011); and Graham Parkes, “Nietzsche and Jung: Ambivalent Appreciations,” in Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer, eds., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 205–27. On the role of Nietzsche in Liber Novus, see Gaia Domenici, “Books ‘For All and None’: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Jung’s The Red Book, and ‘Visionary Works,’ ” PhD thesis, University of Pisa, 2015.
121. See Book 2, p. 197. On this subject, see my “Descensus ad Infernos: la saison en enfer de C.G. Jung,” in Edith Alleart-Bertin, ed., Danger et nécessité de l’individuation (Brussels: L’arbre soleil, 2016), pp. 27–76; and Tommaso Priviero, “On the Service of the Soul: C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus and Dante’s Commedia,” Phanês: Journal for Jung History 1 (2018): 28–58.
122. MZS, January 30, 1914, pp. 47ff.
123. See Memories, chapters 2 and 3.
124. For example, by page 53 of the Draft, there is a note written in the margin: “Awesome! Why cut?” Jung evidently took this advice and retained the original passages. See LN, p. 151, second paragraph.
125. Book 5, p. 235.
126. LN, p. 474.
127. Book 5, p. 235.
128. LN, p. 475.
129. Book 5, p. 239.
130. Jung to Schmid, November 6, 1915, in The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C.G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915–1916, ed. John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder, trans. Ernst Falzeder (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Philemon Series, 2013), p. 131.
131. Ibid., p. 140.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid., p. 141. This dream may be found in Book 4, p. 265.
134. The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C.G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915–1916, pp. 141–42.
135. Maeder papers.
136. On the formation of the Club, see my Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (London: Routledge, 1998).
137. Jung to Poul Bjerre, April 2, 1917, JA.
138. Liber Secundus, “Nox secunda” (LN, p. 340), commenting on a fantasy of January 17, 1914 (Book 3, pp. 205ff.). On this issue, see James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani, Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
139. Liber Secundus, “Nox secunda” (LN, p. 342).
140. Ibid., p. 344.
141. Ibid., p. 433.
142. Ibid., p. 345, n. 187.
143. Book 5, p. 255.
144. Ibid., pp. 269ff.
145. See appendix, p. 131.
146. CFB.
147. Memories, pp. 215–16.
148. Book 4, p. 207.
149. The historical Basilides was a Gnostic who taught in Alexandria in the second century CE. See Bentley Layton, ed., The Gnostic Scriptures: Ancient Wisdom for the New Age (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 417–44.
150. MP, p. 26.
151. Library, Psychological Club, Zürich.
152. January 19, 1917, Letters 1, pp. 33–34. Sending a copy of the Sermones to Jolande Jacobi, Jung described them as “a curiosity from the workshop of the unconscious” (October 7, 1928, JA).
153. After his separation with Freud, Jung found that Flournoy was of continued support to him. See Jung in Flournoy’s 1900 work From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. D. Vermilye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. ix.
154. CW 7, §§ 444–46.
155. Ibid., § 449.
156. Ibid., § 459.
157. Ibid., p. 468.
158. Ibid., p. 521.
159. CW 18, § 1098.
160. CW 18, § 1100.
161. This was published only in 1957, trans. A. R. Pope (Zürich: Students Association, C.G. Jung Institute). A revised version is found in CW 8.
162. JFA.
163. CW 8, § 155.
164. CW 8, §§ 170–71. A planchette is a small wooden board on coasters used to facilitate automatic writing.
165. CW 8, § 186.
166. Ibid., p. 4.
167. CW 7, pp. 3–4.
168. In his 1943 revision of this work, Jung added that the personal unconscious “corresponds to the figure of the shadow so frequently met with in dreams” (CW 7, § 103). He added the following definition of this figure: “By shadow I understand the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those hidden unpleasant qualities, the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious” (ibid., § 103n.). Subsequently, this phase of the individuation process was described as the encounter with the shadow (see CW 9, pt. 2, §§ 13–19).
169. The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, in Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Constance E. Long (London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1917), pp. 416–17.
170. Ibid., p. 432.
171. Ibid., p. 435.
172. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 103.
173. Book 2, pp. 179–96.
174. Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, p. 444.
175. Book 6, p. 227.
176. Book 7, pp. 158ff., 165.
177. See appendix, p. 141.
178. Copied in Constance Long’s diary, CLM, pp. 21–22.
179. They had fair and dark hair, respectively.
180. “Dreams,” p. 17.
181. Book 6, p. 258.
182. Ibid.
183. Book 7, p. 163.
184. Ibid., p. 175.
185. John C. Burnham, Jelliffe: American Psychoanalyst and Physician and His Correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 199.
186. See The Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung, eds., The Art of C.G. Jung (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
187. See appendix, p. 123.
188. Book 7, pp. 148ff.
189. MP, p. 172.
190. Ibid., p. 220. Regarding Moltzer’s conception of art, Fanny Bowditch Katz noted in her diary that Moltzer saw her paintings as “purely subjective, not works of art” (July 31, 1916, CLM). On another occasion, Katz notes that Moltzer “spoke of Art, real art, being the expression of religion” (August 24, 1916, CLM).
191. MP, p. 221.
192. See appendix, p. 129.
193. Unpublished letter, JFA. There also exists an undated painting by Moltzer that appears to be a quadrated mandala. She described it in brief accompanying notes as “a pictorial presentation of Individuation or of the Individuation process” (Library, Psychological Club, Zürich).
194. Jung, “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower,” CW 13, § 34.
195. Ibid., § 35.
196. Fanny Bowditch Katz, Diary, CLM. “R.” refers to Rudolf Katz, whom Fanny Bowditch married.
197. J. B. Lang papers, Swiss Literary Archives, Berne. On Lang, see Thomas Feitknecht, ed., “Die dunkle und wilde Seite der Seele”: Hermann Hesse. Briefwechsel mit seinem Psychoanalytiker Josef Bernhard Lang, 1916–1944 (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 2006).
198. Minutes of the Psychological Club, Psychological Club archives.
199. Sarah Barker, “The Club problem,” Katz papers, CLM, p. 1.
200. Ibid., p. 2.
201. Moltzer to Bowditch Katz, August 1, 1918, Katz papers, CLM.
202. Private possession, Stephen Martin.
203. MP, p. 172.
204. MP, p. 173. The immediate sources that Jung drew on for his concept of the self appear to be the Atman/Brahman conception in Hinduism, which he discussed in Psychological Types, and certain passages in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche writes: “The Self also seeks with the eyes of sense, it listens too with the ears of the spirit. The Self is always listening and seeking: it compares, subdues, conquers, destroys. It rules and is also the I’s ruler. Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage—he is called Self” (Section 1, “Of the Despisers of the Body,” trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984], p. 62). The passage is underlined as in Jung’s copy. There are also lines by the margin and exclamation marks. In commenting on this passage in 1935 in his seminar on Zarathustra, Jung said: “I was already very interested in the concept of the self, but I was not sure how I should understand it. I made my marks when I came across these passages, and they seemed very important to me. . . . The concept of the self continued to recommend itself to me. . . . I thought that Nietzsche meant a sort of thing-in-itself behind the psychological phenomenon. . . . I saw then also that he was producing a concept of the self which was like the Eastern concept; it is an Atman idea” (ZS, vol. 1, p. 391).
205. Ibid.
206. Jung to Lang, October 10, 1923 (private possession, Stephen Martin).
207. Private possession, Stephen Martin.
208. On page 23 of the manuscript of Scrutinies, there is a date: “27/11/17.” It probably indicates that the text was written in the latter half of 1917, and after the mandala experiences at Château d’Oex.
209. LN, pp. 514ff.
210. Book 5, p. 239.
211. LN, p. 480.
212. Book 5, p. 239.
213. LN, pp. 482–83.
214. JFA. This statement is entirely in keeping with Jung’s comments about her in his adolescent diary in August 1899: “E.R. I am in love; I love with that searching yearning that Swedenborg so wonderfully describes: the anticipation of the other self, the unity preparing for heavenly, eternal times. Does she think of me? Does she know it? Could I have deluded myself? Is she not the destined one? I cannot believe that my feeling has deluded me. It must be her (. . .) E.R. In the dark shades of the trees, in the bright rooms of sunny nature I see only her, the sweet one in her familiar stature, in her bright dress with the red ribbons, she, who is so intimately akin to my soul. Does she know it? Does she feel my love regardless of the extent of space that separates?” (JFA). The reference is to Swedenborg’s conception of conjugal love. Jung had taken out Swedenborg’s book on this topic from the Basel University library on October 18, 1898.
215. LN, p. 483.
216. On January 17, 1918, Jung wrote to J. B. Lang, “The work on the unconscious has to happen first and foremost for us ourselves. Our patients profit from it indirectly. The danger consists in the prophet’s delusion, which often is the result of dealing with the unconscious. It is the devil who says: Disdain all reason and science, mankind’s highest powers. That is never appropriate even though we are forced to acknowledge (the existence of) the irrational” (private possession, Stephen Martin). The reference is to Mephistopheles’s statement in Faust, 1, ll. 1851ff).
217. Book 5, p. 270.
218. September 28, 1916, Book 6, p. 259.
219. CW 9, pt. 1.
220. Book 7, p. 178.
221. Ibid., p. 180.
222. Memories, pp. 370–71.
223. CW 9, pt. 1, § 309.
224. Calligraphic volume of LN, pp. 44–64.
225. See The Art of C.G. Jung.
226. CW 10, § 24.
227. Ibid., § 48.
228. CW 8.
229. On the reception of Psychological Types, see my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 83–87 and 334–38.
230. CW 6, § 706.
231. Ibid., §§ 804–5.
232. Ibid., § 426.
233. CW 16.
234. CW 15.
235. On Jung’s trips to England in 1920 and 1923 and later travels, see Dan Noel, “Soul and Earth: Traveling with Jung. Toward an Archetypal Ecology,” Quadrant 24 (1991): 56–73. On Jung’s travels to Africa and New Mexico, see Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, pp. 316ff. On Jung’s trip to Africa, see Blake Burleson, Jung in Africa (New York: Continuum, 2005).
236. See Book 7, p. 238, n. 252.
237. Memories, p. 266.
238. In Magnus Ljunggren, The Russian Mephisto: A Study of the Life of Emilii Medtner (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994), p. 215. See also Jung’s letter to Emma Jung of March 15, 1920 (Memories, p. 403).
239. Memories, p. 270.
240. Ibid., pp. 270–71.
241. Ibid., pp. 271–72.
242. Book 7, pp. 211ff.
243. Ibid., January 2–3, 1923, p. 224.
244. Ibid., p. 226.
245. Ibid., p. 228.
246. Ibid., p. 230.
247. Memories, p. 345. This was not Jung’s first encounter with Wotan, the storm God. In a draft for her biography of Jung, Lucy Heyer narrated the event: “This friendly and mildly temperate landscape was struck by a severe catastrophic storm, a rare natural event at this ferocity, just as the child was being taken for baptism in the church. The home-borne young mother was anxious to see the young one safely brought through the ferocity and the eclipse. In the family, this event fell into oblivion until fifteen years later the boy wrote a poem that described a storm catastrophe. He dedicated it to his mother, and only at that moment she remembered again how threateningly the storm god had accompanied the baptism of her firstborn on that day of baptism in late summer 1875. When Jung related this poem and his mother’s reaction, he noticed that he had often had such inspirations as this poem, contents foreign to consciousness that corresponded to an objective event, imposed themselves on him and sought expression. That storm poem, which was a long time in the possession of the mother, was unfortunately later lost” (Lucy Heyer Grote papers, University of Basel Archives, “Biographie von Carl Gustav Jung,” “Kindheit,” p. 1). On her biography, see my Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (London: Karnac, 2005).
248. CW 10. On the intersection of Jung’s understanding of Nietzsche, Wotan, and contemporary events, see Martin Liebscher, Libido und Wille zur Macht: C.G. Jungs Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche (Basel: Schwabe, 2012), pp. 102–10, and Carrie Dohe, “Wotan and the ‘Archetypal Ergriffenheit’: Mystical Union, National Spiritual Rebirth and Culture-Creating Capacity in C.G. Jung’s ‘Wotan’ Essay,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 344–56.
249. ZS, p. 871.
250. Ibid., p. 869.
251. Book 7, p. 211.
252. Ibid., pp. 215–16.
253. Ibid., p. 216.
254. Goodrich Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at San Francisco.
255. CW 15, § 130.
256. In 1930, Jung expanded upon this theme and described the first type of works as “psychological” and the latter as “visionary” (“Psychology and Poetry,” CW 15).
257. See my Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology.
258. Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 149.
259. See James Heisig, Imago Dei: A Study of Jung’s Psychology of Religion (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979); Ann Lammers, In God’s Shadow: The Collaboration between Victor White and C.G. Jung (New York: Paulist Press, 1994); and Matei Iagher, “Theorizing Experience: Psychology and the Quest for a Science of Religion (1896–1936),” PhD thesis, University College London, 2016. See also my “ ‘Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?’: In Statu Nascendi,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 44 (1999): 539–45.
260. Seminar—July 1923 by Dr. C.G. Jung Held at Polzeath, Cornwall. Notes of Esther Harding, Kristine Mann Library, New York, p. 20.
261. Notes on the Seminar in Analytical Psychology Conducted by Dr. C.G. Jung, Polzeath, England, July 14–July 27, 1923, arranged by members of the class, p. 82, JA.
262. LN, p. 353.
263. Book 7, p. 215.
264. The Psychology of the Transference (1946), CW 16, § 454. Jung dedicated this book to his wife.
265. Cary de Angulo, “Individual Relationships,” p. 1, CFB.
266. Emma Jung, ibid., CFB.
267. Ibid.
268. See my introduction to Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. xv.
269. Minutes of the Psychological Club, Zürich.
270. Times Educational Supplement, May 3, 10, and 17, 1924.
271. January 26, 1924, reproduced in my “Liber Novus: The ‘Red Book’ of C.G. Jung” (LN, p. 213).
272. Ibid., pp. 214ff.
273. For example, substituting “Zeitgeist” for “Geist der Zeit” and “Idee” (idea) for “Vordenken” (forethinking).
274. Memories, p. 275.
275. Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 144.
276. See William McGuire, “Jung in America, 1924–1925,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture (1978): 370–53.
277. January 16, 1925, Dodge papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
278. Memories, p. 276.
279. Ibid., p. 279.
280. Ibid.
281. Ibid., p. 282.
282. Book 3, pp. 107, 120ff.; Book 5, pp. 214ff.
283. May 2, 1925, Murray papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, original in English. Michael Fordham recalled being given a copy by Peter Baynes when he had reached a suitably “advanced” stage in his analysis, and being sworn to secrecy about it (personal communication, 1991).
284. C.G. Jung: His Life and Work, p. 121.
285. June 5, 1924, CFB.
286. November 1 and December 8, 1924; February 21 and May 23, 1925 (Jahresbericht des Psychologischen Clubs Zürich, 1925).
287. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 3.
288. Ibid., p. 35.
289. Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work, p. 166; Esther Harding’s notes from the seminar, Kristine Mann Library, New York.
290. Memories, pp. 298–89.
291. Ibid., p. 303.
292. Book 7, pp. 214ff.
293. Editorial typescript of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, CLM, p. 356.
294. On Jung’s trip to Palestine and Egypt in 1933 see Andreas Jung, “Carl Jung and Hans Fierz in Palestine and Egypt: Journey from March 13 to April 6, 1933,” in Turbulent Times, Creative Minds: Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung in Relationship (1933–1960), ed. Erel Shalit and Murray Stein (Asheville: Chiron, 2016), pp. 131–34.
295. See LN, p. 555.
296. Book 4, pp. 205ff.
297. See my “From Neurosis to a New Cure of Souls: C.G. Jung’s Remaking of the Psychotherapeutic Patient,” in Mererid Puw Davies and Sonu Shamdasani, eds., Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World (London: UCL Press, 2020).
298. These paintings are available for study at the picture archive at the C.G. Jung Institute, Küsnacht. See Ruth Ammann, Verena Kast, Ingrid Riedel, eds., Das Buch der Bilder: Schätze aus dem Archiv des C.G. Jung-Instituts (Zürich, Stuttgart/Ostfildern, Patmos, 2018).
299. “The aims of psychotherapy,” CW 16, § 99.
300. July 8, 1926, analysis notebooks, CLM. The vision referred to at the end is in Book 3, pp. 129ff.
301. December 20, 1929, JA.
302. MP, p. 142.
303. LN, pp. 457–58.
304. JA.
305. Toni Wolff, Diary N, September 3, 1944, p. 5.
306. Book 7, p. 211.
307. Ibid., p. 213.
308. Ibid., pp. 214ff.
309. The municipality and village of Ossingen are in Canton Zürich, between Winterthur and Schaffhausen. There are Roman antiquities and an early medieval burial mound in Goldbuck, which is in the municipality.
310. Book 7, p. 234.
311. Ibid., p. 235.
312. Toni Wolff, Diary B, p. 62.
313. Wolff, Diary C, p. 90.
314. Wolff, Diary J, October 19, 1936, p. 18.
315. Wolff, Diary J, May 3, 1936, p. 30. See Wolff, “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche,” Psychological Perspectives 31 (Spring–Summer 1995): 77–90.
316. Wolff, Diary F, p. 74.
317. Ibid., p. 75.
318. Wolff, Diary G, February 23, 1928, p. 99.
319. Wolff, Diary G, February 21, 1928, p. 95.
320. Wolff, Diary K, November 2, 1937, p. 179.
321. Private possession, Felix Naeff.
322. Private possession, Stephen Martin.
323. “Introduction to Toni Wolff, Studies in C.G. Jung’s Psychology” (1959), CW 10, § 887.
324. Book 7, p. 239.
325. MP, pp. 159–60.
326. Ibid., p. 173.
327. CW 7, §§ 114–17.
328. Ibid., § 386.
329. Ibid., § 314.
330. Ibid., § 315.
331. Ibid., § 316.
332. Ibid., § 374.
333. Ibid., § 323.
334. Ibid., § 353.
335. Ibid., § 358.
336. Ibid., § 377.
337. Ibid., § 399.
338. Ibid., § 405.
339. Book 7, pp. 238, 246, 241.
340. CW 13, § 68.
341. “The Turning Point of Life,” CW 8, § 794.
342. “The Soul and Death,” CW 8, § 800.
343. See appendix, p. 161.
344. Memories, pp. 222–23.
345. “1928. When I painted this image, which showed the golden well-fortified castle, Richard Wilhelm sent me from Frankfurt the thousand-year-old Chinese text of the golden castle, the embryo of the immortal body. Ecclesia catholic et protestantes et seclusi in secreto. Aeon finitus.” (The Catholic Church and the Protestants and those secluded in secret. The end of an eon.) See appendix, p. 341.
346. Jung, Letters 1, p. 66.
347. Foreword to the second German edition, “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower,” CW 13, p. 4.
348. Letters 1, p. 68. Wilhelm appreciated Jung’s commentary. On October 24, 1929, he wrote to him: “I am again struck most deeply by your comments” (JA).
349. See Images 105, 159, and 163 in the calligraphic edition. These pictures and two more were anonymously reproduced in 1950 in Gestaltungen des Unbewussten [Forms of the Unconscious] (Zürich: Rascher, 1950).
350. JA.
351. On this issue, see my The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G. Jung, (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1996) and Giovanni Sorge, ed., Jung and the Indologists: Jung’s Correspondences with Wilhelm Hauer, Heinrich Zimmer, and Mircea Eliade (Philemon Series, forthcoming).
352. MP, p. 15.
353. A number of the essays in this collection were published in English in the collection Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary Baynes (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933).
354. On February 8, 1923, Cary Baynes noted a discussion with Jung in the previous spring that has some bearing on this: “You [Jung] said that no matter how marked off from the crowd an individual might be with special gifts, he yet had not fulfilled all his duties, psychologically speaking, unless he could function successfully in collectivity. By functioning in collectivity we both meant what is commonly called ‘mixing’ with people in a social way, not professional or business relationships. Your point was that if an individual kept away from these collective relationships, he lost something he could not afford to lose” (Baynes papers).
355. JA.
356. William McGuire, ed., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1984).
357. Olga von Koenig-Fachsenfeld, ed., Bericht über das Deutsche Seminar von Dr. C.G. Jung, 6–11 October 1930 in Küsnacht-Zürich (Stuttgart, 1931).
358. Ibid., p. 4.
359. VS, p. 3.
360. JA.
361. On this subject, see Gaia Domenici, Books “for All and None”: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Jung’s Liber Novus and “Visionary” Works (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
362. Ernst Falzeder, ed., The Practice of Active Imagination: C.G. Jung’s German Seminar of 1931, trans. Ernst Falzeder with Tony Wolfson (Philemon Series, forthcoming).
363. Giovanni Sorge, ed., On Dream Interpretation, Yoga and Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given by Dr. C.G. Jung in Berlin between 26 June and 1 July 1933, with a presentation by Heinrich Zimmer (Philemon Series, forthcoming). On Jung’s activities in 1933, see Thomas Fischer, “1933—The Year of Jung’s Journey to Palestine/Israel and Several Beginnings,” in Turbulent Times, Creative Minds, pp. 135–49.
364. “A rejoinder to Dr. Bally,” CW 10, § 1022.
365. Jung, Editorial, Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete, CW 10, § 1014. Also see Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 2nd ed., revised and expanded (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997); Giovanni Sorge, “Psicologia analitica e Anni Trenta. Il ruolo di C.G. Jung nella Internationale Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie (1933–1939/40),” dissertation, University of Zürich, 2010; and Giovanni Sorge, Bestandbeschrieb der Akten zur Geschichte der Präsidentschaft von C.G. Jung in der Internationalen Ärztlichen Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, 1933–1940 im Nachlass von C. A. Meier (Zürich: C.G. Jung-Arbeitsarchiv, ETH-Bibliothek, 2016).
366. “The Spirit Mercurius,” CW 13.
367. Memories, p. 220.
368. See my C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 172–88, and Alfred Ribi, “Zum schöpferischen Prozess bei C.G. Jung: Aus den Excerptbänden zur Alchemie,” Analytische Psychologie 13 (1982): 201–21.
369. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. R. Fairclough, cited in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 11, § 39.
370. Virgil, Aeneid, VII, l. 312. On the history of this citation, see Jean Starobinski, “Acheronto Movebo,” Critical Inquiry 13(1987): 394–407.
371. MP, p. 149.
372. Ibid., pp. 147–48.
373. These volumes, edited by Ernst Falzeder and Martin Liebscher, are forthcoming from Princeton University Press as part of the Philemon Series.
374. On Eranos, see Hans Thomas Hakl, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, trans. Christopher McIntos with the collaboration of Hereward Tilton (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013), and Riccardo Bernardini, Jung at Eranos: The Complex Psychology Project (London: Routledge, 2018).
375. MP, p. 177.
what does it mean? An upper one and a lower one, divided lengthwise, makes four. It blurs—hold me firmly—I must get closer again—patience—hold firm, don’t look away—now it is fiery, 2 circles 
like eyes, empty sockets of fire. Now—hold firm—it is difficult, it seems like two drops 
, two tears of glowing glass dripped from a fiery upper sphere—a yellow light 
burning upward, a will-o’-the-wisp over dark marshes—a grave 
, who rests in it? It is empty, emptied; one rose up from it, where did he go? A fork 
; what does it fork? [122
, severed? From where has it fallen? A grill 
, a loop 
, a prison 
, a cock
,—I’m at a loss—so strange—this is unfamiliar. You picked up on something that does not belong to you, strange infernal stuff, infinitely distant. Something entered into you, adversely—yesterday evening—magic—the strange charms—out swiftly—I found strange bewitchment—falsity—magical tricks—not genuine, not from the ground—poison—hellishly crafty poison from green poisonous flasks. Spit it out, it’s impure, fake, disgusting, a swindle, hellish sorcery. I warned you about magic. Devilish stuff gets into you. No more of it, I implore you, you filthy rat, you underworld tangle, you witches’ spell—be gone, you are found out, nailed and hung up. Everyone looks at you, everyone spits at you—found out—found out—off and away, foreign filth—the air is pure—shut the doors.
(from 2. IX. 17)
. There you also have a prison above and the sun, which is one, looks toward you. One of you is defiant and locked up below. The sun has a serpent’s tail and is the serpent itself, and the other longs for the above and is not yet higher. The defiance of the below and the longing of the above come together. A roof above, and floor beneath, and you are one again.
, but the sun is below and tries to draw you down. But you draw a line above the below and long for the above and are completely at one. There the serpent comes and wants to drink from the vessel 
) long to return. But the lower sun pulls and thus you become balanced again. But soon you fall backward, since the one has reached out toward the upper sun. The other does not want this and so you fall asunder, and therefore you must bind yourselves together 3 times. Then you stand upright again and you hold both suns before you, as if they were your eyes, 
This seems to be a sentence. It looks like a message.
means the end of the sentence.
Dâ yû. Possession in Great Measure.
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