137 - Arthur I. Miller [7]
Dangerously Famous
IN 1920S EUROPE, Carl Jung was a celebrity and regarded as the chief rival of the great Sigmund Freud. While Freud had carved out the new field of psychoanalysis, it was Jung who made it fashionable. He extended the boundaries by using dream images to explore the unconscious more deeply than Freud had, probing into the archetypes built into our minds. He was a spell-binding lecturer and recipient of adulation both from colleagues and a host of women whom he referred to as his “fur-coat ladies.” The rich and famous flocked to his fortresslike mansion on the shore of Lake Zürich, not only as prospective patients but also to enjoy his inspiring conversation. Among them were the McCormicks of the Chicago newspaper dynasty, H. G. Wells, and Hugh Walpole, who remembered him as looking “like a large genial cricketer.” Some came just to gaze at the “primitive” who washed his own jeans with his “powerful arms” on the lawn outside his mansion.
Jung was, as he said himself, “dangerously famous,” so much so that patients sometimes had to wait a year for an appointment. Psychoanalysis had become all the rage and “going to Jung was somehow very chic and modern,” as a wealthy American female client put it.
But there was still something missing. Jung was concerned that his approach to psychoanalysis needed a scientific underpinning, but he didn’t have the requisite scientific background. To develop his ideas, he needed to work with someone who was au fait with the latest developments in science.
Boyhood
Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in the village of Kesswil on Lake Constance, on the northern border of Switzerland, to an impoverished Protestant pastor with a passion for learning. His mother, Emilie, had had three stillborn children before young Carl’s arrival and had withdrawn into a world of ghosts and spirits. Jung’s father moved from parish to parish but nothing seemed to help her. This often enraged him, leading to violent arguments between the two, during which young Carl would take refuge in his father’s book-lined study.
Embarrassed by his shabby clothes and poverty, the boy for the most part kept away from others. His main interest was in his own rich dreams, in ghosts, in stories of the supernatural, and in séances. His charmed solitude came to an end with the birth of a sister, when he was nine. From then on he had to share with her the little attention he received from his parents.
Young Carl spent long periods of time staring at a stone and talking to it. One day he carved the top of a wooden ruler into a manikin and painted it to look like a village elder. He hid it in the attic, took it presents, and even wrote letters to it. Years later, he realized that what he had created was actually a totem—a primeval object of worship. It was a straightforward case of “archaic psychic components” entering “the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition.” Thus he found in himself what he would later call the “collective unconscious.”
By the age of eleven young Carl’s brilliance was clear. He was also bigger and stronger than his classmates and always up for a fight. By fifteen he had read most of the books in his father’s study, from adventure novels to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Goethe’s Faust (both “a tremendous experience for me,” he recalled), as well as Kant, the Grail legends, and Shakespeare.
Jung’s family was so poor that the only university he could go to was Basel, near enough that he could live at home. The question was what to study. He was interested in archaeology, but the university did not offer it. Then he had two dreams. In one he was digging up the bones of ancient animals, while the other concerned protozoa. From this he decided he should study some form of natural science. But if he studied zoology he would be bound to end up as a teacher. So he opted for medicine, even though his father had to petition for a stipend to support him. He started at the university in 1895.
Jung’s calling
By his final year