April 29, 2001
Analyze This Guy
In Ronald Hayman's book, Jung comes off as a monomaniacal narcissist.
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More on Carl Jung
Dr. Carl G. Jung Is Dead at 85; Pioneer in Analytic Psychology (June 7, 1961)
By EMILY NUSSBAUM
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A LIFE OF JUNG
By Ronald Hayman.
Illustrated. 522 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
|
he Swiss psychologist-guru Carl Jung would have made a lousy biographer. Essentially indifferent to the tiny details of human lives -- the erotic quirks, mom complexes and dog bites as a toddler -- Jung once remarked, ''Oh my God, you bore me,'' to a patient who had traveled from Paris to visit him. (He regained interest after passing her on to two other analysts: his wife and his mistress.) For the charismatic thinker, individual life experiences were nothing more than the fingerprints of the vast hand of the unknown, to be dusted for evidence of universal mysteries, not examined for their own squirrelly patterns.
Such a philosophy might offend any historian of individual lives, let alone a prolific biographer like Ronald Hayman, who has traced the lives of Proust, Nietzsche, Mann, Sartre and Sylvia Plath, among others. After all, biographers are by nature Freudians, prizing the catalyzing trauma and the revealing anecdote. Jung was notoriously secretive and self-mythologizing, fudging chronologies and claiming the stories of others as his own experiences. But in his meticulously researched volume ''A Life of Jung,'' Hayman pushes Jung onto the couch the guru himself never used. The result is a judicious but ultimately damning portrayal: Jung comes across as a monomaniacal narcissist, a sexually charismatic but chilly and isolated figure, and a man so insistent on finding a key to all mythologies that he was willing to jimmy the lock if necessary.
Hayman's biography isn't the first to debunk Jung. Richard Noll's 1994 j'accuse, ''The Jung Cult,'' and his follow-up volume, ''The Aryan Christ,'' argued that Jung was a dangerous megalomaniac. Since midcentury, he has been justly criticized as a Nazi apologist (soldiers in the SS, he wrote approvingly in the mid-30's, were ''being transformed into a caste of knights''). But there's something especially powerful about the way Hayman uses Freud's tools to dismantle Jung's house. In close readings of a wide range of materials, including his own translations from the original German texts, Hayman analyzes key passages in Jung's history, from séances with his besotted female cousin to his affair with one of his patients, the brilliant (and Jewish) Sabina Spielrein, to his doomed father-son relationship with Freud. Occasionally an interpretation falters, as when Hayman squeezes much meaning out of a single cryptic remark by Jung, in a letter to Freud, that he had once ''submitted'' to an older man. But over all, Hayman intelligently illuminates the private life Jung deliberately veiled in shadow. Far from a coherent system of thought, Hayman argues, Jung's intellectual legacy was a stone soup of German volk mythology, misappropriated Eastern philosophies, occultism and dubious anecdotal evidence -- the adult expression of fantasies of power Jung had nurtured since his youth.
Born in 1875 in a small Swiss village, the only child of an unhappy marriage, Jung was an introvert who took refuge in obsessive private rituals. A childhood acquaintance later commented, ''I had never seen such an antisocial monster.'' In his autobiography, ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (itself a problematic account compiled by followers seeking to sanitize Jung's earthier side), Jung describes having felt as if he were split into two selves: No. 1, a powerless little boy; and No. 2, a prominent 18th-century gentleman, complete with buckled shoes and powdered wig. The lonely child experienced troubling visions: a God who defecated, a massive fleshy phallus. In time, this schizoid identity faded, but Jung's sense of destiny did not -- and he continued over the course of his life to see hallucinatory images he came to interpret as mystical portents.
is father was a minister, but Jung's home was steeped in both Christianity and the supernatural. While still a medical student, Jung conducted secret séances with his cousin Helly, beginning when she was 13. The young girl swooned, seemingly possessed by spirits, including that of a powerful Jewish woman she called Ivenes. Jung encouraged these visions, hypnotizing Helly and plying her with spiritualist literature. Yet several decades later, he described her only as a patient, ''a young girl somnambulist,'' leaving the impression that he had merely observed her behavior rather than stimulated it -- a pattern he continued throughout his career, when he reported the cases of Sabina and other lovers without revealing his full relationship to them.
Helly's personas, Jung wrote in his 1902 doctoral dissertation, were expressions of submerged desires. But Hayman argues that Jung never truly believed such personas were mere inventions, and throughout his life concealed metaphysical beliefs in order to present himself as a rational scientist. Over the years, he became increasingly fascinated with the notion that human beings were linked by a vast collective memory, a wave that rose up and could be recognized in dreams and fantasies. It was this supernatural ''black tide of mud,'' in Freud's words, that caused the rift between Jung and the founder of psychoanalysis, who had formed an intense bond. Ever political, Freud was convinced that the vigorous Jung was his ideal successor. ''With your strong and independent character, with your Germanic blood, which enables you to command the public's sympathy more readily than I can, you seem more suitable than anyone I know for this mission,'' he wrote.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
"Freud has made a courageous effort to elucidate the intricacies of dream psychology by the aid of
views which he has gathered in the field of psychopathology. Much as I admire the
boldness of his attempt, I cannot agree with his method and its results.
"I am doubtful whether we can assume a dream is something else than it appears to be. I am rather
inclined to quote another Jewish authority, the Talmud, which says: "The dream is its own
interpretation.'
"The dream is a natural event and there is no reason under the sun why we should assume that it is a
crafty device to lead us astray."
-- C. G. Jung, in a lecture reported in The New York Times,October 21, 1937 |
But the relationship grew tense: twice, Freud fainted in Jung's presence. Jung grew to find his mentor's emphasis on sexuality repellently narrow; Freud in turn was alarmed by Jung's fascination with Dionysian myths and Nietzsche. When the break came, it was emotionally violent. ''This letter is an unashamed attempt to accustom you to my style. So watch out!'' Jung scribbled on one missive.
In the years following this split, Jung suffered a psychotic breakdown, though he continued to treat patients. He also became the center of a devoted following, including more than one dark, intellectual female acolyte in the tradition of Sabina -- animas'' who existed in polite, if not happy, coexistence with his more conventional Swiss wife and children. And as Jung's fame increased, he cemented the mystical concepts with which he is now associated: the collective unconscious, the ''shadow,'' archetypes, synchronicity and personality typologies. But despite his ability to charm his followers, the evidence Jung provided was blurry, and often downright deceptive: for example, Jung's well-known tale of a schizophrenic who saw a phallic tube hanging from the sun (an image of God in Mithraism, an ancient Persian religion) was in fact an anecdote told to him by his assistant Johann Jakob Honegger, though he claimed it as the experience of one of his patients for 50 years. Most damningly, Jung readily exploited his ethnic advantage when the Nazis turned against ''Jewish psychoanalysis,'' writing anti-Semitic screeds (later suppressed by followers) and claiming that Jews had a separate collective consciousness from gentiles. ''You never know how these forces of the unconscious begin to arise,'' he wrote of the Nazis. ''Something good may come from it. Give them a chance.''
A troubling legacy, to be sure. Yet Jung's ideas are the foundation of today's New Age movement, from the notion of God within everyone to the vogue for Westernized yoga, visualization, astrology and the I Ching (methods Jung used during sessions with patients). Hayman's account raises questions about Jung, but it also demonstrates the danger that lurks beneath such apparently benign spiritual fads. Without a sense that human experience matters, life becomes the Matrix, Hayman suggests: a terrain in which reality is secondary to symbolic messages and secret heroic destinies. To insist that only the big picture counts is in the end ''to devalue both individual initiatives and historical developments'' -- and to ignore human suffering. If God is in the details, Jung never got close.
Emily Nussbaum is the managing editor of Nerve, a magazine about sex and culture, and a contributing writer at Lingua Franca.
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