THE EARLY YEARS OF C.G.JUNG
1875 – 1961
© Copyright by Angela Maffeo 1998
A Lecture given by Angela Maffeo
At the Boston Chapter of Psychological Type
The College Club, Boston, Massachusetts
February 23, 1998
Carl G. Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875. His childhood was a singular one marked by powerful internal events. Jung’s father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church; two of his uncles were parsons; and there were also six parsons in his mother’s family. When Jung was only three years old, his parents separated and his mother was hospitalized. Jung was deeply affected by the separation.
Jung had two extraordinary dreams during his childhood, which would act as extreme poles in his young life. The first would draw him to himself, and the second to the world. The first dream occurred when he was only 3.5 years old. About it he wrote:
“Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth. What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth, and many years were to pass before I came out again. .... It was an initiation in the realm of darkness. My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that time.” (Jung, 1961, p. 15)
In the dream Jung finds himself in a meadow and discovers a dark, rectangular, stone-lined hole in the ground. He follows steps leading to an underground chamber, which contains a green curtain. Curious, he pushes it aside and behind it finds a golden throne, like in a fairy tale. On the golden throne rests a 12-15 ft. tree trunk with a head on top and “a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward.” (Jung, 1961, p. 12)
For many nights thereafter, he was afraid to fall asleep. Only much later did he realize that he had seen a phallus, and it would be decades before he understood that what he had seen was a ritual phallus. He never spoke of it to anyone until he was 65 years old. The dream, however, affected him deeply. It would set him apart from others. As anyone knows who has read Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung’s childhood was almost barren of relationship. He did not have a special chum to play with so he played alone for the most part feeling more relational with nature than with people. He was an only child until he was 9 years old, when his sister was born --someone he barely names in his autobiography.
He was intense about his playing. He played with bricks and building towers, which he then destroyed. Later he would draw endlessly -- drawings with a military theme. He filled a book with inkblots and then amused himself by giving them fantastic interpretations. Soon after he was six years old, his father began teaching him Latin and he went off to school. He had already learned to read so was ahead of the other students. Jung played ritual games with fire and one very special one with a stone. He called it “my stone” into which he projected consciousness. The stone was embedded on a slope in his garden. The stone jutted out. Often when he was alone he would sit down on this stone and begin an imaginary game and a Zen- like-koan would begin in his head.
“I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath me.
But the stone also could say “I” and think:
I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.”
The question then arose:
Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”
This question always perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now.”
Jung went off to the Gymnasium in Basel when he was eleven and discovered for the first time that he was poor and sit in wet socks for six hours because he had holes in his shoes. School was a bore and took too much of his time. He would have preferred being free to play his ritual games; achievement was not even a glimmer in his life.
Jung writes that his Twelfth year was “a fateful one. Three significant events happened in his young life, one after another. The first involved a brief excursion into neurosis when a classmate knocked him to the ground and he hit his head so hard he almost lost consciousness.
“At the moment I felt the blow, the thought flashed through my mind, “Now you won’t have to go to school any more.” … “From then on I began to have fainting spells whenever I had to return to school, and whenever my parents set me to doing my homework. For more than six months I stayed away from school, and for me that was a picnic. Above all, I was able to plunge in the world of the mysterious. To that realm belonged trees, a pool, the swamp, stones and animals, and my father’s library. But I was growing more and more away from the world...” (Jung, 1961, p. 31)
Then one day Jung accidentally overheard his father talking about him to a visitor: “The doctors no longer knows what is wrong with him. They think it may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?” (Ibid)
“I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality. “Why, then, I must get to work.” (Ibid) From that moment on he became a serious child. He immediately set about his studies, and he fainted after only 10 minutes; with the next try, he fainted after 15 minutes; and with the third try, it was an hour before a third attack came. Still he did not give up and worked for another hour, until he felt that he had overcome the attacks.
“Suddenly I felt better than I had in all the months before. … A few weeks later I returned to school and never suffered another attack, even there. The whole bag of tricks was over and done with!” (Jung, 1961, p. 32) Thereafter, his conscientiousness took the form of rising every morning between 3:00 and 4:00 AM in order to study, before going to school. Jung felt that his passion for being alone, his delight in solitude had led him astray during the crisis. Nature was full of wonder and he wanted to steep himself in it.
Soon after, the second profound event occurred which Jung later termed ego consciousness:
“I was taking the long road to school, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud. I knew all at once: now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an “I.” But at this moment, I came upon myself. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed. This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was “authority” in me. “ Ibid
The third event (Jung was still 12) had to do with the distinct awareness of having two personalities within himself:
“Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent and clean than many other boys. The other was grownup -- old, in fact -- skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of [people], but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly in him .... It seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than [people] with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism -- all qualities with which I was only too familiar from myself, that is, from personality No. 1, the schoolboy of 1890. (Jung, 1961, p. 44)
“In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.” (Jung, 1961. p. 45)
Some say that the origin of persona, ego-image, and ego-identity -- the No. 1 personality, and the shadow or unconscious Other or No. 2 personality goes back to Jung figuring this all out as a 15 year old. Jung would continue to have religious experiences, which would deeply confound him and ultimately pitch him into an intensive search for any knowledge that would explain his own experiences to himself. For him, “God was one of the most certain and immediate experiences. Jung’s mother understood him because she was like him. It was as if the “good witch” inside her recognized the “Merlin” in Jung. She suggested to Jung that he read Goethe’s Faust because she thought it had a magical quality, which would protect her son. As he read it, he said
“It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm. At last he found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power and, more important, the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering. (Jung, 1961, p. 60)
The dream of the other pole occurred when he was preparing to go to the University. It both frightened and encouraged him.
“It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment, I was conscious in spite of my terror that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was ... my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. (Jung, 1961, p. 87-88)
The dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No. 1 was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back .... In the role of No. 1, I had to go forward into study, moneymaking, responsibilities, entanglements, confusions, errors, submissions, and defeats. The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, which just as ceaselessly dogs our heels. It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it -- for a while -- by pressing forward. The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer.
Jung’s father died soon after he went to the University of Basel. He viewed his father as a failed man in a failed marriage with a failed faith. Jung had difficulty deciding on his career. Archaeology was his first choice but there was no teacher in Basel. Finally, he came across a textbook on psychiatry by Krafft-Ebing:
“Beginning with the preface, I read: ‘It is probably due to the peculiarity of the subject and its incomplete state of development that psychiatric textbooks are stamped with a more or less subjective character.’ A few lines further on, the author called the psychoses ‘diseases of the personality.’ My heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowwhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.
My violent reaction set in when Krafft-Ebing spoke of the ‘subjective character’ of psychiatric textbooks. So, I thought, the textbook is in part the subjective confession of the author. With his specific prejudice, with the totality of his being, he stands behind the objectivity of his experiences and responds to the “disease of the personality” with the whole of his personality. Never had I heard anything of this sort from my teacher at the clinic. In spite of the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s textbook did not differ essentially from other books of the kind, these few hints cast such transfiguring light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spell. “ (Jung, 1961, p. 108-9)”
The decision was taken and stood. He said,
“It was as though two rivers had united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably toward distant goals.” Ibid.
Jung would go on to join his own life “in the rapid movement forward of his personal history.” He would marry Emma Rauschenbach at 28, have children, and become a famous psychiatrist. He would fall under the spell of Sigmund Freud for seven years, suffer his own crisis and self-analysis, but would recover; becoming stronger and in time to follow his own path of self-discovery.
The people who really interested him were not those who were merely adapted, but the exceptional individuals whose own nature compelled them to reject conventional ways and discover their own path. He wrote: “The development of individuality, the discovery of what an individual really thinks and feels and believes, as opposed to the collective thoughts, feelings and beliefs imposed on him by social, becomes a quest of vital significance.
He called this process “individuation.”
