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becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to
companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than
the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each
individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself
with others.
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It
fil s life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has
never experienced that has missed something important. He must
sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious;
that things happen and can be experienced which remain
inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated.
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is
life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite
and ungraspable.
I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a
daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It
overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I
was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once
attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my
contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they
saw only a fool rushing ahead.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not
understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was
concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people aside
from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on
me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always
obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?
For some people I was continual y present and close to them so
long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen
that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which
would link me to them. I had to learn painful y that people continued
to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. Many
excited in me a feeling of living humanity, but only when they
appeared within the magic circle of psychology; next moment, when
the spotlight cast its beam elsewhere, there was nothing to be
seen. I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but
as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this
way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over
his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.
"Shamefully
A power wrests away the heart from us,
For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;
But if it should be withheld
Never has that led to good?
says Holderlin.
This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if
I were on a battlefield, saying, "Now you have fal en, my good
comrade, but I must go on." For "shameful y a power wrests away
the heart from us." I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannot
stay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself am
the victim; I cannot stay. But the daimon manages things so that one
comes through, and blessed inconsistency sees to it that in flagrant
contrast to my "disloyalty" I can keep faith in unsuspected measure.
Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others,
and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one
is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one
achieve moderation.
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The
ordinary undertakings I planned usual y had the worst of it though
not always and not everywhere. By way of compensation, I think, I
am conservative to the bone. I fil my pipe from my grandfather's
tobacco jar and stil keep his alpenstock, topped with a chamois
horn, which he brought back from Pontresina after having been one
of the first guests at that newly opened Kurort.
I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been
bountiful, and has given me a great deal. How could I ever have
expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening
to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different.
But it was as it had to be; for al came about because I am as I am.
Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always
prove of benefit to me. But almost everything developed natural y
and by destiny. I regret many fol ies which sprang from my
obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal.
And so I am disappointed and not disappointed. I am disappointed
with people and disappointed with myself. I have learned amazing
things from people, and have accomplished more than I expected
of myself. I cannot form any final judgment because the
phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of man are too vast. The
older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into
or known about myself.
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am
distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am al these things at once, and
cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate
worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my
life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite
convictions not about anything, real y. I know only that I was born
and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist
on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of al
uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying al existence and a
continuity in my mode of being.
The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the
same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the
other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of
temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant,
the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree
with each step in our development. But that is or seems to me not
the case. Probably, as in al metaphysical questions, both are true:
Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious
hope that meaning wil preponderate and win the battle.
When Lao-tzu says: "Al are clear, I alone am clouded," he is
expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. Lao-tzu is the
example of a man with superior insight who has seen and
experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life
desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable
meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is
eternal y true. At every level of intel igence this type appears, and its
lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a
great philosopher like Lao-tzu. This is old age, and a limitation. Yet
there is so much that fil s me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night,
and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself,
the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with al
things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long
separated me from the world has become transferred into my own
inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity
with myself.
Appendix I
LETTERS FROM FREUD TO JUNG [1]
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
April 16, 1909
DEAR FRIEND,
... It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formal y adopted
you as an eldest son, anointing you as my successor and crown
prince in partibus infidelium that then and there you should have
divested me of my paternal dignity, and that the divesting seems to
have given you as much pleasure as investing your person gave
me. Now I am afraid that I must fal back again into the role of father
toward you in giving you my views on poltergeist phenomena. I must
do this because these things are different from what you would like
to think.
I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a
powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to
make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room
there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy
Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that's
obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such
noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some
meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were
here were never heard again after your departure. But since then it
has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my
thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special
problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of chal enge.) The
phenomenon was soon deprived of al significance for me by
something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe,
vanished along with the spel of your personal presence; once
again, for various inner reasons, it seems to me whol y
1 Reproduced with the land permission of Ernst Freud, London.
implausible that anything of the sort should occur. The furniture
stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and
godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece.
I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and
warn my dear son to keep a cool head and rather not understand
something than make such great sacrifices for the sake of
understanding. I also shake my wise gray locks over the question of
psycho-synthesis and think: Wel , that is how the young folks are;
they real y enjoy things only when they need not drag us along with
them, where with our short breath and weary legs we cannot fol ow.
Now I shal exercise the privilege of my years to turn loquacious and
tel you about one more matter between heaven and earth which
cannot be understood. A few years ago I took it into my head that I
would die between the ages of 61 and 62, which at that time
seemed to leave me a decent period of grace. (Today that leaves
me only eight years stil to go.) Shortly afterward I made a trip to
Greece with my brother, and it was absolutely uncanny to see how
the number 61, or 60 in conjunction with i and a, kept cropping up
on anything that had a number, especial y on vehicles. I
conscientiously noted down these occasions. By the time we came
to Athens, I was feeling depressed. At our hotel we were assigned
rooms on the second floor, and I hoped I could breathe again at
least there could be no chance of No. 61. However, it turned out that
my room was No. 31 (which, with fatalistic license, I regarded as
after al half of 61-62). This wilier and nimbler figure proved to be
even better at dogging me than the first.
From that day until very recently the number 31 remained faithful to
me, with a 2 al too readily associated with it. But since I also have
in my psychic system regions in which I am merely avid for
knowledge and not at al superstitious, I have attempted to analyze
this conviction. Here it is. My conviction began in 1899. Two events
coincided at that time. The first was my writing The Interpretation of
Dreams (which, you know, is dated ahead to 1900); the second, my
being assigned a new telephone number, which I have to this day:
14362. It is easy to establish the link between these two facts: in the
year 1899, when I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, I was 43
years old. What should be more obvious than that the other figures
in my telephone number were intended to signify the end of my life,
hence, 61 or 62? Suddenly there appears a method in this
madness. The superstition that I would die between 61 and 62 turns
out to be equivalent to the conviction that with the book on dreams I
had completed my life work, needed to say no more, and could die
in peace. You wil grant that after this analysis it no longer sounds
so non-sensical. Incidental y, the influence of Wilhelm Fliess plays a
part in this; the superstitition dates from the year of his attack on
me.
Here is another instance where you wil find confirmation of the
specifical y Jewish character of my mysticism. Apart from this, I only
want to say that adventures such as mine with the number 62 can
be explained by two things. The first is an enormously intensified
alertness on the part of the unconscious, so that one is led like
Faust to see a Helen in every woman. The second is the undeniable
"co-operation of chance," which plays the same role in the
formation of delusions as somatic co-operation in hysterical
symptoms or linguistic co-operation in puns.
I therefore look forward to hearing more about your investigations of
the spook-complex, my interest being the interest one has in a
lovely delusion which one does not share oneself.
With cordial regards to yourself,
your wife and children, Yours,
Freud.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
May 1
DEAR FRIEND,
... I know that your deepest inclinations are impel ing you toward a
study of the occult, and do not doubt that you wil return home with a
rich cargo. There is no stopping that, and it is always right for a
person to fol ow the biddings of his own impulses. The reputation
you have won with your Dementia [2] wil stand against the charge
of "mystic" for quite a while. Only don't stay too long away from us in
those lush tropical colonies; it is necessary to govern at home....
With cordial greetings and the hope that you wil write me again
after a shorter interval this time.
Your faithful
Freud.
2. See above, Chap. V, n. 4, p. 149.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
June 15, 1911
DEAR FRIEND,
... In matters of occultism I have become humble ever since the
great lesson I received from Ferenczi's experiences. [3] I promise
to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit
reasonable. As you know, I do not do so gladly. But my hubris has
been shattered. I should like to have you and F. acting in
consonance when one of you is ready to take the perilous step of
publication, and I imagine that this would be quite compatible with
complete independence during the progress of the work....
Cordial regards to you and the beautiful house
from Your faithful
Freud
3. Cf. Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1953-57),
III, pp. 387 f.
Appendix II
LETTERS TO EMMA JUNG FROM AMERICA
(1909)
September 6, 1909, Monday
At Prof. Stanley Halts
Clark University, Worcester
.... So now we are safely arrived in Worcester! I have to tel you
about the trip. Last Saturday there was dreary weather in New York.
Al three of us were afflicted with diarrhea and had pretty bad
stomach aches.... In spite of feeling physical y miserable and in
spite of not eating anything, I went to the paleontological col ection,
where al the old monsters, the Lord God's anxiety dreams of
Creation, are to be seen. The col ection is absolutely unique for the
phylogenesis of Tertiary mammals. I cannot possibly tel you al I
saw there. Then I met Jones, who had just arrived from Europe.
Around half-past three we took the elevated and rode from 42nd
Street to the piers. There we boarded a fantastical y huge structure
of a steamer that had some five white decks. We took cabins, and
our vessel set sail from the West River around the point of
Manhattan with al its tremendous skyscrapers, then up the East
River under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, right through the
endless tangle of tugs, ferryboats, etc., and through the Sound
behind Long Island. It was damp and chil y, we had bel y aches and
diarrhea and were suffering from hunger besides, so we crawled
into bed. Early on Sunday morning we were already on land in Fal
River City, where in the rain we took the train to Boston and
immediately went on to Worcester. While we were en route, the
weather cleared. The countryside was utterly charming, low hil s, a
great deal of forest, swamp, smal lakes, innumerable huge erratic
rocks, tiny vil ages with wooden houses, painted red, green, or gray,
with windows framed in white (Hol and!), tucked away under large,
beautiful trees. By 11:30 we were in Worcester. We found the
Standish Hotel a very pleasant place to stay, and cheap also, "on
the American plan," as they say here that is, with board. At six in the
evening, after a wel -deserved rest, we cal ed on Stanley Hal . He is
a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy who
received us with the kindest hospitality. He has a plump, jol y, good-
natured, and extremely ugly wife who, however, serves wonderful
food. She promptly took over Freud and me as her "boys" and plied
us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so that we began
visibly to recover. We slept very wel that night in the hotel, and this
morning we have moved over to the Hal s'. The house is furnished in
an incredibly amusing fashion, everything roomy and comfortable.
There is a splendid studio fil ed with thousands of books, and boxes
of cigars everywhere. Two pitch-black Negroes in dinner jackets,
the extreme of grotesque solemnity, perform as servants. Carpets
everywhere, al the doors open, even the bathroom door and the
front door; people going in and out al over the place; al the
windows extend down to the floor. The house is surrounded by an
English lawn, no garden fence. Half the city (about a hundred and
eighty thousand inhabitants) stands in a regular forest of old trees
which shade al the streets. Most of the houses are smal er than
ours, charmingly surrounded by flowers and flowering shrubs,
overgrown with Virginia creeper and wisteria; everything wel
tended, clean, cultivated, and exceedingly peaceful and congenial.
A whol y different America! This is what they cal New England. The
city was founded as long ago as 1690, so it is very old. Much
prosperity. The university, richly endowed, is smal but
distinguished, and has a real, though plain, elegance. This morning
was the opening session. Prof. X had first turn, with boring stuff. We
soon decamped and took a delightful walk through the outskirts of
the town, which is surrounded on al sides by smal and minute
lakes and cool woods. We were ecstatic over the peaceful beauty
of the surroundings. It is refreshing and reviving after the life in New
York....
Clark University
Worcester, Massachusetts
Wednesday, September 8, 1909
... The people here are al exceedingly amiable and on a decent
cultural level. We are beautiful y taken care of at the Hal s' and daily
recovering from the exertions of New York. My stomach is almost
back to normal now; from time to time there is a little twitch, but
aside from that, my general health is excel ent. Yesterday Freud
began the lectures and received great applause. We are gaining
ground here, and our fol owing is growing slowly but surely. Today I
had a talk about psychoanalysis with two highly cultivated elderly
ladies who proved to be very wel informed and free-thinking. I was
greatly surprised, since I had prepared myself for opposition.
Recently we had a large garden party with fifty people present, in
the course of which I surrounded myself with five ladies. I was even
able to make jokes in English though what English! Tomorrow
comes my first lecture; al my dread of it has vanished, since the
audience is harmless and merely eager to hear new things, which is
certainly what we can supply them with. It is said that we shal be
awarded honorary doctorates by the university next Saturday, with a
great deal of pomp and circumstance. In the evening there wil be a
"formal reception." Today's letter has to be short, since the Hal s
have invited some people for five o'clock to meet us. We have also
been interviewed by the Boston Evening Transcript. In fact we are
the men of the hour here. It is very good to be able to spread
oneself in this way once in a while. I can feel that my libido is
gulping it in with vast enjoyment...
Clark University
Worcester ', Mass.
September 24, 1909
... Last night there was a tremendous amount of ceremony and
fancy dress, with al sorts of red and black gowns and gold-tasseled
square caps. In a grand and festive assemblage I was appointed
Doctor of Laws honoris causa and Freud likewise. Now I may place
an L.L.D. after my name. Impressive, what?... Today Prof. M. drove
us by automobile out to lunch at a beautiful lake. The landscape
was utterly lovely. This evening there is one more "private
conference" in Hal 's house on the "psychology of sex." Our time is
dreadful y crammed. The Americans are real y masters at that; they
hardly leave one time to catch one's breath. Right now I am rather
worn out from al the fabulous things we have been through, and am
longing for the quiet of the mountains. My head is spinning. Last
night at the awarding of the doctorate I had to deliver an impromptu
talk before some three hundred persons.... Freud is in seventh
heaven, and I am glad with al my heart to see him so....
I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again,
where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of
that infinite peace and spaciousness. Here one is in an almost
constant whirlwind. But I have, thank God, completely regained my
capacity for enjoyment, so that I can look forward to everything with
zest. Now I am going to take everything that comes along by storm,
and then I shal settle down again, satiated...
Albany, N. Y.
September 18,
... Two more days before departure! Everything is taking place in a
whirl. Yesterday I stood upon a bare rocky peak nearly 5600 feet
high, in the midst of tremendous virgin forests, looking far out into
the blue infinities of America and shivering to the bone in the icy
wind, and today I am in the midst of the metropolitan bustle of
Albany, the capital of the State of New York! The hundred thousand
enormously deep impressions I am taking back with me from this
wonderland cannot be described with the pen. Everything is too big,
too immeasurable. Something that has gradual y been dawning
upon me in the past few days is the recognition that here an ideal
po- tentiality of life has become reality. Men are as wel off here as
the culture permits; women badly off. We have seen things here that
in- spire enthusiastic admiration, and things that make one ponder
s o c i a l evolution deeply. As far as technological culture is
concerned, we lag miles behind Ajnerica. But al that is frightful y
costly and already carries the germ of the end in itself. I must tel you
a great, great deal. I shal never forget the experiences of this
journey. Now we are tired of America. Tomorrow morning we are off
to New York, and on September 21 we sail!...
368