sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.--And he fel --
tightrope-walker that he proclaimed himself to be--into depths far
beyond himself. He did not know his way about in this world and
was like a man possessed, one who could be handled only with the
utmost caution. Among my friends and acquaintances I knew of only
two who openly declared themselves adherents of Nietzsche. Both
were homosexual; one of them ended by committing suicide, the
other ran to seed as a misunderstood genius. The rest of my friends
were not so much dumfounded by the phenomenon of Zarathustra
as simply immune to its appeal.
Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zarathustra slammed one
shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come. I felt like the old
peasant who discovered that two of his cows had evidently been
bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. "How did that
happen?" asked his smal son. "Boy, one doesn't talk about such
things," replied his father.
I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about
the things they know. The naive person does not appreciate what
an insult it is to talk to one's fel ows about anything that is unknown
to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer,
journalist, or poet. I came to see that a new idea, or even just an
unusual aspect of an old one, can be communicated only by facts.
Facts remain and cannot be brushed aside; sooner or later
someone wil come upon them and know what he has found. I
realized that I talked only for want of something better, that I ought to
be offering facts, and these I lacked entirely. I had nothing concrete
in my hands. More than ever I found myself driven toward
empiricism. I began to blame the philosophers for rattling away
when experience was lacking, and holding their tongues when they
ought to have been answering with facts. In this respect they al
seemed like watered-down theologians. I felt that at some time or
other I had passed through the val ey of diamonds, but I could
convince no one--not even myself, when I looked at them more
closely--that the specimens I had brought back were not mere
pieces of gravel.
This was in 1898, when I began to think more seriously about my
career as a medical man. I soon came to the conclusion that I would
have to specialize. The choice seemed to lie between surgery and
internal medicine. I inclined toward the former because of my
special training in anatomy and my preference for pathology, and
would very probably have made surgery my profession if I had
possessed the necessary financial means. Al along, it had been
extremely painful to me to have to go into debt in order to study at
al . I knew that after the final examination I would have to begin
earning my living as soon as possible. I imagined a career as
assistant at some cantonal hospital, where there was more hope of
obtaining a paid position than in a clinic. Moreover, a post in a
clinic depended to a large extent on the backing or personal
interest of the chief. With my questionable popularity and
estrangement from others--experienced al too often--I dared not
think of any such stroke of luck, and therefore contented myself with
the modest prospect of a post in one of the local hospitals. The rest
depended on hard work and on my capability and application.
During the summer holidays, however, something happened that
was destined to influence me profoundly. One day I was sitting in
my room, studying my textbooks. In the adjoining room, the door to
which stood ajar, my mother was knitting. That was our dining room,
where the round walnut dining table stood. The table had come from
the dowry of my paternal grandmother, and was at this time about
seventy years old. My mother was sitting by the window, about a
yard away from the table. My sister was at school and our maid in
the kitchen. Suddenly there sounded a report like a pistol shot. I
jumped up and rushed into the room from which the noise of the
explosion had come. My mother was sitting flabbergasted in her
armchair, the knitting fal en from her hands. She stammered out,
"W-w-what's happened? It was right beside mel" and stared at the
table. Fol owing her eyes, I saw what had happened. The table top
had split from the rim to beyond the center, and not along any joint;
the split ran right through the solid wood. I was thunderstruck. How
could such a thing happen? A table of solid walnut that had dried
out for seventy years--how could it split on a summer day in the
relatively high degree of humidity characteristic of our climate? If it
had stood next to a heated stove on a cold, dry winter day, then it
might have been conceivable.
What in the world could have caused such an explosion? "There
certainly are curious accidents," I thought. My mother nodded
darkly. "Yes, yes," she said in her No. 2 voice, "that means
something." Against my wil I was impressed and annoyed with
myself for not finding anything to say.
Some two weeks later I came home at six o'clock in the evening
and found the household--my mother, my fourteen-year--old sister,
and the maid--in a great state of agitation. About an hour earlier
there had been another deafening report. This time it was not the
already damaged table; the noise had come from the direction of
the sideboard, a heavy piece of furniture dating from the early
nineteenth century. They had already looked al over it, but had
found no trace of a split. I immediately began examining the
sideboard and the entire surrounding area, but just as fruitlessly.
Then I began on the interior of the sideboard. In the cupboard
containing the bread basket I found a loaf of bread, and, beside it,
the bread knife. The greater part of the blade had snapped off in
several pieces. The handle lay in one corner of the rectangular
basket, and in each of the other corners lay a piece of the blade.
The knife had been used shortly before, at four-o'clock tea, and
afterward put away. Since then no one had gone to the sideboard.
The next day I took the shattered knife to one of the best cutlers in
the town. He examined the fractures with a magni-- fying glass, and
shook his head. "This knife is perfectly sound," he said. "There is
no fault in the steel. Someone must have deliberately broken it
piece by piece. It could be done, for instance, by sticking the blade
into the crack of the drawer and - breaking off a piece at a time. Or
else it might have been dropped on stone from a great height. But
good steel can't explode. Someone has been pul ing your leg." I
have careful y kept the pieces of the knife to this day. My mother
and my sister had been in the room when the sudden report made
them jump.
My mother's No. 2 looked at me meaningful y, but I could find
nothing to say. I was completely at a loss and could offer no
explanation of what had happened, and this was al the more
annoying as I had to admit that I was profoundly impressed. Why
and how had the table split and the knife shattered? The hypothesis
that it was just a coincidence went much too far. It seemed highly
improbable to me that the Rhine would flow backward just once, by
mere chance--and al other possible explanations were
automatical y ruled out. So what was it?
A few weeks later I heard of certain relatives who had been
engaged for some time in table-turning, and also had a medium, a
young girl of fifteen and a half. The group had been thinking of
having me meet the medium, who produced somnambulistic states
and spiritualistic phenomena. When I heard this, I immediately
thought of the strange manifestations in our house, and I
conjectured that they might be somehow connected with this
medium. I therefore began attending the regular séances which my
relatives held every Saturday evening. We had results in the form of
communications and tapping noises from the wal s and the table.
Movements of the table independently of the medium were
questionable, and I soon found out that limiting conditions imposed
on the experiment general y had an obstructive effect. I therefore
accepted the obvious autonomy of the tapping noises and turned
my attention to the content of the communications. I set forth the
results of these observations in my doctoral thesis. After about two
years of experimentation we al became rather weary of it. I caught
the medium trying to produce phenomena by trickery, and this
made me break off the experiments--very much to my regret, for I
had learned from this example how a No. 2 personality is formed,
how it enters into a child's consciousness and final y integrates it
into itself. She was one of these precociously matured
personalities, and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. I
saw her once again, when she was twenty-four, and received a
lasting impression of the independence and maturity of her
personality. After her death I learned from her family that during the
last months of her life her character disintegrated bit by bit, and that
ultimately she returned to the state of a two-year-old child, in which
condition she fel into her last sleep.
Al in al , this was the one great experience which wiped out al my
earlier philosophy and made it possible for me to achieve a
psychological point of view. I had discovered some objective facts
about the human psyche. Yet the nature of the experience was such
that once again I was unable to speak of it. I knew no one to whom I
could have told the whole story. Once more I had to lay aside an
unfinished problem. It was not until two years later that my
dissertation appeared.[4]
At the medical clinic Friedrich von Mul er had taken the place of old
Immermann. In Mul er I encountered a mind that appealed to me. I
saw how a keen intel igence grasped the problem and formulated
questions which in themselves were half the solution. He, for his
part, seemed to see something in me, for toward the end of my
studies he proposed that I should go with him, as his assistant, to
Munich, where he had received an appointment. This invitation
almost persuaded me to devote myself to internal medicine. I might
have done so had not something happened in the meantime which
removed al my doubts Concerning my future career.
4 Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phanomene: eine
psychietrische Studie (1902); English trans.: "On the Psychology and
Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena," in Psychiatric Studies (CW 1).
Though I had attended psychiatric lectures and clinics, the current
instructor in psychiatry was not exactly stimulating, and when I
recal ed the effects which the experience of asylums had had on my
father, this was not calculated to prepossess me in favor of
psychiatry. In preparing myself for the state examination, therefore,
the textbook on psychiatry was the last I attacked. I expected
nothing of it, and I stil remember that as I opened the book by
Krafft-Ebing[5] the thought came to me: '"Wel , now let's see what a
psychiatrist has to say for himself." The lectures and clinical
demonstrations had not made the slightest impression on me. I
could not remember a single one of the cases I had seen in the
clinic, but only my boredom and disgust.
I began with the preface, intending to find out how a psychiatrist
introduced his subject or, indeed, justified his reason for existing at
al . By way of excuse for this high and mighty attitude I must make it
clear that in the medical world at that time psychiatry was quite
general y held in contempt. No one real y knew anything about it,
and there was no psychology which regarded man as a whole and
included his pathological variations in the total picture. The director
was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the
institution was equal y cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like
an ancient lazaret with its lepers. No one liked looking in that
direction. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and
therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless and
fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as wel . The
psychiatrist was a strange figure in those days, as I was soon to
learn from personal experience.
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 cal ed 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 il umination,
that for me the only possible goal
5 Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 4th edn. (1890).
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 nowhere found. Here at last was the
place where the col ision 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 own 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 essential y from
other books of the kind, these few hints cast such a transfiguring
light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spel .
The decision was taken. When I informed my teacher in internal
medicine of my intention, I could read in his face his amazement
and disappointment. My old wound, the feeling of being an outsider
and of alienating others, began to ache again. But now I understood
why. No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined I could become
interested in this obscure bypath. My friends were astounded and
put out, thinking me a fool for throwing up the enviable chance of a
sensible career in internal medicine, which dangled so temptingly
before my nose, in favor of this psychiatric nonsense.
I saw that once again I had obviously got myself into a side al ey
where no one could or would fol ow me. But I knew--and nothing and
nobody could have deflected me from my purpose--that my
decision stood, and that it was fate. It was as though two rivers had
united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably toward
distant goals. This confident feeling that I was a "united double
nature" carried me as if on a magical wave through the
examination, in which I came out at the top. Characteristical y, the
stumbling block that lurks in the path of al miracles that turn out too
wel tripped me up in the very subject in which I real y excel ed,
pathological anatomy. By a ridiculous error, in a slide which apart
from al sorts of debris seemed to contain only epithelial cel s, I
overlooked some molds hiding in a corner. In the other subjects, I
had even guessed what questions I would be asked. Thanks to this,
I cleared several dangerous reefs with flying colors. In revenge, I
was then fooled in the most grotesque way just where I felt most
certain of myself. Had it not been for this I would have had the
highest mark in the examination.
As it was, another candidate received the same number of points
as I did. He was a lone wolf, with a personality quite opaque to me
and suspiciously banal. It was impossible to talk to him about
anything except "shop." He reacted to everything with an enigmatic
smile, which reminded me of the Greek statues at Aegina. He had
an air of superiority, and yet underneath it he seemed embarrassed
and never quite fitted into any situation. Or was it a kind of
stupidity? I could never make him out. The only definite thing about
him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal ambition
which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts. A few years
afterward he became schizophrenic. I mention this as a
characteristic example of the paral elism of events. My first book
was on the psychology of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and in
it my personality with its bias or "personal equation" responded to
this "disease of the personality? I maintained that psychiatry, in the
broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the
psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be "normal." It is a
coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the
therapist, both in principle equal y subjective. My aim was to show
that delusions and hal ucinations were not just specific symptoms of
mental disease but also had a human meaning.
The evening after my last examination I treated myself--for the first
time in my life--to the longed-for luxury of going to the theater. Until
then my finances had not permitted any such extravagance. But I
stil had some money left from the sale of the antiques, and this
al owed me not only a visit to the opera but even a trip to Munich
and Stuttgart.
Bizet intoxicated and overwhelmed me, rocked me on the a waves
of an infinite sea. And next day, when the train carried me over the
border into a wider world, the melodies of Carmen accompanied
me. In Munich I saw real classical art for the first time, and this in
conjunction with Bizet's music put me in a springlike, nuptial mood,
whose depth and meaning I could only dimly grasp. Outwardly,
however, it was a dismal week between the first and the ninth of
December, 1900.
In Stuttgart I paid a farewel visit to my aunt, Frau Reimer-Jung,
whose husband was a psychiatrist. She was the daughter of my
paternal grandfather's first marriage to Virginia de Lassaulx. She
was an enchanting old lady with sparkling blue eyes and a vivacious
temperament. She seemed to me immersed in a world of
impalpable fantasies and of memories that refused to go home--the
last breath of a vanishing, irrevocable past. This visit was a final
farewel to the nostalgias of my childhood.
On December 10, 1900, I took up my post as assistant at Burgholzli
Mental Hospital, Zurich. I was glad to be in Zurich, for in the course
of the years Basel had become too stuffy for me. For the Baslers no
town exists but their own: only Basel is "civilized," and north of the
river Birs the land of the barbarians begins. My friends could not
understand my going away, and reckoned I would be back in no
time. But that was out of the question, for in Basel I was stamped for
al time as the son of the Reverend Paul Jung and the grandson of
Professor Carl Gustav Jung. I was an intel ectual and belonged to a
definite social set. I felt resistances against this, for I could not and
would not let myself be classified. The intel ectual atmosphere of
Basel seemed to me enviably cosmopolitan, but the pressure of
tradition was too much for me. When I came to Zurich I felt the
difference at once. Zurich relates to the world not by the intel ect but
by commerce. Yet here the air was free, and I had always valued
that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the
centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture.
For Basel I have to this day a nostalgic weakness, despite the fact
that I know it no longer is as it was. I stil remember the days when
Bachofen and Burckhardt walked in the streets, and behind the
cathedral stood the old chapter house, and the old bridge over the
Rhine, half made of wood.
For my mother it was hard that I was leaving Basel. But I knew that I
could not spare her this pain, and she bore it bravely. She lived
together with my sister, a delicate and rather sickly nature, in every
respect different from me. She was as though born to live the life of
a spinster, and she never married. But she developed a remarkable
personality, and I admired her attitude. She had to undergo an
operation that was considered harmless, but she did not survive it. I
was deeply impressed when I discovered that she had put al her
affairs in order beforehand, down to the last detail. At bottom she
was always a stranger to me, but I had great respect for her. I was
rather emotional, whereas she was always composed, though very
sensitive deep down. I could imagine her spending her days in a
Home for Gentlewomen, just as the only sister of my grandfather
had done.
With my work at Burgholzli, life took on an undivided reality--al
intention, consciousness, duty, and responsibility. It was an entry
into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe
only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of
meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and
reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were
only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations,
accidents without coherence, knowledge, that shrank to ever
smal er circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively
narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine. For six months
I locked myself within the monastic wal s in order to get accustomed
to the life and spirit of the asylum, and I read through the fifty
volumes of the Al gemeine Zeitschrift for Psychiatric from its very
beginnings, in order to acquaint myself with the psychiatric
mentality. I wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight
of its own destruction, for psychiatry seemed to me an articulate
expression of that biological reaction which seizes upon the so-
cal ed healthy mind in the presence of mental il ness. My
professional col eagues seemed to me no less interesting than the
patients. In the years that fol owed I secretly compiled statistics on
the hereditary background of my Swiss col eagues, and. gained
much instruction. I did this for my personal edification as wel as for
the sake of understanding the psychiatric mentality.
I need scarcely mention that my concentration and self-imposed
confinement alienated me from my col eagues. They did not know,
of course, how strange psychiatry seemed to me, and how intent I
was on penetrating into its spirit. At that time my interest in therapy
had not awakened, but the pathological variants of so-cal ed
normality fascinated me, because they offered me the longed-for
opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the psyche in general.
These, then, were the conditions under which my career in
psychiatry began--the subjective experiment out of which my
objective life emerged. I have neither the