Jung’s Memories

July marked the 150th anniversary of Carl Jung’s birth, a milestone that passed without much fanfare. In his lifetime, he was an icon: Freud’s big gentile counterpart, a sly look on his face in place of Freud’s glower and a pipe in his hand in place of a cigar. By the time of his death, his collected works ran to many volumes and he held honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and half a dozen other institutions. These days, Jung is mostly known for the pop psych and New Age practices inspired by his work. His theoretical writing is mostly read by scholars. This work is difficult: frequently obscure, and so removed from either Freudian theory or contemporary science-based therapy that it is difficult to know how to approach it. But the anniversary is a fitting occasion to revisit his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which is not just an introduction to his ideas and personality but a strange, sui generis document, as vividly alive today as when it was published. 

Jung always disliked the idea of writing an autobiography. Throughout the 1950s, he received regular requests from publishers for his memoirs and from biographers eager to write about his life, which he fended off grouchily. “Someone wants to write my biography but it is foolish,” he told an interviewer in 1954. “I am a simple Bourgeois. I seldom travel — I sit here and write or walk down my garden — my life has not been dramatic.” His followers, however, were not deterred, and neither were publishers. Eventually, a combination of their pressure and (as often happened with Jung) the feeling that such a book was “a task imposed on him from within” brought Jung around. He was persuaded to undertake a kind of autobiography organized by the famous publisher Kurt Wolff in 1957. This was a collaborative work in which some chapters were written by Jung and others by his secretary, Aniela Jaffé, based on extensive notes of her interviews with him. The result was completed just a few months before Jung died in 1961.

Jung was born in 1875 in the Swiss village of Kesswil. His father was a poor pastor, and Jung grew up around small farms and peasant families. He was a solitary child, given to reflections and reveries. As he got older, he had precocious intellectual interests but was not well-liked at school: The other boys found him pretentious and called him “Father Abraham.” He went to medical school because he didn’t have the money to go abroad and study archaeology, and from there into psychiatry, at the time a neglected and unprestigious specialization. There he found his place. He had great skill with patients and made his reputation as a researcher with his experiments on word association. He became an early advocate for the ideas of Sigmund Freud at a time when Freud was considered outside the mainstream. When the two men met in Vienna in 1907, Jung writes, they “talked virtually without a pause for thirteen hours.” Jung became Freud’s protégé and chosen successor but harbored a number of doubts about his theories, in particular his emphasis on sexuality. In 1912, he published a book, The Psychology of the Unconscious, which set out his own views, after which Freud broke with him. Jung spent the next five decades seeing patients and writing books, with visits to America and travels in India and Africa. 

There is not much more biographical information to be found in Memories, Dreams, Reflections beyond this bare outline. “I often asked Jung for specific data on outward happenings, but I asked in vain,” Jaffé writes in her introduction. Wolff, savvy publisher and man of the world, tried repeatedly to nudge Jaffé in this direction. “It would be wonderful,” he wrote to her, “if you could get Jung to talk a little bit about his feelings towards animals, about the characteristics of various nationalities (the British, the Germans, etc.)… and then of course to single personalities such as Charcot, Freud, etc., etc.” This “etc.” could have included Einstein, Thomas Mann, and many others about whom, in person, Jung could tell amusing anecdotes for hours. But it was to no avail. The reader of Memories learns little about Jung’s career and almost nothing about his friends and lovers or his wife and five children, to say nothing of Albert Einstein. The book is, instead, a record of Jung’s inner life. In the prologue, he writes

We do not have to wait long before we are plunged right into this magma. When he was three or four years old, Jung had a dream that has by now become famous in the world of psychoanalysis. In the dream, he discovers a stone-lined hole in the ground in a meadow near his house. He descends some stairs, pulls back a curtain, and finds himself in a dimly lit chamber, where a red carpet runs to a low platform, on which stands a “wonderfully rich golden throne.” He continues:

The reader, expecting an ordinary autobiography or a book of useful wisdom by a famous thinker, is instead plunged into a totally unfamiliar world. There follow many more such shocking visions, including another famous one in which God, from his golden throne, shits on a cathedral and shatters its walls with an enormous turd. We begin to understand what is going on when Jung writes that, from childhood, he felt himself to be split into what he calls his “No. 1” and “No. 2” personalities. No. 1 was his outward self, a schoolboy “who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself.” No. 2 was some aspect of his inner self, which was connected to wisdom, authority, and great age, “an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps.” Memories is the story of this double person: a conservative, well-educated Swiss doctor who, while maintaining all the outward signs of respectability, lives his life according to inner visions so compelling that they amount almost to a private religion. He experiences paranormal phenomena and has prophetic revelations. He engages in sustained dialogue with “autonomous elements” of his own unconscious named Elijah, Philemon, and Ka. Seized with the urge to build a circular stone tower, he builds a circular stone tower.

The electricity that crackles in the air of Jung’s life leaps out onto those of his patients as well. The psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, remarking in an interview on how much he admired Memories, says, “He gave the most extraordinary account of a life lived as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, in which amazing things could happen to people if they spoke freely to each other.” This is certainly true, although it hardly gets across the drama of Jung’s therapeutic encounters as he describes them. One of his patients, for example, is a young secular Jewish woman, “daughter of a wealthy banker, pretty, chic, and highly intelligent,” who suffers from severe anxiety. Jung can make no sense of her case until she tells him that her grandfather was a zaddik, a kind of Jewish saint supposed to possess holy powers. 

Jung understands immediately. He explains to her that her father, in becoming secular, became an apostate, and “you have your neurosis because the fear of God has got into you.” The next night, Jung has a dream in which the patient asks him for an umbrella and he hands it to her on his knees, “as if she were a goddess.” When he tells her the dream the next week, she’s cured. Jung explains matter-of-factly, “All her conscious activity was directed toward flirtation, clothes, and sex, because she knew of nothing else. She knew only the intellect and lived a meaningless life. In reality she was a child of God whose destiny was to fulfill His secret will.”

Amazing things indeed. Just as striking as these dramatic episodes is the peculiar mood and personality that permeate the book. Whole chapters seem to take place in that pre-storm atmosphere of meaningfulness and hilarity I associate with a low dose of psilocybin. Ordinary descriptions have an uncanny freshness — for example, Jung’s passing observations on plants: “It was as though one were peering over the shoulder of the Creator, who, thinking Himself unobserved, was making toys and decorations.” Jung wasn’t a stylist like Freud. The effect of the writing is artlessness, as though Jung were trying to explain everything as simply and clearly as possible. Memories is not a work of literature, but it has a weird, extra-literary gravity: there is a visionary self-confidence behind Jung’s plainspoken language. A friend of mine, recalling the first time he picked up the book, told me that the only experience he could compare it to was that of the wedding guest buttonholed by the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem: 

Memories was reviewed widely, often glowingly. Yet some psychiatrists in particular were more critical: They had no difficulty recognizing Jung’s “glittering eye” as a symptom of madness. Anthony Storr, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, observed,

The great Freudian analyst and writer D. W. Winnicott, in his review of the book in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, wrote, “Jung, in describing himself, gives us a picture of childhood schizophrenia,” providing insight “…into the feelings of those who are mentally split.”

These eminent psychiatrists were respectful of Jung even while stating plainly that his theories were inspired by psychosis. He was a giant. But as their comments hint, his ideas had been losing influence for a while, with Freud’s theories dominant in psychoanalysis and behaviorism gaining ground in academic psychology. This decline would continue inexorably in the following decades, even while Jung’s influence in popular culture grew. Today, Jungian analysts are a small minority. The Jung-Freud split of 1913 is still largely in effect: The average psychoanalyst has probably read less Jung than the average liberal arts college student, and old-school analysts will affect almost not to have heard of him. Jung remains a kind of left-hand path for therapy, identified with the mystical and flaky. Outside their pop versions, his ideas are no longer well known.

What are these ideas? Memories, Dreams, Reflections is not a theoretical work, but it takes place in what you could call the Carl Jung Universe. Much of his theory is implied in the story. You could read Memories as a description of one of Jung’s most important concepts, “individuation.” This is the process of bringing one’s unconscious into consciousness, which Jung saw as the goal of therapy and indeed of life. On the surface, this does not sound very different from Freud; what differs is Jung’s conception of the unconscious. Freud imagined it as a collection of repressed biological drives, most importantly aggression and sex. Jung found this view reductive and called it the “nothing but” approach. For example, he writes in Memories (with an exasperation that might be familiar to other readers of Freud), “Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as ‘psychosexuality.’” 

Jung posited a level of the unconscious separate from these instincts. This was the collective unconscious, a substratum of the mind beneath the personal. In Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, he writes that the contents of this collective unconscious“belong to a pattern not peculiar to any particular mind or person, but rather to a pattern peculiar to mankind in general.” These patterns have a mythological character. Jung called them archetypes, which he imagined as structures of the human mind, a “biological inheritance,” that were the source of the world’s myths. One such archetype is the figure of the hero or redeemer; its variations include the whale or monster who swallows him and the hero’s descent to the underworld, or katabasis.

Jung interpreted his childhood dream of an enthroned phallus as one such katabasis. “What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth,” he writes in Memories. "It was an initiation into the realm of darkness.” As an adult, he experienced a series of apocalyptic dreams and visions as powerful as this childhood one: seas turned to blood; dwarves guarding underground caverns; scarabs and black serpents. Needless to say, he did not search these visions for evidence of repressed sexuality and aggression (or incipient psychosis). This would have been the "nothing but" approach, and Jung took the opposite one. He interpreted these visions as archetypal contents and, in self-induced trances, entered into communication with the figures in them. This is where he met Elijah, Ka, and Philemon. Of this last, he writes, “At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.” 

In this way, Jung played the role of his own first patient, working to become conscious not of his own repressed urges but of the portion of the oceanic vastness of the collective unconscious that was his alone. In so doing, he seems to have achieved his own individuation to his satisfaction. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, an early work that he revised toward the end of his life, he offers an unexpectedly poetic description of maturity. For the mature person, he writes, the self is nothing more than a kind of arbiter between the demands of the exterior world and the equally real demands of the interior one: in his words, “an actual, living something, poised between two world-pictures and their darkly discerned potencies.”

Can we believe these ideas apply to people other than Carl Jung? I’d certainly like to. Freud wrote that “the unconscious can do nothing but wish.” Like much of Freud’s thought, this is admirably straightforward and terribly bleak: the soul as sucking void. In contrast, Jung imagines an unconscious as big as the external world. “The ego,” he writes in Analytical Psychology, “is only a bit of consciousness which floats upon the ocean of the dark things.” And while modern psychotherapy has to do mainly with accommodating oneself to the unpleasant realities of life — Freud famously wrote that often what he could offer patients was merely “ordinary unhappiness” in place of their hysterical misery — Jung imagined the process of individuation as a heroic struggle in which success meant access to mysterious and age-old sources of creativity.

There is a philosophical, or perhaps temperamental, conflict here in which I instinctively want to take Jung’s side. However, I also know that I can’t read his theoretical writing very long before my eyes start to swim. You could say that his writing voice, the one that comes through so clearly in Memories, is his No. 1 personality: no-nonsense, precise, almost superhumanly shrewd and penetrating. But his ideas themselves are more like his No. 2 personality: visionary, sometimes occult, concerned only with eternal truths and the most recondite knowledge — difficult to believe, that is. To say that we’ve inherited archetypes from our ancestors, for example, seems to imply some form of Lamarckism and contradict basic genetics. And it would take a lot before I could believe a dream represented even one myth, much less a complex of alchemical symbols such as the rotundum, the aqua permanens, or the filius hermaphroditus. 

Pop culture hasn’t had a problem digesting Jung’s rich ideas. His stout rejection of scientific materialism inspires the New Age, and his idea of therapy as a creative act inspires self-help authors. “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. — Carl Jung” reads an intertitle page of The Shadow Work Journal, a self-published self-help book by 25-year-old marketer Keila Shaheen that became a bestseller after going viral on TikTok in 2023. Each generation seems to have its own characteristic gloss on Jung. Before Shaheen, Jordan Peterson cast Jung’s psychology as a Nietzschean battle of self-overcoming and Jung himself as a sort of Übermensch. “God only knows what his IQ was,” Peterson marvelled in one lecture. Baby boomers had the more amiable figure of Joseph Campbell (the author who actually wrote that line Shaheen attributes to Jung), who, in cozy talks with Bill Moyers, discussed how the study of archetypes could help PBS viewers to “find your bliss.” 

Shaheen’s book is inspired by Jung’s idea of the shadow, which refers to those qualities in ourselves that we don’t acknowledge consciously but which annoy us inordinately when we recognize them in others. However, her book, along with online “shadow work” amounts to little more than the advice to occasionally sit and think about the aspects of your personality that you don’t like and to call them your shadow, something that presumably adds a little mystery and excitement to the painful process of facing them. Though this doesn’t have much to do with Jung’s ideas, in a way it’s true to his spirit. 

“To the intellect,” Jung writes in Memories, “all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without.”

No, we would not. But modern psychotherapy as so many people experience it — that is, as a bureaucracy of diagnosis and medication — is notably lacking in glamour, as is the worldview that informs it, scientific materialism. Frustration with medication has lately inspired a modest resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis, and frustration with the “materialist paradigm” has been inspiring alternative beliefs for decades (or longer). It’s unclear to me how useful Jung’s ideas are in treating ordinary unhappiness. But his “inordinate idea of his own importance,” which extended also to his patients and to human beings generally, strikes me as a corrective to the depreciation of human importance implied by materialism — what Jung called “the general devaluation of the human soul.” It's difficult to read any portion of his work, and in particular Memories, without feeling a little beguiled by his conception of our own depths. 

These depths, for Jung, included experiences some regard as symptoms of mental illness. I couldn’t say. I’m not a therapist or a Jung scholar, only a reader. I know that for a reader, the split between Jung’s rational side and his visionary one is what gives his work much of its power. I can almost imagine these two sides as the positively and negatively charged ends of a magnet that create electricity in electromagnetic induction. Just No. 1, and Jung would have been an ordinary, if talented, researcher, a disciple of Freud who made contributions to the field of personality testing. Just No. 2, and he would have been a prophet or madman. This contradictory quality of his personality gives it its lasting fascination. The “simple bourgeois” who walked in his garden might, while he strolled, have been conversing with Philemon, “a pagan [who] brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.” Even in his most impenetrable writing there is a sense of authority and great intelligence, and even the people who dismiss his ideas (“gobbledygook” — Richard Noll, “flapdoodle” — Walter Kendrick, “nonsense” — Philip Rieff) still speak of him as a genius or “colossal personality.” Aniela Jaffé wrote, “I must confess that the approach of the old magician never lost its excitement in all those years. With my inner ear I still hear it to this day.”

It’s no surprise that Jung is a favorite of artists. Among the many who admired him was Federico Fellini, who made a pilgrimage to visit the stone tower he built at Bollingen, in Switzerland. When Fellini arrived, one of Jung’s grandsons led the director and his party to a room that he said he rarely showed visitors because, he admitted, it embarrassed him. This was a small space, dimly lit with two tiny Gothic windows, the walls painted by Jung with mandalas and illustrations from myth. Inside were small objects, statues, “an incredible bric-à-brac, and in a corner the robe of a magician (an initiate or guru). The young man explained to them how his grandfather had spent hours and hours there.” This room left Fellini’s friends perplexed, but “it inspired in him an impression of intimacy, somewhat akin to having discovered a secret vice, which in his eyes rendered Jung more human and thus greater; closer and at the same time more mysterious.” Fellini got it. This room seems to have expressed Jung’s No. 2 personality in something close to its pure form. Fellini didn’t try to kiss the hem of the robe or dismiss the whole thing as ridiculous. He appreciated the contradiction. 

Jung’s building at Bollingen still stands, a fat tower attached to several outbuildings on the shore of Lake Zurich. Memories is another kind of monument, even more idiosyncratic and impressive, something like standing stones or a jungle temple. The extremely rational-minded might declare these monuments a waste of effort, structures erected to gods who aren't there. Most visitors will find that they cannot take their eyes off it or visit without feeling in some way implicated — in the depths, in the deep past.