Toni and I are still grappling with the analysis of my death wish. We have gone over together all the records of my dreams; and it is astonishing how often and in how many different contexts the motif recurs. What we are trying to do now is relate the dream wish to its object in real life and examine my own connection with that object.
Today we are happier together. Last night I responded to her challenge. While Emma was sleeping, in the small hours of the morning, I slipped out of the house and cycled over to Toni’s place. We had four wonderful hours together, and I left just as the false dawn was breaking over the lake. When Emma woke and came looking for me, I was shaved and tidy and working assiduously at my desk. No smoking this time! No brandy stains on what has turned out to be a very useful set of notes!
Toni, too, is much calmer in mind. It is not simply the sexual release, although that, she assures me, was enormous; it is the fact that I dared something for her. My midnight visit was an escapade that might have cost me dear, if Emma had found out. Her outburst the other day still troubles me. I have always assumed that, like good respectable Swiss, we shall stay wedded, no matter what happens in the enclave of our marriage. Now I am not so sure. If Emma finds my delinquencies intolerable, she may well decide to take the children and go back to her family, who would without doubt receive her and comfort her. On the other hand, if my reputation gets too much mauled, I may just decide to say to hell with them all, toss my own cap over the windmill and go away with Toni. She would be quite happy for us to live together with or without benefit of clergy. I discourage talk of this; but I know it is in her mind and it lurks always at the back of mine. After all, Freud seems to survive this kind of situation better than I. I suspect that “amortising his marriage” means that he has some kind of accommodation with his wife’s sister. Which would explain why he is so devilishly sensitive to my published views on the incest taboo. Well, he’s going to hear more of the same in Munich, come September. Freud is, of course, the clear object of one death wish, and Toni continues to hammer at this single subject.
“Freud is the new father figure in your life. You adopted him to replace your natural father who failed you when he was alive, about whom you feel guilty now that he is dead. You have a deep emotional attachment to Freud. Yet, you are going to kill him.”
“No, that’s not accurate. My subconscious entertains the death wish. It expresses itself in dreams. My conscious – and my conscience – reject the thought.”
“Not true!” Toni is very resolute. She will tolerate no hedging on this argument. “You are going to kill Freud. You are going to do it at the Munich conference. You will disavow publicly one of his key doctrines. You will fight him for the presidency of the Psycho-Analytical Society and you will probably win. What is all that but a duel to the death?”
It is true, of course. I admit it and pay her a compliment on her precision and sagacity. She waves it aside impatiently.
“Please, Carl! Don’t do that with me. Not now! This is much too important. We’re just beginning to make progress. There’s something else behind this Freud situation; we have to find it together. In the last chaos dream you saw the black stallion. Right?”
“Yes.”
She riffles through her notes until she comes to the reference and reads it back to me.
“‘I saw his forequarters and the great muscles in his neck.’ But you didn’t see his hindquarters?”
“No.”
“How did you know it was a stallion?”
“Well, I suppose the build of the beast, the strength, the . . .”
“The hindquarters were hidden, but you knew there was a penis there and testicles. What are you trying to hide that has to do with your maleness? Please, Carl! You have to be honest, otherwise I can’t help you.”
Suddenly I want to tell her. The words come pouring out: the guilty joy, the bitter shame, the transference to Freud of this unresolved homoerotic episode, my fear of how she herself might regard it. At the end I am blubbering like a schoolboy, my pride in tatters. Toni strokes my bowed head and repeats over and over, “There . . . there . . . there,” as if she is soothing a stricken child. When all my tears are spent, she sponges my cheeks and cups my face in her hands and smiles at me with grave tenderness.
“Now at last I know you love me, Carl. You’ve given me the greatest proof possible: your trust.”
“I’ve given you the rottenest part of myself.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that to me! What did you expect of yourself – a boy, a parson’s son, with a man he loved and trusted? I only wish you could have enjoyed the whole thing, instead of carrying the guilt of it all these years. Don’t you see, Carl, this is a big part of your problem. Everything with you is half done, half finished, half enjoyed. Me, Emma, all the others who pop in and out of your life, your children, too! You want them and you don’t want them. Everything is a transaction. You always try to calculate whether what you get is worth what you’re paying. There’s no joy in that!”
“Then perhaps today will be the beginning of joy.”
It is a wish more than a hope. She is very pleased with herself because she has flushed out one small demon from the thickets of my soul. She does not realise that there are legions more lurking in the undergrowth. Still, she has cause to be proud, and I to be grateful, that this sordid little history is out in the open.
I am calm now. She asks whether I am ready to continue the session. I tell her yes. So long as the water flows, don’t close the sluice gate. Her next question shocks me, as she intends it to do.
“How will you kill Emma and the children?”
“That’s monstrous!”
“No. It’s the logic of the psyche. What you dream is what you wish. What you wish, you will try to accomplish, in fact or symbol. So please, my dear, my love, try to answer. Don’t retreat now!”
I do retreat. I will not tell her my thoughts about divorce, remarriage, all that social chaos. Instead I toss a bait to distract her from the subject.
“I told Emma yesterday that she must let me go my own way. She must concentrate her life on herself and the children.”
Toni reflects for a long moment. Finally she nods assent.
“If you meant it, yes, that’s a death sentence for a woman. If ever you tell me that, I’ll be sure it’s over between us. But are you certain you did mean it?”
Now I am really sliced by Occam’s razor. If I say yes, I am a horror of a man, who marries a woman, breeds five children out of her and then leaves her to her own devices. Toni sees my hesitation. She continues the inquisition.
“Do you love Emma?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your children?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Then why do you dream their death?”
“Because they stand between me and you.”
“But why can’t you love us all?”
“There isn’t enough of me for that.”
“Ah! So you kill them to save yourself, not to possess me!”
“This is dialectic, not analysis! Let’s drop it.”
She has made her point. She is prepared to drop the argument without protest. Now she begins, more placidly, to develop another line of enquiry. This time I am prepared to cooperate, because it interests me, too. She asks:
“The train. You say it was coming from somewhere in the North.”
“It seemed so, yes.”
“Home, here to Switzerland.”
“And the flood didn’t stop it?”
“No. It just kept going. The waters never seemed to threaten the train.”
“That’s why you wanted to stay inside?”
“Until I saw the stallion, yes.”
“Do you see any pattern there, any analogy with your own life?”
Once again I am self-conscious, reluctant. Toni forces me to fit the jigsaw pieces together and admit the connection between dream and reality.
“I am, for the present at least, in a kind of retirement. I need that. I cling to my privacy here. I need the security of a family routine. If this marriage were to break up, I don’t think I would be able – at least in this moment – to cope with it. If I lost you, I too would be lost. When you didn’t meet me on the train, I was terribly troubled.”
“So let me ask you something important, Carl. Your present is here. You need the security of your home place; but where do you see your future?”
“There will be another home place, not far from here. My future, my real future, is inside my head. I know that. I am absolutely certain of it. Wait, I have something to show you.”
I bring out the sketches I have made of my tower, of the ground plan which is at once a mandala and the Tetragrammaton. I explain them with loving care. I tell her I have not yet found the land, but I will one day. I tell her how even as I made the sketches I saw it as a place where we could be together. Her face lights up with pleasure. She is like a young bride looking at the plans of her first home. When I put away the sketches, the light is quenched and her questions take on a more sombre tone.
“Why is Salome blind?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been fishing around for connections with that one. You know that, in the Orient, blind girls are often trained as prostitutes. They are much in demand by older men because they are skilful and sensitive – and they cannot see the ravages of age in their clients. Also, here in Europe, the blind are trained in massage and physiotherapy. They are excellent manipulators. The two ideas are related in the dream. Salome is a person of low origins. She is also the wife, lover and protector of an old man.”
“So, let me ask you another question, Carl. In your very first important dream, the one in the underground cave, you saw the phallus as a giant one-eyed god. Was it blind, too? And how blind are you, Carl?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll put it another way then. You made love to me last night. I know you make love to Emma when you can. What’s the difference? Or are we both just two grey cats in the dark? No, don’t get angry! This is important, and you know it!”
The humour of it hits me and I burst out laughing. Toni is disconcerted. She demands to know what is so funny. I tell her that perhaps I should call Emma and have her join us so that I don’t have to go over the same explanation twice. Where would she like me to start? The physics of intercourse? The oestrous cycle of women? The varieties of stimuli for each sex? Does absence excite desire? Does propinquity kill it? Finally she laughs, too, and agrees to drop the question. Then she tosses another in my lap. This one really takes the prize!
“Carl, how do you see yourself? What are you?”
I know what she is asking. I know why. We have had many discussions, made many tentative definitions about the nature of mental health. We have arrived together at a notion of one-ness, a settled state in which the individual recognises himself as an entity, not necessarily complete or perfect, but acceptable and endurable. I have coined the word “individuation” to express both the process of growth and the state of arrival.
The cat does not question that she is a cat. The zebra does not seek to change his stripes. So, when Toni asks me who I am, I have to tell her honestly that I don’t know yet. This is the nature of my sickness. I have lost the certainty, not only about my goals, but about who is the real man behind the “persona”, the public face of Carl Gustav Jung. As I try to explain, she listens in silence, holding my hands between her own.
“My love, I am like the man who lost his shadow. Because I have no shadow I have no proof that I exist at all. This is why I need you. You prove that I’m solid, substantial and not just a fantasy of my own fantasies. This is why I am unsatisfactory to Emma and she to me. She is bringing up a family, bearing a new child. She needs a sure man to sustain her and her offspring. She cannot carry me too, like a suckling at the breast. So, we resent each other and hurt each other. I know that she has more grounds for complaint than I; but that doesn’t help. Her grip on reality is stronger than mine, as is yours. Just now, I am in the cloud of unknowing! So you see, the real question is not what I am, but what I’ll turn out to be. Have I ever told you that, when I began my university studies, I wanted to be an archaeologist?”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Simple economics. Basel was near home. My parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else. But Basel had no chair in archaeology. So, I took a medical degree instead. Now look at me – a compromise! And compromises never work too well.”
“Don’t underrate yourself. You’re a very good doctor.”
“I used to be, at the clinic. Now I’m the patient – and like all patients I’m centred on myself. Yet something tells me that although I’ve travelled much and will travel more in the physical world, my real exploration will be in the undiscovered country of the mind. Remember the old tag, ‘Non foras ire: in interiore homine habitat Veritas. Truth dwells inside a man. He doesn’t have to go outside to find it.’ Sometimes it’s a frightening journey. I feel often as if I’m toppling off the edge of the world. But I must go on. Perhaps my final destiny is not to be a healer, but one who risks his own sanity to bring back the healing herbs and the magical formulae for other men to use.”
Perhaps! It is all a great perhaps until she puts her arms around me and makes my manhood rise again and turns herself into my shadow so that I can stand, for a brief while at least, solid in the sun. To which, as always, there is an ironic afterthought. The shadow, once reunited with the substance, never, never leaves!