C.G.Jung Letters

I must send you my most cordial thanks for your masterly as well as veracious book: Demian.¹ I know it is very immodest and officious of me to break through your pseudonym; but, while reading the book, I had the feeling that it must somehow have reached me via Lucerne.² Although I failed to recognize you in the Sinclair sketches in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung,³ I always wondered what sort of person Sinclair must be, because his psychology seemed to me so remarkable. Your book came at a time when, once again, I was oppressed by the darkened consciousness of modern man, and by his hopeless bigotry, as Sinclair was by little Knauer.⁴ Hence your book hit me like the beam of a lighthouse on a stormy night. A good book, like every proper human life, must have an ending. Yours has the best possible ending, where everything that has gone before runs truly to its end, and everything with which the book began begins over again—with the birth and awakening of the new man. The Great Mother is impregnated by the loneliness of him that seeks her. In the shell burst 5 she bears the "old" man into death, and implants in the new the everlasting monad, the mystery of individuality. And when the renewed man reappears the mother reappears too—in a woman on this earth.

I could tell you a little secret⁶ about Demian of which you became the witness, but whose meaning you have concealed from the reader and perhaps also from yourself. I could give you some very satisfying information about this, since I have long been a good friend of Demian's and he has recently initiated me into his private affairs—under the seal of deepest secrecy. But time will bear out these hints for you in a singular way.

I hope you will not think I am trying to make myself interesting by mystery-mongering; my amor fati is too sacred to me for that. I only wanted, out of gratitude, to send you a small token of my great respect for your fidelity and veracity, without which no man can have such apt intuitions. You may even be able to guess what passage in your book I mean.

I immediately ordered a copy of your book for our Club library.⁷ It is sound in wind and limb and points the way.

□ (Handwritten.) See Hesse, 28 Jan 22, n □.

¹ Berlin, 1919 (tr 1965). The novel appeared originally under the pseudonym of its hero-narrator "Emil Sinclair." H. borrowed the name from Isaak von Sinclair (1775-1815), diplomat and author, and a friend of the poet Hölderlin, whom H. greatly admired. — The true author was generally unknown until June 1920, when Hesse officially acknowledged authorship. (The editor is indebted to Professor Ralph Freedman, Princeton U., for this information.)

² In 1916 H. had a serious breakdown, for which reason he went to the Sanatorium Sonnmatt, near Lucerne. There he was advised to consult Dr. J. B. Lang, a medical psychotherapist and pupil of Jung's. The therapeutic relationship soon developed into a close friendship. The analytical interviews went on from May 1916 to Nov. 1917, altogether about seventy sessions, each lasting up to three hours. The fruit of these interviews was Demian, written explosively in 1917 (and to a lesser degree H.'s Mächen, 1919 [tr. Strange News from Another Star, 1972]).—This information is taken from Hugo Ball, Hermann Hesse, sein Leben uncdsein Werk (Berlin, 1927). Also cf. Maier, 24 Mar.50.

³ E. Sinclair, "Der Europaär; Eine Fabel," Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4 and 06Aug. 1918 (nos. 10026, 10032); tr. "The European," in If the War Goes On . . . 1971).

⁴ A fellow -tudent of Sinclair's, a lost creature, looking for the saviouur in incclair.

⁵ Sinclair, as a soldier in the first World War, has a vision of "a mighty, godlike figure with shining stars in her hair . . . and the features of Frau Eva [Demian's mother]" giving birth to thousands of stars. One of the stars seems to seek him out: "The world was shattered above me with a thunderous roar": he is hit by a shell splinter. In a field hospital he finds himself lying beside the mortally wounded Demian.

⁶ As this letter came to light only after the present volume was in page proof, nothing definite has as yet been ascertained about the allusions in this and the following paragraph More research is needed But it is probable that the "small token of my great respect" was a copy of Jung's Septem Sermones, where the Gnostic figure of Abraxas plays a key role. The "passage in your book" may refer to the beginning of ch. 5 of Demian: "The bird is breaking its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. He who wishes to be born must first destroy a world The bird flies to God. The name of the god is Abraxas." The winged egg and Abraxas appear in a Gnostic mandala painted by Jung in 1916: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, frontispiece and p. xi. Cf. also Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse (Princeton, 1965), pp. 111 ff.

⁷ The Psychological Club of Zurich.

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In 1916 I underwent an analysis with a doctor friend of mine who was in part a pupil of Jung's. At that time I became acquainted with Jung's early work, the Wandlungen der Libido,1 which made an impression on me. I also read later books by Jung, but only until around 1922 because thereafter analysis did not greatly interest me. I have always had respect for Jung, but his works did not make such strong impressions on me as did those of Freud. Jung will already have written you that, in connection with an evening of readings I gave as the guest of Jung's Zurich Club, I also had several analytic sessions with him around 1921.² Then too I got a nice impression of him, though at that time I began to realize that, for analysts, a genuine relationship to art is unattainable: they lack the organ for it.

I shall stay here still longer, the fruit I have bitten into has to be eaten to the full. Dr. Jung impresses me very much.

I am so glad to know that waiting for me down in the Ticino are not just chestnut forests and typewriter, but also dear friends.

I send greetings to both of you in Agnuzzo and to forest and lake from the bottom of my heart.

□ As published in an essay by Benjamin Nelson, The Psychoanalytic Review, 50:3 (Fall 1963); see Maier, 24 Mar. 50, n. □. The translation (slightly revised) is published here with permission of Mr. Heiner Hesse and of The Psychoanalytic Review. — According to Nelson (p. 12), the copy "bears neither a date nor point of origin on its face." The above date is adduced in relation to Jung's letter to Maier.

¹ Wandlungen und Symbols der Libido (1912).

² Cf. the following letter. Mr Heiner Hesse has recalled, in a private communication to Professor Ralph Freedman, that his father had several analytical sessions with Jung in Feb. and Apr. 1921. This was at a time when he was unable to complete his novel Siddhartha (1922; tr. 1951). Cf. Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse, pp. 150-151.

□ From a copy of the original in the Hesse Archiv, Marbach, kindly made available by Professor Ralph Freedman, with permission of Mr. Heiner Hesse. The translation is Professor Freedman's. — Hugo Ball was one of Hesse's closest friends from the time of their meeting, 1919, until Ball's death, 1927. At Hesse's suggestion, the publisher S. Fischer commissioned Ball to write the first authorized Hesse biography (see above, Hesse, 3 Dee. 19, n. 2).

¹ The allusion is to Hesse himself, as he liked to use the names of his heroes and in 1919 had completed the story "Klingsors letzter Sommer" (pub. 1920; tr. Klingsor's Last Summer, 1971).

Addenda

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