Dr. Jung:
I think there are some points about the functions in general that need further clarification. I would like to speak now of the four functions in relation to reality, for it is my idea that each of them brings to the subject a special aspect of reality. This diagram then (Diagram 6) represents the four main functions emanating from a virtual center and constituting, in their totality, the subject.
The subject is suspended in a world of objects and cannot be thought of apart from them. Ordinarily we class as objects only those things belonging to the external world, but equally important are the intrapsychical objects with which the subject is in contact. To this latter class belong any conscious content that has slipped out of consciousness, been forgotten, as we say, or repressed, and all unconscious processes. There are always parts of your functions that are within your conscious, and parts that are without your conscious but still within the sphere of psychical activity.
Some of these intrapsychical objects really belong to me, and when I forget them they can be likened to pieces of furniture that have got lost. But some, on the other hand, are intruders into my psychical entourage and come from the collective unconscious. Or the intruder may be from the external world. Take, for example, an institution. This may be unconscious and therefore an object rising out of myself, or it might be started from without by something in the surroundings.
Obviously, the external world does not remain without effect on the functions. If sensations were only subjective and not founded on reality, it would not carry with it the conviction it does. To be sure, not all the sense of conviction rests on the effect derived from the outer object. Sometimes there is also a strong subjective element, as the hallucinations and illusions to be observed in pathological cases prove. But the greater part of the conviction carried by sensation derives from the connection of sensation with the trans-subjective or objective fact in reality. It is of reality as it is that sensation speaks, not reality as it might have been nor as it might be, but as it is now. Therefore sensation gives only a static image of reality, and this is the basic principle of the sensation type.
Now, intuition carries with it a similar feeling of certainty, but of a different kind of reality. It speaks of the reality of possibilities, but to an intuitive type this is just as absolute a reality as that possessed by the static fact. Inasmuch as we can test the validity of intuition by seeing whether or not the possibilities do occur actually, and since millions of these possibilities arrived at by intuition have been realized, it is legitimate for the intuitive type to value his function as a means of understanding one phase of reality, that is, dynamic reality.
When we come to the rational functions, things become different. Thinking is based on reality only indirectly, but nonetheless it can carry just as much conviction. Nothing is more real than an idea to a person who thinks. There are certain general or collective ideas from which the thinker derives his judgment, and these we know as the logical modi, but these in turn are derived from some underlying idea; in other words, the logical modi go back to archetypal origins. It would be difficult indeed to trace out their history, but someday, when men are more intelligent than they are now, it will undoubtedly be done. But if we follow the history of thought in the rough way possible for us, it can be readily seen that all times have recognized the existence of primordial images. To Kant they were the noumena, “das Ding an sich.” To Plato they were the eidola, the models that existed before the world existed, and from which all things in the world were derived.
Diagram 6
Thinking, then, derives from the reality of the image, but has the image reality? To answer that question, let us turn to the field of natural science, where we can find abundant evidence of the potency of an image. If you cut an earthworm in two, the segment with the head will grow a new tail, and the tail segment will grow a new head. If you destroy the lens of a salamander’s eye, a new lens will develop. In both these cases it must be assumed that the organism carries within itself, in some way, an image of its totality, which totality tends to be reestablished when disturbed. In the same way, the fact that the mature oak is contained within the acorn suggests this principle of the image of the whole. Of course, the principle of reestablishing the integrity of the whole when a portion is lopped off works within limitations. The thing replaced is of a more archaic type than the original. So one can say in general that if a differentiated form is removed, the organ substituted goes back to a more primitive level. The same thing happens psychologically. That is, as soon as we set aside the more differentiated function, we hark back to the archaic level. We can see such a thing even in so simple a thing as the progress of an argument. If we fail to convince by means of logical thought, we abandon it and resort to more primitive means, that is, we raise our voices, catch after current phrases, become sarcastic or bitter. In other words, our refined tools failing, we grasp the hammer and tongs of emotion.
Returning to this question of the images, we find something in nature corresponding to the principle involved in them. When we apply the conception to thinking only, we suppose the images to be static. The great philosophers have spoken of them always as being eternal. It is these static images that underlie thinking. We could call them, if we chose, Logos.
Feeling, as we have seen, has also its reality conviction, that is, it has to do with a trans-subjective fact. If we take it from certain aspects, it can bear a resemblance to thinking, but this is merely an apparent, not a real connection. Thus, for example, I can take the concept freedom, and show it to be a highly abstract static concept; that is, I can keep it an idea, but freedom can convey also a powerful feeling. In the same way, the phrase “my country” can be taken abstractly or emotionally. In this way, most of our general ideas are feeling values and intellectual images also, so that we can say that the underlying fact of feeling is a dynamic image. That is to say, it is an image that works, it has motive power. An abstract statement of feeling does not move, it is static. If I define God as the unchanging totality of all changing processes, what have I but a thoroughly static idea? But it is easy to imagine God as a most potently dynamic image. For the totality of the dynamic images can use Eros.
To sum up, we have considered four kinds of realities: (1) static reality that comes to us through sensation; (2) the dynamic reality revealed by intuition; (3) static images given us by thinking; (4) dynamic images sensed by feeling.
I assume that the fact of the discovery of the four functions is equivalent to a statement about the world, that is, that the world has these four aspects of reality. We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves. We can think of the possibility of the world changing in such a way as to bring another function, or other functions, into existence; meantime I offer these conceptions as a possible point of orientation.
So now you see what I think of feeling.
I have been asked whether, if a number of individuals in the class draw up a statement of feeling as it appears to them, I would be willing to discuss it. Of course I will do this very gladly, it will be an advantageous way of going into the subject; but I must warn you not to take feeling too subjectively in that case. Each function type has a special way of viewing feeling, and is likely to find things about it which are untrue for the other types. Thus one of the points with respect to the functions that has been most combated is my contention that feeling is rational. My books have been read largely by intellectuals, who have, of course, not been able to see feeling from this aspect, because feeling in themselves is thoroughly irrational by reason of its contamination by elements from the unconscious. Similarly, people with a fairly developed amount of feeling, but in whom there is also intuition with it, hold feeling to be an irrational function.
It is the fate of people to seek to interpret life chiefly through the function strongest in them. Sometimes it is quite impossible to convince a person that he cannot grasp the trans-subjective world with one function alone, no matter how strong that function may be. With respect to the thinking type, this was once borne in upon me very impressively by a man who came to consult me about a compulsion neurosis.1 He said to me, “I don’t think you can cure me, but I would like to know why it is that I can’t be cured, because as you will see, there is really nothing that I do not-know about myself.” And that proved to be true, he had covered his case with truly remarkable intelligence and from the Freudian point of view he was completely analyzed, for there was no corner of his past, even back to the remotest infancy, that remained unexplored. For a moment I could not make out myself why it was that he could not get well. Then I began to question him about his financial situation, as he was just coming from St. Moritz and had spent the winter at Nice. “Were you able to make so much money that you could live that way without working?” I asked him. He became annoyed with me for pressing this point, but finally had to tell the truth, namely that he was unable to work, had never made any money for himself, but was being supported by a schoolteacher, ten years older than himself. He said none of this had anything to do with his neurosis, that he loved the woman, and she him, and they both had thought the situation out together and that it was all right. Nor was I ever able to make him see that he was behaving like a pig to this woman, who was living on next to nothing while he was carousing over Europe. He left my office with the firm conviction that, having “thought” the whole thing out, as he was pleased to put it, that finished it.
But the sensation type can crucify reality with equal facility. Suppose there is a woman who has fallen in love with her sister’s husband. He is her brother-in-law, and one does not fall in love with one’s brother-in-law, therefore the fact is never admitted into consciousness. It is only the facts as they are controlled by the situation as it is that come into the argument; the possibilities behind must be carefully excluded. So these two live for twenty years and only arrive at the true state of affairs through analysis.
I have spoken more than once of the way an intuitive type can neglect reality, and you can, I am sure, supply an equal number of examples of the ways a feeling type can do the same thing. If a thing is disagreeable to the feelings, a feeling type will slide over the reality of it with the greatest facility.
Inasmuch as women are more connected with Eros than are men, they tend to have particular notions about feeling, just as men, even if not intellectual, tend to have particular notions about thinking. So it is hard for men and women to understand one another. The woman tends to identify feeling with reality, the man clings obstinately to the logical statement.
Up to this time we have spoken of the subject as though it were unchanging in time, but as we know, the body is a four-dimensional entity, the fourth dimension being time. If the fourth dimension were spatial, our bodies would be wormlike—that is, drawn out in space between two points. In Diagram 7, I have tried to give some idea of an individual moving through space, that is, three-dimensional space. The individual cannot be understood merely as a static entity. If we want to have a complete notion for the individual, we must add the factor of time. Time means a past and a future, and so the individual is only complete when we add his actual structure as the result of past events, and at the same time the actual structure taken as the starting point of new tendencies. According to this idea, we can make out two types, those individuals who hang back in their time under the spell of the past, and others too much ahead of themselves. The latter are only to be understood by their tendencies.
Diagram 7
So far, these pictures have disregarded the unconscious. In Diagram 8, I have brought this factor into consideration. This diagram presupposes a fully developed thinking type in whom sensation and intuition are half conscious and half unconscious, and in whom feeling is in the unconscious. This does not mean that such a type is devoid of feeling; it only means that, compared to his thinking, his feeling is not under his control but eruptive in character, so that normally it is not in the picture at all, and then all of a sudden it quite possesses him.
In Diagram 9, I have shown the individual in relation to the world of external objects on the one hand and to the collective unconscious images on the other. Connecting him with the first world, that is, the world of external objects, is the persona, developed by the forces from within and the forces from without in interaction with one another. We may think of the persona as the bark of a conscious personality. As we have indicated elsewhere, it is not wholly our choice what the persona shall be, for we can never control entirely the forces that are to play on our conscious personalities.
Diagram 8
Diagram 9
The center of this conscious personality is the ego. If we take the layer “back” of this ego, we come to the personal subconscious. This contains our incompatible wishes or fantasies, our childhood influences, repressed sexuality, in a word all those things we refuse to hold in consciousness for one reason or another, or which we lose out of it. In the center is the virtual nucleus or central government, representing the totality of the conscious and unconscious self.
Then we come to the collective unconscious as it is present in us—that is, the part of the racial experience which we carry within us. It is the home of Cabiri or dwarfs whom we may not see else they cease to serve us. In this region another virtual center often turns up in dreams. It is a minor figure of oneself usually projected on a friend, for the unconscious pays these compliments very easily. I have called it the shadow self. The primitive has developed an intricate set of relationships to his shadow which symbolize very well my idea of the shadow self. He must never tread on another’s shadow, so too we must never mention the weaknesses of another, those things in him of which he is ashamed and has therefore put out of sight. A primitive says, “Don’t go out at midday, it is dangerous not to see your shadow.” We say, “Be careful when you don’t know your weaknesses.”
We can speak of the conscious ego as the subjective personality, and of the shadow self as the objective personality. This latter, made up of what is part of the collective unconscious in us, carries the things that appear in us as effects. For we do have effects on people which we can neither predict nor adequately explain. Instinct warns us to keep away from this racial side of ourselves. If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. The primitive says, “Don’t let a ghost get into you.” By this he conveys the double idea, “Don’t let a visitor get into your unconscious, and don’t lose an ancestral soul.”
The feeling of awe of the primitive with respect to what we call the collective unconscious is very great. It is to him the ghost world. The following story told by an explorer among the Eskimo is an example of this awe, shared even by the medicine man.2 The explorer came to the hut of a Polar Eskimo where incantations were going on over a sick man for the purpose of driving away the ghosts or evil spirits that were making him sick. There was a tremendous noise going on, with the sorcerer jumping and running about like mad. As soon as he saw the explorer he became very quiet and said: “This is all a nonsense.” He had taken him for another medicine man because no one but a medicine man is supposed to approach a hut where such an incantation is going on. It is the custom, too, for the medicine men who are struggling with the ghosts to smile and say to one another that the whole thing is nonsense, not because they think it is, but because they use it as a sort of apotropaic joke. It is in the nature of a euphemism that should protect them against their own fear.
This instinctive fear of the collective unconscious is very strong indeed in us. There can be a continual flow of fantasies inundating us from it, the danger signal coming when the flow cannot be stopped. If one has once seen this happen one feels deeply frightened. We have in general not much imagination about these things, but the primitive knows all about it. For the most part, we are so cut off from it as to float above it.
When it comes to the rather delicate task of locating the collective unconscious, you must not think of it as being compassed by the brain alone but as including the sympathetic nervous system as well. Only that part of it that is your vertebrate inheritance—that is, that comes to you from your vertebrate ancestors—is to be thought of as within the limits of the central nervous system. Otherwise it is outside your psychological sphere. The very primitive animal layers are supposed to be inherited through the sympathetic system, and the relatively later animal layers belonging to the vertebrate series are represented by the cerebrospinal system. The most recent human layers form the basis of actual consciousness, and thus the collective unconscious is reaching into consciousness, and only thus far can you call the collective unconscious psychological. We wish to reserve the term “psychological,” used thus, for those elements which, theoretically at least, can be brought into conscious control. On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as “outside” our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves.
As an example of how the collective unconscious can work upon you through the inside fact, I would give the following: Suppose a man is sitting somewhere out of doors and a bird flies down near him. Another day he is in the same place and a similar bird comes. This time the bird stirs him in an altogether strange way, there is something mysterious attaching to that second bird. The naïve man certainly assumes that the extraordinary effect of the second bird belongs as much to the outside world as the ordinary effect produced by the first bird. If he is a primitive he will distinguish between the two effects by saying the first bird is just a bird, but the second is a “doctor” bird. But we know that the extraordinary effect of the “doctor” bird is due to a projection upon it from the collective unconscious, from within the man.
Ordinarily, it is only by such a projection into the external world that we become conscious of the collective unconscious images. Thus suppose we meet with an extraordinary effect from without. An analysis of that effect shows that it amounts to a projection of an unconscious content, and so we arrive at the realization of such a content. The case mentioned above is an ordinary one insofar as we assume an individual who is chiefly identical with the ego or conscious, but if it should happen that the individual should be more on the side of his shadow, then he would be capable of realizing without projection an immediate—that is, an autonomous—movement of the unconscious contents. But if the individual is identical with his normal ego, then even such an autonomous manifestation of the unconscious—that is, one not released by the projection, nor by external effect, but originating within himself—appears to him as if in the external world. In other words, it requires a very close contact with the unconscious, and an understanding of it, for a man to realize that the origin of his mythological or spiritual experiences is within himself, and that whatever forms these experiences may appear to take, they do not in fact come from the external world.
Using the diagram I have just discussed, that is, Diagram 9, we could give an explanation of analysis. The analyst makes his approach through the persona. Certain formalities of greeting are gone through, and compliments exchanged. In this way, one comes to the gateway of the conscious. Then the conscious contents are carefully examined, and the one passes to the personal subconscious. Here the doctor often marvels that many of the things found there are not conscious since they seem so obvious to an observer. At the personal subconscious a Freudian analysis ends, as I indicated above. When you have finished with the personal subconscious, you have finished with the causal influence of the past. Then you must come to the reconstructive side, and the collective unconscious will speak in images and the consciousness of unconscious objects will begin. If you can succeed in breaking down that dividing wall made by the personal subconscious, the shadow can be united with the ego and the individual becomes a mediator between two worlds. He can now see himself from the “other side” as well as from “this side.” Here consciousness of the shadow self is not though,3 one must have the unconscious images also at one’s disposal. The animus or the anima begins to be active now, and the anima will bring in the figure of the old man. All these figures will be projected into the conscious external world, and objects of the unconscious begin to correspond to objects in the external world, so that the latter, the real objects, take on a mythological character. This means an enormous enrichment of life.
I have often been asked about the “geology” of a personality, and so I have tried to picture this after a fashion. Diagram 10 shows individuals coming out of a certain common level, like the summits of mountains coming out of a sea. The first connection between certain individuals is that of the family, then comes the clan which unites a number of families, then the nation which unites a still bigger group. After that we could take a large group of connected nations such as would be included under the heading “European man.” Going further down, we would come to what we could call the monkey group, or that of the primate ancestors, and after that would come the animal layer in general, and finally the central fire, with which as the diagram shows, we are still in connection.4
Diagram 10
There has apparently been considerable misunderstanding of what I have said about the relation of the subject to the external object, and also about the relation of the subject to the world of the unconscious images. In the supplementary material I have added to the lecture as given in the class, I hope to have been able to clear up these points, but as they are of unusual importance, it is worthwhile to pursue the matter further even if it should take us somewhat far afield. Let us look at the matter historically, in order to get more light on the problem of the relation of the subject to the external object. This is a theme philosophers have been in dispute about from very ancient times. The doctrine of the esse in re was the point of view held by the antique world. Everything we perceive outside ourselves is so completely “outside” as to be in no way conditioned by our way of perceiving it. It is even as though there were emanations from our eyes illuminating the object and making it visible to us, so little cognizance does this view take of the subjective side of seeing. This is the notion held by the uneducated man today.
This conception was followed by that of esse in intellectu solo; that is, what we see is an image in the head and nothing but that. The question as to whether there are things beyond is left open. This would lead to a solipsism, and makes of the world a gigantic hallucination.
Our idea is of esse in anima. This principle recognizes the objectivity of a world outside ourselves, but it holds that of this world we can never perceive anything but the image that is formed in our minds. We never see an object as such, but we see an image which we project out upon the object. We positively know that this image is only imperfectly similar to things as they are. Thus it is indubitable that sound consists of waves; but only when the waves come at a certain rate, let us say sixteen to the second approximately, do we perceive waves as sound. When the vibration is at sixteen or a more rapid rate, we do not sense waves at all, but hear a sound; below that rate we hear no sound, but feel the vibration of the air on the skin. The same is true of light, which has wave character when examined with suitable apparatuses, but which to our eye has nothing of the kind. That shows in how far the world as we perceive it is a subjective image—that is, an image within us—but at the same time this image is related, and indispensably related, to a thing in itself whose absolute nature is independent of our senses and impossible for us to perceive. Whatever we perceive is an image in the psyche. In that sense, even external reality is in our heads, but only in that sense, and we must avoid speaking too much of the world as subjective images, lest we convey the impression of holding to transcendental idealism, which is practically esse in intellectu solo.
The esse in anima admits the subjective nature of our world perception, at the same time maintaining the assumption emphatically that the subjective image is the indispensable link between the individual entity, or entity of consciousness, and the unknown strange object. I even hold that this case of the subjective image is the very first manifestation of a sort of transcendent function that derives from the tension between the entity of consciousness and the strange object.
Everything I said about the image of the so-called external reality I have to say also about the images of the collective unconscious: namely, they refer to the influences of absolutely existing external objects, and they are the psychic reactions to them, the only difference between the image of external reality and the archetype being that the former is conscious and the latter unconscious. The archetype nonetheless appears also in the so-called external world if it is not “dug up” in ourselves by an analytical procedure. But you can apply the same analytical processes to the image of external reality also, and see how subjective they are.
There is a further difference between the images of external reality and the archetypes. Images of external reality make up the contents of our conscious memory and also of our artificial reminiscences—that is, our books, archives, etc.—while the archetypes are records of reactions to subjective sense-images. In our conscious memory we record things as they are subjectively, as memories of real facts, but in the unconscious we record the subjective reactions to the facts as we perceive them in the conscious. I should suppose that there are layers even of such repercussions, reactions of reactions, and that they would form the stratification of the mind.
Let us take an example: The fact of Christianity persisting through the ages has left a certain reaction in our unconscious minds; let us call it reaction b. This is a repercussion to another reaction we can call reaction a, that is, our conscious relation to Christianity throughout the ages. It is reaction b, the repercussion to the conscious reaction, which reaches the unconscious strata and persists in our minds as an archetype.
That reaction b is modeled on an archetype already, which archetype is simply molded and reshaped by the new deposit. Or to take another example: the most regular recurrence in the world is the rising and the setting of the sun. Our consciousness remembers the real facts of this phenomenon, but our unconscious has recorded the untold millions of sunrises and sunsets in the form of a hero myth, and the hero myth is the expression of the way in which our unconscious has reacted to the conscious image of sunrise and sunset. As reaction a is forming the image of the external world, so reaction b is forming the collective unconscious—what one could call a sort of mirage world or reflex world.
But it would be somewhat of a depreciation to make the dignity of the collective unconscious one of secondhand origin only. There is another kind of consideration that allows us to envisage the collective unconscious as a firsthand phenomenon, something sui generis, in the following way. As we assume that behind our image of the external world there is an absolute entity, so necessarily we must assume that behind the perceiving subject there is an entity; and when we start our consideration from that end, we must say the collective unconscious is reaction a, or the first reaction, or first image of the world, while the conscious would be secondhand only.
At the preceding meeting of the class, Mr. Radin presented the story of She, together with a sketch of the characters involved. The analysis was postponed till the next meeting, which is recorded here.
Dr. Harding, who gave the analysis, said the committee had decided to treat the book as presenting the material of an anamnesis, and then to take Holly as the conscious side of Haggard, and to analyze Holly through the material given in the story. A very thorough analysis was given, of which the following is only an outline summary.
Holly has come to the time of life when he should have settled down to academic life; that is, he is about to give himself up to the absolute one-sidedness of an intellectual. Just then comes the call from the unconscious. All the other sides of life that he has discarded mobilize themselves for a last effort to get his attention. The knock at the door, this stirring of the unconscious, brought an enigmatic thing that could not be touched then, and also a live thing, Leo, who forced him into a new orientation to life. The enigmatic thing lies dormant for twenty years, and then is taken up again. The casket is opened. He consents to consider his unconscious contents, and he goes through them layer by layer, till he comes to the sherd and the scarab. The casket reveals Holly’s problem as it has been relived throughout the ages, that is, conventional morality over against the thing that means life.
Holly and Leo, the youthful side of Holly, struggling now to come into being, set out for the land of Kor—that is, Holly will go deeper and deeper into the unconscious until he finds the anima figure, “She,” who rules over all the things he has denied admittance into his mind. When “She” is found, and finally loved by Holly, he is for a moment on the verge of madness. He speculates on the possibility of imposing his unconscious symbol upon the external world. That is, can “She” be taken to England?
The innumerable adventures in the land of Kor, all of them important mileposts on the way of Holly’s psychological development, culminate in the great test of burning in the pillar of flame. They, Holly and Leo, wisely decide not to risk the test. Holly is not ready for the fundamental change of attitude demanded of him. But he can never again be the commonplace person he started out as; something of the inner meaning of life has been found by him.
Dr. Jung: I have to thank the committee and Dr. Harding for their presentation of She. They have brought out some brilliant ideas, and I have enjoyed their report very much.
Now I would like to make a few criticisms. Why did you think of Holly as the hero? At any rate, some other views of this point are possible. I think that the author certainly intended Leo as the hero. This fact is brought out with perfect definiteness in the second volume, where Leo, much developed as a personality, is the pivotal character. But of course it is a problem as to whether the author succeeds in his intention in this volume we are discussing, or whether it simply is his viewpoint, and the fact that Dr. Harding has found Holly to be the hero suggests that Haggard has not succeeded.
Dr. Harding: Isn’t the point whether Leo is the hero of the story or psychologically the hero?
Dr. Jung: Of course the whole thing is a fantasy of Haggard’s, and inasmuch as Haggard has more of himself in Holly probably than in Leo, one might say that Holly is the hero, but nonetheless he is trying to make Leo the hero of the story. Because Haggard is too much Holly in reality, Leo remains a shadowy, relatively undeveloped figure; he has not lived Leo, in other words.
Unfortunately the Tauchnitz edition6 of She does not contain a poem which appears in the English edition, and which really gives a clue to Haggard’s relationship to the story. In this poem dedicated to “She,” he says that it is not in the land of Kor and it caves, nor in any mysterious land, but in the heart that the grave of the lost love is to be found, and that there dwells “She.” This shows what he intended She to be. It is a love story, his own love story let us say, but it is not given from the conscious side, but instead from the unconscious side, as a repercussion from the conscious experience, whatever it was. This, of course, is the habit of the introverted writer. So She is valuable to us as bringing out these unconscious reactions. The author has evidently had a peculiar love affair which he never quite settled to his satisfaction. It left him with the problem of She, and the same problem follows him through most of his books. Perhaps it happened to him in Africa.7
We could treat Holly as one unconscious figure and Leo as another, then different aspects of Haggard’s character. When you took Holly as the hero, you were not so far from one sense of the book, as we said; since, as we noted, Haggard has identified with Holly. He, like Holly, has probably not seen the importance of his love affair, and when that happens, when a person has an emotional experience and refuses to take it seriously enough, it means a piling up of material in the unconscious. This has been the case with Haggard evidently.
Now there are a few details I would like to discuss. Have you any idea why this ancient material comes up?
Miss Corrie: It is out of the collective unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but why does it come up?
Miss Corrie: It always does with introverts sooner or later.
Dr. Jung: No, not necessarily.
Mr. Schmitz: Could not She be taken as a revolt on the part of Haggard to the whole Victorian age, and especially to the Victorian woman? Rider Haggard traveled a great deal in foreign countries and was especially well fitted to overthrow the ridiculous idea of a woman that had grown up in England, and to develop the fact that every woman should have some of “She” in her.
Dr. Jung: Part of what you say brings us to the point. That is, if Rider Haggard had not traveled in primitive countries, the collective unconscious would not have been activated in the peculiar way it was. It would not have been so dynamic in its reaction. Of course, there is another way in which the collective unconscious can be strongly stimulated. A man has had a psychosis, there has been formed a hole in his unconscious so to speak, and there is always a chance of the collective breaking through. But that was not the case with Haggard, his unconscious was animated by contact with the primitive life about him. It is very interesting indeed to observe the effect of life in primitive countries upon civilized men coming to them. It is said of many of the officials that return to England from India that they come home with burned brains. But of course it has nothing to do with the climate. Their vitality has simply been sucked away in that alien atmosphere. These men try to keep up the standards to which they have been trained, in a country where everything is set in the opposite direction, and the strain breaks them.
I have treated several cases of men returning from the colonies after long association with native women. They cannot love European women after this experience. They come with all sorts of symptoms, of indigestion, etc., but in reality they have been dissociated by the native women. A primitive would say they have lost a soul. There is a very good story illustrating this in an otherwise very poor book by Algernon Blackwood. The book is called Incredible Adventures,8 and the story is “Descent into Egypt.” The man simply fades out, he is gone as a European.
This then is the reason for the tremendous welling up of the collective unconscious in Rider Haggard. The fact that it comes about through his contact with the primitive complicates the love problem. But how could his love problem be complicated by the fact of his life in Africa?
Mr. Schmitz: Perhaps “She” is such a complete opposite to the women of Dickens, let us say, that she can be taken as a wish-fulfillment. Of course he would not want such a woman as “She,” and yet he would understand that in part “She” is necessary; that is, that a woman must have a primitive side in order to be complete, just as in the case of a man.
Dr. Jung: But if he had such an idea of what a woman ought to be, it should have helped him in his problem.
Mr. Schmitz: He was not clear about it, so the unconscious produced this desire.
Dr. Jung: It is out of this groping about in his unconscious that She developed. But why should a man in Africa be less able to handle a love problem?
Mr. Robertson: Isn’t it because the African situation makes it hard for him to handle his feelings in the old way?
Dr. Jung: Yes, if you don’t look at it in too special a way, it could be put in those terms. That is, the man’s attitude toward the love problem changes, and it becomes really a terrible problem for him.
Mr. Bacon: Does not the problem consist in his projecting a primitive anima on a non-primitive woman?
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is exactly it, and when that happens, the non-primitive woman becomes perfectly hysterical under it.
The whole problem of the projection of the anima is a most difficult subject. If a man cannot project his anima, then he is cut off from women. It is true he may make a thoroughly respectable marriage, but the spark of fire is not there, he does not get complete reality into his life.
Coming back now to the story: how do you understand the father of Leo?
Dr. Harding: Except as one of the former heroes in the legend, we did not attempt to interpret him.
Dr. Jung: He is certainly not a strong character, in fact he is just fading out when the story begins. But that is important in itself, for psychologically we know the father must fade when the hero comes, otherwise the development of the hero is seriously hindered. I mention this because it is of great importance in the Egyptian religion around which this fantasy of Haggard’s plays. Thus Osiris fades into a ghost who rules over the dead, and his son Horus becomes the rising sun. It is an eternal theme.
Mr. Schmitz: An excellent example of the need of the son for having the father out of his way before he can come into his own is seen in the case of Frederick the Great, who was markedly effeminate up to the very day of his father’s death. Kubin,9 too, never wrote at all until after his father died.
Dr. Jung: It is truly a critical moment in a man’s life. Often instead of being released for life by the death of the father, the son becomes neurotic. Mythology takes note of the fact that it is so critical a moment; in fact, all these great moments of life have been embodied in mythology, because the latter sets forth the average solution found by humanity in its problems.
I think you have interpreted the chest quite properly. The fact that there is a chest within a chest suggests a process of involution.
When it comes to the love of Kallicrates,10 we find the whole story anticipated in remotest times. Why is that so?
Dr. Bertine: It is because it is not an individual story but repeats an archetypal pattern.
Dr. Jung: Quite so. It is an eternal truth. It says that man is to play this role over and over again. This is another cause for the coming up of the unconscious material. But which archetype is it that is reawakened?
It is the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys. The myth says that Osiris was in the womb of his mother Nut together with Isis the queen of the day and Nephthys the queen of night, and while in the womb he had sexual intercourse with his two sisters. Here is an ever-recurring motive, the conflict between the two for the love of the hero. Therefore we have the conflict between “She” and Amenartis. In the Return of She11 the conflict comes up again, this time between “She” and the Tartar queen who wants to marry Leo. Again it is the conflict between day and night, only this time “She” impersonates Isis, and the other is Nephthys. This is the archetype aroused in Haggard by Africa. Haggard was a thoroughly “respectable” man and no doubt his marriage a thoroughly conventional one, but one can read between the lines of She that he loved another woman in all probability.
Who is Leo in the author? Holly is relatively an old man, he has come into the age of wisdom where he is really too old to take on the risks the problem involves. Therefore he creates the youthful figure of Leo. The latter is hardly more than a youthful fool, but he is altogether a gentleman. Through his youth he compensates the old Holly and allows the latter to play safe. It is always Leo that takes the risks even to the point of being almost hot-potted.
Do you know what is the significance of hot-potting?
Mr. Schmitz: I should think it would mean the heat of the passions taking the head.
Dr. Jung: And what does that mean? Insanity—all over the place, as the saying is. I have scarcely seen anyone who did not have that reaction to the collective unconscious. At first the past looks dead, but as we get closer it gets us. Take for example an old house. One is at first so delighted at its antiquity, and then little by little an atmosphere of mystery gathers about it, and then before we know it, we have “ghosts” on our hands. Something about the house has activated the unconscious in us. Just give a little libido to it and the collective unconscious takes on an enormous attraction for us. Just look at the power of history over our minds as another example.
Mr. Radin: Walter Scott is a case of the past swallowing a man’s conscious adaptation, for when he moved into Abbotsford and began to live into history, so to speak, he lost all his money, and all power of directing his life.12
Miss Corrie: “She” said her kingdom was of the imagination.
Dr. Jung: Yes, when you give yourself to the imagination, you are in effect lost to this world. Soon you can no longer explain yourself and then the way to the lunatic asylum is clear. That is why, when the collective unconscious is near, one must learn some form of expression so as to create a bridge to reality. Otherwise there is nothing to hold to, and the individual is a prey to the forces released. When people are lost in the collective and you can provide a form in which they can cast their ideas, they can come over into sanity again.
That, then, is the danger in hot-potting. It is done by the primitive. The primitive layers are so thick they can easily overcome you.
I think your interpretation of Job the correct one—that is, the commonplace, correct man happily gets lost. This amounts to saying that Holly can never be a don again. Offsetting the loss of Job is Leo’s receiving the cloak of “She.” Leo gets into shape, he receives something from “She” but only after Holly gives up his conventional aspect, i.e., Job.
You said nothing about Ustane.
Dr. Harding: That was because there was already too much to be said, and she seemed relatively unimportant.
Dr. Jung: Yes, she was in fact dead.
I think you have got Noot, Billali, and Holly rightly placed, that is, as figures of the wise old man. Holly is the most human of them. Haggard is inclined to identify himself with the wise old man through Holly, but there is more of pedantry than real wisdom in the figure of Holly. It is rather typical that Holly should have explored the graves while Leo was about to die.
You spoke of a passage about a unicorn and a goose, where was that?
Dr. Harding: No, not a unicorn, but a goose that was shot after the fight between the Lion and the Crocodile. The goose had a spur on its head and I said it associated to the unicorn.
Dr. Jung: The killing of the goose is surely the same motive as that in the Grail story, as you indicated. It is an omen or presage of coming events. The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Parcival,13 the unconscious hero Parcival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. In She the heroes awake to a realization of the extraordinary things ahead of them. A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind.
One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives.
You will then come into a realization not only of your human pre-stages, but of the animal also. This feeling of the collective unconscious brings with it a sense of the renewal of life to which there is no end. It comes down from the dim dawn of the world, and continues. So when we obtain a complete realization of self, there comes with it the feeling of immortality. Even in analysis such a moment may come. It is the goal of individuation to reach the sense of the continuation of one’s life through the ages. It gives one a feeling of eternity on this earth.
As Dr. Harding pointed out, these men are not ready for the pillar of fire. The whole phenomenon of “She” has not yet been assimilated, the task is still before them, and they must have a new contact with the unconscious.
Dr. Mann gave the report for the committee on The Evil Vineyard. Only her synopsis of the psychological aspects of the story will be given. Taken on the reality basis, the story tells of a marriage in which no possibility of a real relationship existed. The girl, having repressed her instincts as a woman, marries Latimer because he stands for the intellectual world which has completely fascinated her. She has no love for him, even fears him. Latimer, twenty years her senior, seeks in her a renewal of youth; instead of feeling, he brings her sexuality. The weirdness he is described as having [experienced] before his marriage progresses through shell shock into a neurosis in which he has to relive the crimes of a legendary Italian condottiere.
Because he represents her projected unconscious, and is in short an animus figure to her, Mary is utterly powerless to free herself from him until she comes to love another man in a real way.
Taken symbolically, the story is that of a woman giving way to the evil side of the animus, finally to be rescued by the upcoming of the positive side. Throughout, Mary was taken as psychologically identical with the author.
It was the opinion of Dr. Jung that the committee had failed to get at the deeper psychological significance of the book, and that the reason that they had failed lay in the assumption that Latimer was abnormal when he met Mary. There was not sufficient evidence, he thought, for that viewpoint, and taking the story that way limited it too much. It should be taken on a much deeper level.
Dr. Jung: I would like to hear from the men on the committee. Mr. Bacon?
Mr. Bacon: The thing that interested me was that I thought if I could have read the symbols rightly, which I did not feel competent to do, I could have learned something very interesting about the author. I thought she must have had some bad experience, and that the book was a reflection of her private troubles.
Dr. Jung: I think it would be a mistake to take the book as too much a story of the author. We really don’t know in how far the author has come to it from inner motives, and how much she has taken over the legend of the Casa di Ferro.14 She seems to have lived in Switzerland and to have known much of Swiss life. In case she has taken over the plot ready-made, it would not be fair to say it is symptomatic. So I think we can dismiss the intuitions about the author’s conflict. It was more possible to take She from that viewpoint, but here the connections are very obscure. It would be better to take this story from the standpoint of the heroes, as Dr. Harding has done with Holly. Thus I should analyze it first from the standpoint of the girl, and then from that of Latimer. Looked at from the two aspects, very different things come out. We have no book that I know of in which we could establish a direct relationship between the author and the animus figure. But here an important part of the problem is presented. We can assume that the author has put feminine psychology into the heroine, and we can try to reconstruct what that woman has experienced and the development of the animus.
Do you consider, Dr. Mann, that Latimer is a suitable animus figure?
Dr. Mann: Yes, because he is a power figure.
Dr. Jung: I think it nearer the facts to say that he became a power figure. First he appears as a learned man who appealed to her as a source of wisdom, a man representing wisdom. The animus is not necessarily a power figure. The anima, on the other hand, is usually a power figure. She appears in that way from the very beginning.
But the response of a woman to wisdom is not necessarily a power reaction, as you seem to have presented it. It is quite a legitimate craving. I think the author has tried to show here a girl who was starved on the spiritual side, and came to an older man legitimately seeking. Of course the world always takes such a situation and makes a love story of it, not allowing that a girl comes to a man for anything but love. When such a thing happens to a man in reality, he is very likely to make the false assumption; and obviously there are more cases in which the assumption is right than those in which it is wrong, but nonetheless, we must admit that there are plenty of serious cases in which a girl can be interested in learning. And so I think Mary sought information from Latimer.
Then begins the tragic situation. He would not assume that she is interested in knowledge, but takes it that she wants him as a man, and is simply pretending an interest in order to trap him. Here is the tragic conflict. He does not see that she is really interested, and so he gets her into a trap. Then comes her mistake. She is not aware of her instincts, and has no love for him whatsoever. It would be her duty to tell him that he has made a mistake, but she just lets him marry her, and never tells him that she does not love him.
Because she has disregarded her instincts, they begin to grow in the dark. Then the animus begins his work, and from this moment he gives an evil twist to her unconscious processes. Before she was all right, and she had projected her animus into Latimer at sight. It was something that simply happened, and if the situation had been taken seriously, it might have gone very well. But his attitude to her was all wrong because it was blind. He took no cognizance of what she really thought about him, and made the false assumption about her seeking him as a lover. A man thoroughly aware of his own instincts should not make a mistake like that, but obviously he was a very intellectual man living in his mind with complete repression of the anima. When he meets her all of that goes over on her, and he never stops to make out the reality of the situation. But she will not carry his projection, and presently he begins to feel something growing in her which he does not understand. And there we are launched upon the battle between the anima and the animus.
Let us take up her side of the conflict first. She committed a sin of ignorance in that she was unaware of her instincts. Nature pays no attention to ignorance as an excuse, she simply punishes it as a sin. She handles the situation as it is, and it makes no difference to nature if the person has chosen the wrong way with malice aforethought, or has merely fallen into it. We might say that ignorance of instinct on the part of Mary is a sort of inherited sin, for her whole education has been along the lines of excluding knowledge of life. Her family did all they could to keep her unconscious, and she knows nothing of the role a woman must play. She quite innocently lies to the man, then she behaves as though she were his wife and really is not.
In such a marriage there will be a violent outburst of sexuality at the beginning on the part of the man. The primitive in the man is awakened because he must beat the woman down in order to make her serviceable to his instincts. Of course this is quite wrong, hopelessly wrong, but he is driven to it, and any natural man will do it. The woman gets into the position of the archaic woman, and then the animal lust of the man is stirred. Negresses in certain parts of Africa exhibit with pride the scars they have received in their sexual battles with men. Then the man is fairly launched on a course of brutality. But an educated man cannot keep this up indefinitely. It breaks him and he becomes impotent.
As long as the woman can be kept down, she is alive as an animal; she becomes the victim of a brute, and takes a certain animal satisfaction out of it. But she cannot keep on that low level any more than the man, and so it leads into a breakdown.
What happens then? The libido with no outlet goes into the unconscious in a lump, one might say. It becomes an egg that she broods over and hatches out. What is in this egg? Feminine instinctiveness. Fantasies begin to form around the figure of a young man who will come and free her from this tyrant. The fantasies go on further and further with this theme of her being a prisoner of a cruel tyrant. Often I have seen this fantasy material about the young man, and the old man who has put the little bird into a gilded cage.
She is indulging in these fantasies, and brooding and brooding, but without knowing why. Hardly any woman in this condition is conscious. Perhaps after she gets to be forty or forty-five she can wake up and know what is happening in her mind, but ordinarily she remains profoundly ignorant of it all. So then we have the formation of these unconscious sexual fantasies; and they make wonderful material out of which an unconscious complex can form. This begins in the personal unconscious. At her first sexual experience she could have understood. Many women do come into consciousness in this way. But when brutal sexuality comes, the deeper layers of the personality are opened up. This leads right back to the monkey age. The libido leaves the surface and goes down into the depths.
When a woman gets to this point she will begin to use historical material in which to wrap the fantasies. Instead of saying “My husband has forced me,” she will begin a story of ancient times in which this tragedy was enacted. This historical element points to the collective unconscious. Then it must be determined why it chooses the specific period it does, in this case the Middle Ages. And in this case, it is because the special psychology involved lies within the viewpoint of the Middle Ages. If one goes back, on the other hand, in search of the place in history where the repression of the anima begins, one is taken far beyond the Middle Ages, back of Christianity to paganism. This is far too intricate a theme for me to enter upon here, but it is my belief that the repression of the anima is connected with the problem of the collective domestication of man. In order that the state be made, the anima had to be repressed. That is why the story of Kallicrates in She is staged first in ancient times. Not so early as Babylon or Egypt, however, because neither of these countries ever knew a state, strictly speaking. The king was on the level of the gods, as is witnessed by the Babylonian temples; at one end is the king, at the other the god. In some of the Egyptian sculpture, the king is pictured issuing orders to the gods. Of course a state is not possible in such a condition, it is simply the ruling of the herd by the terror of mana. In the Greek polis, no such thing existed, and it is there we find the beginning of the state. But if the anima ruled, the formation of a state would be impossible. But how does the repression gradually come about? You have contracts, you promise not to fight under such and such conditions, you put down your weapons and don’t speak very loud, you are very polite, you don’t tread on another man’s shadow. So it goes among primitives, and in this way tolerance has a chance to grow. Through these observances, man’s anima became repressed.
In this case the cause of the repression of the instincts lay in medieval psychology, and we must look back into medieval times to find out why. Have you any ideas on this subject?
Mr. Schmitz: Did the repression of the instincts in women not grow out of the man’s desire to keep the woman chaste while he went to war?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but you must explain the exaggerated ideal of chastity in these times.
Mr. Schmitz: If one goes as far back as the matriarchy, there is no ideal of chastity in women; but when gradually the patriarchy came about, men became interested in establishing their children’s paternity, and so grew up the conception of the chaste wife, and from that they passed to the idea of the virgin powerful through chastity, such as Athena.
Dr. Jung: You make then a connection between the cult of the virgin and the exaggerated idea of chastity. I quite agree with that. This cult brought with it very brutal means of enforcing the chastity. If you go back to primitive tribes, even when a more or less strict monogamy is the rule, it is taken for granted that women are unreliable when the man turns his back, but not too much notice is taken of it unless the man is greatly attached to his wife. It is understood that a woman is not exactly true, but the primitive husband does not particularly care. Nor does the woman on her side mind having the husband go with other women as long as he is not taken from her. In other words jealousy is not so much present. With the ideal of chastity comes jealousy.
Mr. Bacon: Among the natives of Nicaragua,15 the husband is inordinately jealous of his wife; in fact he becomes quite ferocious about it.
Dr. Jung: Yes, there are certain tribal ideas that explain particular cases, but when you study the average case you will find what I have said to be true. But there are other examples where terrible punishments follow infidelity. Our exaggerated feeling about chastity has brought similar cruelties with it. Primitive punishments are often of a peculiar ferocity, as is shown in the practices surrounding witch-hunting. But what about our own laws in respect to that? In the year 700, the burning of witches was not allowed, but 700 years later, down to 1796, witches were burned. It had its climax at the same time as the appearance of the Lauretanian Litany,16 which expresses the culmination of the cult of the Virgin. When such cruelties as witch-burning appear in society, it means on the psychological side that instinct has been tortured, and in fact instinct is tortured by an extreme over-valuation of chastity. Really hellish tortures have followed in its wake.
So these medieval fantasies in this book are to be explained by the fact of the complete repression of instinct. Images of times when such deeds as those of Henrico von Brunnen were generally current are reawakened. As the murderer of his wife and her lover, he forms a suitable figure for the unconscious fantasy material of Mary, who thinks of herself as the prisoner of an ogre. Now, when such fantasies are forming, they permeate the mind, and the collective unconscious is animated and one reacts to it—I mean anyone intimately associated with such a person. It is just as though the animated collective unconscious were sending out waves influencing others. The husband in this story responds to the activation of the collective unconscious in his wife. He is gripped by something he does not understand, and as he becomes restless, he is chased by these collective fantasies of his wife. He does not know where they belong. On his wanderings he comes upon this place, the Casa di Ferro. I know the place, and it is in fact very extraordinary; one wonders what it was, and feels the truth of the legends about it.
When Latimer saw it, something happened to him. He said to himself: “This is the place, and I am that man Henrico von Brunnen.” There is the immediate conviction that always follows when an archetype is struck, it is an extraordinary experience. If the fantasy of your partner gets into you, you make yourself responsible for it; and if you hit upon the reality that frames the fantasy, you do just as Latimer did when he said, “I am Henrico von Brunnen—that is my form.” This brought him peace, but at the same time he had to live the thing. He fell under the spell of the fantasy and was overcome by it. He was no longer himself, but his unconscious. So he died when he committed the murder. He had not done it himself, nature had brought it about.
To sum up, we see in this story the complete projection of the woman’s unconscious into the man, the operation of the animus. Then comes the tragic denial of love. All of the repressed instinctive libido activates the deeper layers of the unconscious with the resulting fantasy system we have seen, till the man upon whom it is projected [falls] under its spell and lives it out. That is the story as determined by the woman’s part in it. If we look at it from the man’s side it becomes different.
Until his marriage Latimer has lived the life of a learned man. He has repressed the anima completely. Then he goes out to seek “She,” and finds her in this lovely young girl. The feeling of youth was stirred in him. He found this girl uncannily unconscious, full of a strange vagueness, and unaware of the instincts as she was, and she became for him a wonderful opportunity for anima projection. Into such a vague, ambiguous frame you can put any amount of fantasy, and so he made a plaything of her. She fulfilled his wish by keeping quiet. The vaguer she became, the more the anima had a chance to play her role. The more she fits into the anima role, the less he can get at her in reality. Then he begins to make assumptions to take the place of the realities. He gets into a complete mist about her, and she becomes more elusive than moonlight. She had denied love, and so he began to seek for this thing he could not find. He began going all over Europe in quest of this unknown thing. Inasmuch as she withdrew all libido from him and began to weave fantasies of lovers who would release her from him, his wife was really untrue to him. He became convinced that she was untrue to him in point of fact, and began to make sure against lovers in the night. Thus following up the suspicions of the anima, he fell deeper and deeper into the snare. Finally he resorted to locking her up. All of these things he was driven to do in order to get rid of the torture that was tearing him to pieces.
Dr. de Angulo: I can see the truth of all that you have said if you take it that Latimer was a normal man when he married Mary, but is there not a justification for taking it as the committee did, that is, that Latimer was already split apart, and abnormal through his one-sidedness when he first met her? His experiences in the war swamped him completely, and then be began to live his unconscious, which finally led to his identification with Henrico von Brunnen. Mary is then only an incident in his life; what drives him to insanity is his inability to get at his feelings. Just because he is so unreal when she meets him, he is an animus figure for Mary.
Dr. Jung: No, I see no justification for assuming that Latimer was abnormal from the beginning. Besides, it is only a hiding behind words to say that, for it does not explain anything.
Mr. Bacon read the report of the committee on L’Atlantide. The committee were of divided opinions as to the proper psychological interpretation. One view was that the book demonstrated a conflict in Benîit’s mind between his spiritual side and a tendency toward material considerations. It was felt, for example, that he was conscious of misusing the messages of the unconscious for the sake of writing “bestsellers.” Looked at from that angle, Antinéa was not accepted as a true anima figure—that is, a creation of unconscious fantasies—but was taken as having been more than half constructed with a view to literary effect.
Another view represented in the committee was that the book represented a conflict between what was rational and what was irrational in Benoît’s psychology, rather than as a conflict between a spiritual and a materialistic viewpoint.
Mr. Aldrich, differing from both of these viewpoints, presented a minority report in which he valiantly defended Antinéa not only as a true anima figure, but also as being a symbol of positive importance. According to his view, Antinéa was neither a good woman nor an evil one, but complete on all sides. He has summarized his report as follows:
“The natural complement of a complete woman is a complete man. Insofar as the man is incompletely developed, or refuses to give her more than one side of his nature, he may expect that she will punish him. In Benîit’s romance, the hero is split in two: the sensual side of him is personified by Saint-Avit, while Morhange stands for an infantile and conventional sort of spirituality. In effect, the hero goes to Antinéa and says, ‘I tender you my sensual side, because Nature drives me; but I mean to deny you any participation in my spiritual side because, according to my conventional morality, love of woman and spirituality are opposites and cannot be reconciled.’ Naturally, this aroused a devil in Antinéa—as it would in any woman who had any individuality. Obviously the right woman for a man is the woman who complements his own stage of development: the mother is suitable for the baby, the wife for the man who is winning his place in the world, and the hetaira—the completely developed woman, the comrade—for the man who has achieved complete individuality, the Wise Man. Antinéa would have been a delightful comrade for a Wise Man; but for a man who had not passed out of the Warrior stage she was as inappropriate and fatal as a wife would be for a baby.”
Dr. Jung: The most interesting point about this book is the way in which it differs from She, is it not, Mr. Bacon?
Mr. Bacon: Yes, I must say I was a little confused in trying to get at the differences, but for one thing there is the theme of luxury greatly emphasized in Benîit’s book.
Miss Raevsky: Not only that, there is a sensualism that is much developed in it, even in Antinéa.
Dr. Jung: Yes, if you think of the outside details, there is a tremendous difference. In L’Atlantide as you say, there is an atmosphere of luxury, the beauty of the place is dwelt upon, the way which the people are received is described so as to bring out the details, while the corresponding features in She are very sparsely treated. Benoît is outspokenly esthetical. One could [not?] imagine an Anglo-Saxon writer paying as much attention to these physical details. Haggard pays a good deal of attention to them himself, in fact, as for example when he describes an afternoon tea under perfectly absurd conditions, but when Haggard does this, it is with a sort of frugality; it is the sort of sensuality that belongs to the sportsman, while Benoît’s is that of the salon.
When you mention the sensuality in L’Atlantide, you have something, but there is a still greater difference. Benoît fully acknowledges the place of sexuality, while in Haggard it always appears as a fiendish element. In Benoît it plays a big part, while in all of Haggard’s books it is decidedly in the background. One could say that one had here the French and the Anglo-Saxon viewpoints in opposition. We cannot assume that the Anglo-Saxon view is the only one in harmony with Heaven; we must assume that the French view has also justification. So it is worthwhile to go into some detail about this question of attitude. In order to do that we must pay some attention to Antinéa. I am not sure if the class got a very clear picture of Antinéa. Mr. Bacon, will you describe the ways in which Antinéa differs from “She”?
Mr. Bacon: Antinéa is a much more physiological object than “She,” who is very nebulous. Antinéa is represented as full of animal desire.
Mr. Aldrich: “She” says nothing to me, while Antinéa is to me a real woman. I think I was the only member of the committee who did not think of her as poison. If the author could only have got himself together and not approached her as a split personality, he would have found Antinéa a very nice girl.
Dr. Jung: But you must admit it is a bit of a bad joke to have a salon full of dead men.
Mr. Aldrich: Ah, but she gave them immortality.
Dr. Jung: I must say that view is a little too optimistic, but it is true that Antinéa17 is usually depreciated, unnecessarily so if her circumstances are taken into consideration. She is an omnipotent queen who can have her every mood and whim satisfied. Such an Oriental queen can be very cruel without being vicious. If we compare her with other similar types, she is not so bad. Moreover, she is in a difficult situation. She is a woman who has not been hampered by interferences of education; she could unfold quite completely, but we should not assume that this is the best thing that can happen. She sees and appreciates natural values, and she is intelligent and educated intellectually, but she has had no education in the higher values. One can be doubtful, of course, about whether or not these higher values are worthwhile, but it would be a mistake to think they can be utterly neglected. If we compare “She” with Antinéa, we can see that the tragedy hangs about this matter of values. “She” is tortured for thousands of years till she admits them. Antinéa is not even so far along that she admits or sees their existence, and so she does not fight, and we see that Antinéa is on a lower level than “She.” Our sympathy therefore goes to the latter. But Antinea has all the charm of the native woman, all the erotic power and instinctiveness that goes with such a woman. This is somewhat gone in “She,” for “She” is already under the influence of things.
But we must remember that Antinéa is not a real woman, but the anima of a Frenchman, and here we have a typical difference between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. If ever there was a book that could throw light on this difference it is this one. I should like to hear from you on this point. How do you explain this peculiar difference?
Mr. Schmitz: I believe that the difference between the French and the Anglo-Saxons, between the French and the rest of Europe for that matter, arises out of the difference in their relation to the pagan world. The French are the only people having a direct connection with this world. When the Romans conquered Gaul they surrounded it with Roman culture. So when Christianity came, it found France a civilized state in contradistinction to Germany. The Germans resisted Roman culture, so there is no continuity of tradition with the pagan world. Christianity found us barbaric, and our paganism has remained with the barbaric element in it. This difference runs through the whole French culture.
Dr. Jung: What Mr. Schmitz says is very true. Therein lies the reason for the difference between the French and the Anglo-Saxon viewpoints. Gaul was civilized in early times; it even contained a fertile Roman culture at a time when Germany and the Anglo-Saxon were in a most primitive state of development. In those days even Paris was in existence as a civilized place, and there were poets, even emperors, coming from the natives of Gaul. It was, in other words, a rich civilization, the old Gauls having been assimilated into the Roman people. The Celtic languages disappeared, and the Germanic tribes that came in were absorbed by the Romanized population and so received the Roman civilization also. On that basis Christianity was planted, not on a wild people as in Germany. Therefore there is an absolute continuity between the Roman mentality and that of the Middle Ages. There is no break. Even certain early Church Fathers were French.
Besides the Roman, there was a strong Greek influence that reached up the Rhone, and cultural influences from the Mediterranean came at a very early date. All of these influences from the pagan world had a peculiar effect. They fortified the antique layers to such an extent that Christianity could not undo it. The same is true more or less for all the Mediterranean peoples; that is, they remained more pagan than Christian. It would be hard to say this to a Frenchman, because the French think of themselves as good Catholics. And so they are, in one sense; even when most skeptical they are still good Catholics. Otherwise Voltaire and Diderot would not be as acceptable as they are. Thus one can be Catholic in a negative way, and be pleased with venom against the thing formerly most reverenced.
Those within the Church have a most positive attitude. They center about Catholicism because they feel it embraces life. Within its scope paganism persists, and so one finds among the most religious Frenchmen a full recognition of sexuality. Today their point of view about sexuality is that it is amoral.18 It is just obvious that it is accepted, and morality scarcely enters into the question. A man goes regularly to church and keeps up whatever sexual practices he may see fit, for sexuality in his eyes has nothing to do with morality. That is why sexuality receives the special treatment it does in France.
This peculiar difference explains, I think, every difference between “She” and Antinéa. And since Antinéa has so definite a character, we can reconstruct something of the author’s conscious and arrive at an appreciation of a modern Frenchman.
Then there are other figures that throw much light on French psychology. Take Le Mesge, for example. Here is a pure rationalist living in an altogether irrational way, a thing typical of the French. It is characteristic of the French mind to allow the limit of irrationality in behavior, and nowhere else can one see so many comical figures in reality; but they are nonetheless rational in their viewpoints.
Then Count Bielowsky, in spite of being a Pole, is a typical French figure of the Third Empire, a habitué of Paris. His figure forms a necessary counterpart to that of Morhange, whose flirtatious attitude toward the church is compensated by Bielowsky’s flirtatious attitude toward “high life.” The mediating figure between the two is Le Mesge. Such contradictions always demand a compromise, and this comes about through a rational mediation. But here there is too little life, so then Saint-Avit is brought in to provide temperament and passion.
A Frenchman always allows himself to have “fits,” where he can apply a whole arsenal of rhetoric. There comes out a long series of tremendous words, put together in a perfect style, and then he is all right.
Mr. Aldrich: Morhange, according to the way I see him, has only a very feeble spirituality. I don’t believe he ever had a religious emotion.
Dr. Jung: But you are Anglo-Saxon and he was a Catholic. We can never know what Sacré-Cœur19 means to them, nor how they can excite themselves over the image of the Virgin.
We can say then that there is a peculiar atmosphere in L’Atlantide, and an altogether different one from She. This is something I felt very profoundly and wonder if you did not also. When one reads such a book one asks oneself, “What does it lead to?” What does it mean to you?
Mrs. Zinno: It seems to me a going to death rather than to life.
Mr. Bacon: There is an indefinable sense of cheapness about it to me. It ends as if preparing for a sequel.
Mrs. Zinno: I think the figure of “She” is an effort to connect unreality to reality, but Antinéa remains stuck in unreality, that is, the unconscious.
Dr. Jung: You have touched upon something important there. Antinéa does not try to get out, she makes no attempt to reach the world, nor to let the world reach her. “She” is planning to rule the world, to get at it in some way. That is a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon, this desire to get at the world and rule it. It is quite conscious in England, and probably in fifty years will be equally so in America. But the French point of view is to remain where they are. The French are really not concerned with ruling the world, it is an affectation that Napoleon, who was not a true Frenchman, brought—i.e., the idea of dominating Europe. The French are concerned with their own country.
It is no wonder then that Antinéa sticks where she is. What I really feel about the issue is that it is hopeless. It will be repeated one hundred times, and then there is an end of the whole business. Antinéa will die, and then she will be on a throne in all her royal beauty with appropriate adornments. It is a sort of apotheosis, something one can see at the end of a film, the idea of La Gloire. There is a pantheon of fallen heroes, and there the whole thing ends in vain ambition.
Now, in She there is the feeling of enormous expectation at the end. One does not know, but the future is looked for. What makes a great difference between the anima of the Frenchman and that of the Anglo-Saxon is that the latter contains a mysterious side of promise, therefore there is more feeling of spiritual potencies in “She” than in Antinéa.
All that element is taken out of Antinéa by the supposition of her birth. That rational suspicion is, of course, a tremendous depreciation of the function of the archetypes. It is the “nothing but”20 spirit again. The value is gone from the archetype. It says, “You can’t base yourself on the archetypes, so it is better not to build at all, the ground is not safe.” This is a peculiar fact that has to be reckoned with in the analysis of Frenchmen. It is very hard to get them to take it seriously enough. Their rationalism is blocking them at every point. They have an exact view about everything and know what it is to the last dot. They exhaust themselves in that fight. Because of this knowing how everything works, they are inclined to depreciate the immediate facts of the soul, and to assume that everything is the result of an old civilization. This was the attitude they had to take up in the Middle Ages as a compensation against the force of antiquity. Christianity was not strong enough to hold them at the beginning, and this rationalism gave support to the Church. The relation of this rationalism to the Church is something that an Anglo-Saxon can hardly understand.
Dr. de Angulo: Will you discuss the point made in the report of the committee to the effect that Antinéa was not an unconscious figure but was put into the unconscious setting deliberately?
Dr. Jung: I think Antinéa is partly conscious and partly unconscious. When the Anglo-Saxon says she is twisted by the personal unconscious, he is commenting on the peculiar racial character of Antinéa.
Mrs. Jung: Could you say something about the relation of the animus to immortality in the same way that you discussed the anima and immortality?21
Dr. Jung: The animus seems to go back only to the fourteenth century, and the anima to remote antiquity, but with the animus I must say I am uncertain altogether.
Mrs. Jung: It had seemed to me that the animus was not a symbol of immortality, but of movement and life, and that it is man’s attitude that gives that different aspect to the anima.
Dr. Jung: It is true that the animus is often represented by a moving figure—an aviator or a traffic manger. Perhaps there is something in the historical fact of women being more stable, therefore there is more movement in the unconscious.
Mr. Schmitz: Surely there could have been no repression of the animus at the time of the matriarchy.
Dr. Jung: We cannot be too sure.
Mrs. Zinno: The figures of gods carry the idea of immortality, do they not? Inasmuch as they are also animus figures and come into women’s dreams, I should think one could say the animus carried the meaning of immortality also.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is true, but there remains a tremendous difference between the animus and the anima.
Mr. Schmitz: Is immortality in the individual?
Dr. Jung: No, only as the image. Immortality belongs to the child of the anima. Inasmuch as the anima has not brought forth, she assumes immortality. When she brings forth she dies. But this problem of the anima and the animus is far too complex to be dealt with here.
The End
1 Jung first described this case, with more detail, in one of the lectures he delivered in London in 1924; see above, Lecture 14, n. 1. Cf. “Analytical Psychology and Education” (CW 17), par. 182; also “Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology” (1931), CW 8, par. 685, and “The Tavistock Lectures” (1935), CW 18, par. 282.
2 Jung’s source may have been Knud Rasmussen, Neue Menschen; ein Jahr bei den nachbarn des Nordpols (1907), a book that was in his library, or Rasmussen, Across Arctic America (1927), which he cited in the Dream Analysis seminar, pp. 5f. (1928).
3 The transcript seems to be garbled here. Perhaps “enough.”
4 Footnote in the transcript: A number of points of confusion having come up in connection with the lecture, Dr. Jung added to the notes supplementary material as well as the appendix which follows.
5 There is no indication whether these reports and discussions took place at the 6 July meeting (as assumed for the present edition) or a subsequent one. For the assignment of the readings, see above, Lecture 15 (one week earlier).
6 The “Collection of British and American Authors,” published (in English) by a German firm for sale on the Continent, not legally to be taken into American or British territory.
7 Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had served in South Africa from 1875 to 1880 as secretary to the governor of Natal before returning to England and marrying an English heiress. His romantic novels brought him fame and fortune.
8 London, 1914. Blackwood (1869–1951) wrote many short stories on supernatural themes. His work has been compared to that of Gustav Meyrink.
9 The Expressionist artist and writer Alfred Kubin was married to Schmitz’s sister. Jung cited his novel Die andere Seite (1909) as “a classic example of the direct perception of unconscious processes” (Jung: Letters, vol. 1, p. 104: 19 Nov. 1932).
10 Kallicrates: not the Greek architect of the 5th century B.C., but a figure in She.
11 Haggard, Ayesha, or the Return of She (1895).
12 Scott purchased his estate, Abbotsford, in 1811; published the first of the Waver-ley novels in 1814; and suffered financial ruin in 1826.
13 Percivale, Parzival, or Parsifal, the hero of the Grail quest in Arthurian legend, would have been familiar to Jung through the Wolfram von Eschenbach poem and Wagner’s opera, both of which he variously cited. (Jung alluded to Parsifal in a letter to Freud, Dec. 1908, 117 J, and mentioned the Grail in Wandlungen und Symbole, 1912; cf. Psychology of the Unconscious, ch. 6, n. 36, and CW 5, par. 150, nn. 577, 60. Cf. also Types, CW 6, par. 371 ff.) Apparently Emma Jung began her study of the Grail legend in the year the present seminar took place: cf. Marie-Louise von Franz, foreword (p. 7) to the work left unfinished at Mrs. Jung’s death, in 1955, and completed by von Franz, The Grail Legend (orig. 1960; tr. Andrea Dykes, New York and London, 1971). According to von Franz, Jung did not undertake research on the connections between the Grail legend and alchemy in deference to his wife’s interest.
14 The 15th-cent. Castello di Ferro, as it is usually called, is in Minusio, on the outskirts of Locarno, on the shore of Lake Maggiore. Cf. Kunstdenkmaler der Schweiz, vol. 73 (Basel, 1983), pp. 219ff.
15 Bacon in his youth had lived in Nicaragua; see his autobiography, Semi-centennial (New York, 1939).
16 Also called the Litany of Loreto (16th cent.). For the text and analysis, cf. Types (CW 6), pars. 379, 390ff., 406.
17 Transcript: “Atlantide.”
18 Transcript: “a moral.”
19 Either the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, on Montmarte in Paris, which had been consecrated six years earlier, and which carries a strong religious symbolism; or the Roman Catholic devotion of the Sacred Heart.
20 A term Jung took from William James: cf. “A Contribution to the Study of Psychological Types” (1913; CW 6), par. 867.
21 Emma Jung lectured on the problem of the animus in Nov. 1931 to the Psychological Club, Zurich. The essay was published in Wirklichkeit der Seele (Psychologische Ab-handlungen 4; Zurich, 1934); tr. C. F. Baynes, “On the Nature of the Animus,” Spring, 1941; reprinted in E. Jung, Animus and Anima (New York, 1957), pp. 1–44.