Basel, 17/18. XII. 15.
Dear Friend,
I was not surprised by your reaction to my honest letter.262 As you sent it to Solothurn, despite my postscript, it arrived only this evening. I have now thought it through and have come to the conclusion that it is a prime specimen of Mephistophelean wisdom. Its end provoked a laughter of relief, for which I heartily thank you.
Too bad that these truths are nothing new to me. I have an equally sharp-tongued Mephistopheles within myself, who already showed me the same truths about God and the Devil, Eros and the Poisoner,263 etc., in an even more drastic manner long ago, particularly in the black book.264
I need no longer to demand the acknowledgement of the value of my love, neither from you nor from other people. I acknowledge its worth as well as its worthlessness. So I do not demand anything from you that I’m not doing myself.
Moreover, I did not demand anything from you at all; I simply did what you asked and told you of a feeling I have toward you, a feeling that is proved right to me again and again, and particularly also by your present reaction. My motive for leading this correspondence was not only my being acknowledged by you but the feeling that it is not yet possible for you to acknowledge an important, divine as well as devilish, power of the inner life of all humans, and because I was worried about the effects of your one-sidedness on our work. If I also fought for being acknowledged myself, this was out of an instinct of self-preservation, because I, like any other honest extravert, cannot collaborate in a work that does not take my divine and devilish parts into account. But this does not mean that I demanded anything from you. I can well go my way alone. Yet I still believe that analysis will be able to prevent another splitting.265
Acknowledgement or acceptance does not mean blind acceptance, or even adoration, to me, by the way, even though the intellect has to be dimmed so that the power that lies in the realm of feelings can be acknowledged. It seems to me, however, that a power can also be acknowledged when its one side is devilish.
Nevertheless I know that I have always acknowledged, and will always acknowledge, in private and in public, in speech and in writing, the value of your thoughts; actually I also accepted your untruths at first, that is, also your devil. This was the only way it was possible for me to really acknowledge you. I cannot understand why you distinguish so painstakingly between moral and immoral, between divine and devilish love, in the extravert. They simply cannot be separated, because out of both—just as out of truth and untruth—the new develops again and again.
Nor do I demand that you feel in the way I want you to. This reproach has been beaten to death, and no longer applies.266 I well nigh know the kind of feelings of the introvert, but vis-à-vis a nearly complete lack of feeling-into I am feeling as much as a fish in the air as an introvert toward an extravert who cannot think at all.
I cannot grant that it belongs to the typical standpoint of the one type to treat the other ironically, or even to debase him, and that someone who does not do this will have to adopt the superior standpoint.
Incidentally, I already wrote in my last letter that I do not believe that letters will convince you of the correctness of my feeling, which is also shared by others. As mentioned, this can be done only by knowledge gained from experience, provided one still concedes that experience can have some influence on one’s knowledge at all.
To conclude, I would juxtapose your “wonderful” Viennese idyll267 with a “bitterly true” idyll on Lake Zurich.
There you are, sitting in a tower on the Obersee,268 having become Nietzsche’s heir, father to none, friend to none, and sufficient unto yourself. Vis-à-vis, here and there, a few other male and female introverts are living, each in their tower, loving humankind in those “farthest away,” thus protecting themselves against the devilish love of their closest “neighbors.” And, from time to time, they meet in the middle of the lake, each in their motorboat, and prove to each other the dignity of man.
With best regards,
Hans Schmid
262 Missing; see 10 S, note 248.
263 An allusion to Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates relates what Diotima had taught him about Eros/Love: an intermediate being between wisdom and folly, beyond good and evil, sometimes blossoming, sometimes dying, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, a sorcerer and a poisoner.
264 Again, probably a reference to his own “black book.”
265 Possibly not a reference to a splitting between the two of them but to another splitting in the analytic movement, like Jung’s from Freud, this time in the Zurich school.
266 Original: trifft nicht mehr, which can mean both “no longer applies” and “no longer hurts.”
267 Unclear reference; to a statement in Jung’s missing letter?
268 This creates a further mystery: Schmid’s letter is clearly dated 17/18 December 1915, in his own handwriting, and contextually it does follow up on 11 S, where Schmid admitted he wanted to write “honestly,” and 12 S, where he refers to Jung’s reaction to his honest letter. However, the reference to a tower on the Obersee (upper lake), where Jung did eventually build his tower in Bollingen in 1923, is enigmatic. Perhaps Jung had already told him about such a plan or fantasy in his missing letter, or on one of their joint sailing trips, during which “a wish must have grown in them to build a refuge with simple means in natural surroundings” (Iselin, 1982, p. 19) or Schmid’s remark is uncannily premonitory.