Figure 5. Neumann talking to Gershom Scholem, Adolf Portmann (right), and Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at Eranos (Eranos Archive; courtesy of Paul Kugler).
Prof. C. G. Jung |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH, |
22. XII. 1935
My dear Neumann,
Do not allow yourself to go gray over missing my 60th birthday. The abstract number 60313 means nothing at all to me. I much prefer to know, through hearing from you, what you are doing. What the European Jews are doing I already know, but what the Jews are doing on archetypal soil—that interests me extraordinarily. Analytical Psychology (or as it is now called: Complex Psychology) is deeply rooted in Europe, in the Christian Middle Ages and, in the last analysis, in Greek philosophy. The connecting link that eluded me for so long has now been found, it is alchemy, as Silberer314 already correctly suspected. Sadly he broke his neck on rational psychologism.
I saw G. Adler recently. He’s going to England, which he regards as the intermediate station on the way to Palestine.
The “Culture Jews” are always en route to being “non-Jews”; you are completely right, the route does not go from the good to the better, but first downhill to historical actuality. I routinely draw the attention of most of my Jewish patients to the fact that they are self-evidently Jews. I would not do this if I had not so frequently seen Jews who imagined that they were something else. To such as these “being Jewish” is a form of personal insult.
I have heard of Westmann’s essay but have not yet read it. I’m told it is very good. Your disparaging assessment is valuable to me as is your very positive conviction that the Palestinian soil is essential to Jewish individuation. How does the fact that the Jew in general has lived in other countries than in Palestine for much longer relate to this? Even Moses Maimonides315 preferred Cairo (Fostat) even though he had the possibility of living in Jerusalem.
Is it then that the Jew is so accustomed to being a non-Jew that he requires the Palestinian soil in concreto in order to be reminded of his being Jewish? I find it hard to comprehend a soul that has grown up in no soil.
With sincere wishes for your ongoing well-being,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
313 This letter was—an abridged version—included in Aniela Jaffé’s edition of Jung’s letters (Jung, 1973, vol. 1, pp. 265–66). Jaffé misread the number “60” for “so.”
314 Herbert Silberer (1882–1923): Austrian psychotherapist, member of the Freud circle from 1907 onward. Freud writes to Jung on 19 July 1909: “Silberer is an unknown young man, probably a better-class degenerate; his father is a well-known figure in Vienna, a member of the city council and an ‘operator’” (Jung and Freud, 1974, p. 242). Silberer published his main study, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (Probleme der Mystik und ihre Symbolik), in 1914. His categorization of dreams into psychoanalytic and anagogic was rejected by Freud and led to an alienation of the two men. Silberer committed suicide in January 1923. Jung, in contrast to Freud, emphasized the importance of the book as the first psychological interpretation of alchemy: “Herbert Silberer has the merit of being the first to discover the secret threads that lead from alchemy to the psychology of the unconscious” (Jung, 1955–56, § 792), In his Tel Aviv seminar on alchemy in 1941/42 Neumann said about Silberer: “Silberer not only discovered alchemy but also the essential concepts of the psychological principles which have been developed in analytical psychology—archetypes are infinitely many things. On the one hand, he interpreted the Parabola analytically according to the old analytical school, on the other hand, anagogically, synthetically. His problem was: how can the same thing be interpreted psychoanalytically and anagogically. He interpreted the entire Parabola psychoanalytically (Oedipus, Incest, Castration) but then managed to interpret every symbol both analytically and anagogically.’ (Neumann, 1941–42, p. 66).
315 Moses Maimonides (also Rabbi Mosheh ben Maimon) (ca. 1135–1204): Important Jewish philosopher, theologian, legal scholar, and physician; born in Córdoba as part of the Almoravid Empire, Maimonides had to leave the Iberian Peninsula when the Almohad dynasty took over and put pressure on Jews to convert to Islam. He finally settled down in Fostat (today a part of Cairo). He is renowned for compiling the fourteen books of the Mishneh Torah (“Repetition of the Torah”), subtitled Sefer Yad HaHazaka (“Book of the Strong Hand”), which is a code of Jewish religious law (Halakha).
30. Jan. 36
Most dear Professor Jung,
I thank you very much for your letter that has shown me once again that you continue to have patience with me and once again have engaged with my problems that I know could not be your own.
I do not even believe that Palestinian soil is so important for the Jew but it will become so if ever this soil absorbs sufficient human beings to be a true ancestral soil once again. Certainly the Jews have lived much longer in other countries but without the contact to the soil that was not accessible to them due to their being rooted in the Torah. Now that this foundation of the law is fractured, and I see in Hasidism the revolution of this fracturing, we must come to a new beginning via a regression to the soil, if at all. Only now that the 2000-year-old law in its role as an artificial psychospiritual root soil is broken, is Palestine starting to become relevant and the history of the spiritual productive time is fused with this. Both Maimonides and Philo316 are in fact assimilated Jews—but they could afford to be—because the root soil of the law made them independent of mere natural national limitations to which we had to return after the emancipation, while consciously repudiating our sole cosmopolitan supranational stance.
I do not wish to write any more about these matters as things have taken a strong and radical turn for me, which has forced me back into my own problems. Nothing has happened in the external world, my position on Palestine and on the Jewish problem has remained the same, but this has been put aside because I first need to make some progress myself. My analytical work is making great demands of me, problems are mounting up that I am grappling with without resolving them, and it is becoming evident to me more often that I urgently need to do some more work with you and Miss Wolff. The two years of independently accountable work, completely alone, establishing a practice, actually my very first one, an evident transformation that has been set in motion here, all these things together justify me in my desire to go to Zurich, without needing to reproach myself that I am out of touch with reality. I would very much like to know if it would be possible for you to give me some time, and when this might be. I would have to bring things to a close here for two months, perhaps May/June, or if absolutely necessary in the autumn—ever in the hope that you could arrange it and I ask you to bear in mind that it will and must certainly be as crucial for me as the time was back then. My late resolve will be especially comprehensible to you because of my introverted hesitation when I confess to you that, from a practical perspective that I discipline myself to achieve, this Europe trip must seem rather audacious, if not crazy. The economic situation here is extremely uncertain, my family and my wife’s have partially been blown apart, despite this I have the feeling it is the right thing to do. My wife would urgently like to work with Miss Wolff and I consider this also to be crucially important, after that it must be decided whether she will work more in this direction. In short, I believe I have presented the situation to you as it is and would like to now leave it up to you whether you will be able to take this into account. I will sadly not be able to allocate more than 6 weeks to my visit, but I think I could achieve a decent amount of work even in this time. When I was with you back then, you said to me “Widen your horizons!” To a certain degree I think this has happened. I would have to contradict you today if you said to me that, for me, it was all about the Jewish problem, it is beginning to be about me, the Jewish aspect is the obvious location of my debate. Europe, Asia, Primitives, there the Jewish part is a small point, albeit an important one for me, and, as I still believe, also one of general importance, but: “Before the end, Rabbi Sussja spoke: ‘In the coming world I will not have to answer for the fact that I was not Moses; I must answer for the fact that I have not been Sussja.’”317
With gratitude,
Your E. Neumann
I would be very grateful to you, dear Professor, if you could let me have your reply quite quickly since I must naturally organize everything here well in advance.
Even if I am vacillating, I still have the feeling that I should act in this way, precisely the “actual” risky thing about this seems to me to be absolutely important. By the way—there are other risks—possible aspects that probably lie dormant in the background.
316 Philo Judaeus, also known as Philo of Alexandria (15–10 BCE–40–45 CE): Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, born in Alexandria. Philo brings together Greek philosophical thinking such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, and Stoicism with the Jewish exegesis of the bible. As he combines religious revelation and philosophical reason he has also been seen as a forerunner of Christian theology.
317 Neumann quotes from Buber’s Die chassidischen Bücher (Buber, 1927, p. 446). In Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim) from 1949 Buber tells this tale of Rabbi Sussja’s in a slightly different way: “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” (Buber, 1949, p. 251). Neumann also quotes the story in his unpublished volume on Hasidism (Neumann, 1934–40, vol. 2, p. 17).
10. III. 36
Dear Professor,
Since I do not know whether a letter from me to you or one from you to me has gone astray, I would like to briefly ask the following. I wrote to you some time ago that my internal situation was compelling me to work with you again and I requested you to let me know if this would be possible now, i.e., in May/June, or in the autumn. Unfortunately I have had no word from you as yet, but the necessity of going to Zurich has proved unshakeably firm. I would ask you to please reply to me as soon as possible. All economic considerations that I discussed in my letter are still important but they have become absolutely secondary as I have reached a point in my development from which I cannot make decent progress on my own, it seems to me.
I am extremely grateful to you for sending me your work from the Eranos conference.318 This work seems to me to be unique in its evidence, significance, and simplicity.
I have become rather unsettled due to the lack of response to my letter, so I do ask you not to forget me.
In a curious way—quite in the spirit of your inquiry into the collective symbolism of the Jews—some material has emerged in the meantime that I would desperately like to discuss with you, along with countless other things. In the foreground, though, remain my own difficulties, the absolute necessity of making a shift from “knowing” to “being,” a path for which I very much need your help.
With gratitude,
Your E. Neumann
10. III
318 The Eranos Yearbook 1935 was dedicated to Westöstliche Seelenführung. Jung’s contribution was titled “Traumsymbole des Individuationsprozesses: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der in den Träumen sich kundgebenden Vorgängen des Unbewussten” (“Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation”) (Jung, 1936a); the extended version is known as “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” and was later published as part of Psychology and Alchemy (Jung, 1944).
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
21 March 1936
Dr. E. Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv,
Palästina.
My dear Neumann,
I am sorry that I have not replied to your letter for so long. My time in May and June is unfortunately a very uncertain matter. In reality I am fully occupied. If you do the majority of your work with Miss Wolff and can put up with being squeezed in with me here and there, you can come in May. I would not recommend the autumn as my work will start late due to preceding lectures in America and England.319 I intend to largely stop my work with patients in the winter anyway in order to get further with some work that has become urgent. As a result of my lectures at the E.T.H.320 my available time has been whittled away even more, while even more people wish to come to see me. Furthermore I’m not getting any younger, rather older.
But I believe I understand the compelling nature of your problem and will do my utmost not to let you down.
In the meantime, with best wishes,
Your always devoted,
C. G. Jung
319 In autumn 1936, Jung was invited by Harvard University to lecture on the occasion of its tercentenary celebrations, where he was awarded an honorary degree. He left Zurich together with Emma in August 1936 and arrived by steamliner in New York in early September. Jung’s Harvard lecture was titled “Psychological Factors Determining Human Behavior” (Jung, 1937a). Jung left Harvard for Bailey Island, Maine, to deliver a seminar on dream analysis. On 3 October he embarked on a ship for England, where he lectured at the St. Bartholomew Hospital London on 19 October. The title of his presentation was “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (Jung, 1936–37).
320 From the winter semester 1933 on, Jung lectured on a weekly basis at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). With the exception of the semesters 1936/37 and 1937/38 he held his lectures until 1941. Topics ranged from History of Psychology, Dream Psychology, Typology, Eastern and Western Spiritualism, to the Psychology of Alchemy. During his first stay in Zurich in 1933–34 Neumann visited Jung’s lectures (see also n. 258). (The lectures are being prepared for publication by Ernst Falzeder and Martin Liebscher as part of the Philemon series.)
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist,
Tel Aviv
20. I. 37
Dear Professor Jung,
In contrast to my overlong early letters I have now intentionally become very taciturn as I do not wish to detract from your very valuable work and rest times.
Today I would like only to send you a short greeting to maintain the feeling that I have not lost the contact with you. The time in Zurich was eminently fruitful, the development initiated then is ongoing, even if it has been pushed into the background by a strong—i.e., therefore welcome—professional demand. This development, together with the work for my course: Soul problems of the modern Jew,321 stand at the center for me and the work on the book on which you have already given a mortgage is resting externally at the moment, precisely because internally it has entered a new phase that I would like to wait upon.
As you will be able to imagine, I had a mountain of inquiries, but I will not bother you with them but simply wait until the answers have formed themselves for myself.
Things are fairly good with us. The situation is however quite dark. Where is light today.
As I have heard, you have retreated somewhat in the service of a larger work, I would be grateful to you if you could let me know if it is the work on symbols you once mentioned or something else. You can hardly believe how important such anticipation is for me, as I know that every one of your works has revealed something crucial to me in one or more regards.
In wishing you and also us a good year and successful endeavors, I am your ever grateful,
E. Neumann
Tel Aviv,
1 Gordon St.,
Palestine
20. I.
321 In 1937–38 and 1938–39 Neumann held a weekly seminar series in Tel Aviv titled “Soul Problems of the Modern Jew: An Analysis of a Series of Dreams, Images, and Phantasies” (“Seelenproblem des modernen Juden: Eine Reihenanalyse von Träumen, Bildern und Phantasien”) in which he discussed a series of dreams of a Jewish woman in the first half of her life. Asked on 19 January 1939 why the Jewish theme does not feature more prominently, Neumann reflected on the seminar series: “Besides, something has become clear that was not fully known to me, that the Jewish problem is so deeply integrated into the collective problem that one can not treat them separately. Two years ago we started with the problems of the Jew and have now provided evidence for them with individual material” (Neumann 1938–39, p. 152).
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH, |
25th January 1937
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
I am pleased to hear that you are well and that you are busy.
The work that all conceivable external demands seek to keep me from refers to a far-reaching representation of the individuation process.322 This is at least a reasonably accurate description, although I don’t yet have a title.
I wish you likewise a good new year and hope that your activities will be even more fruitful than in the old one.
With best wishes,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
322 Jung was probably reworking his Eranos lectures from 1935 and 1936 (see n. 323), which would eventually form the base of Psychology and Alchemy (Jung, 1944).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 23. VII. [1937]
Dear Professor,
I do not want to let the occasion of your birthday pass—especially as you have not heard from me for so long, without sending you a brief note with my good wishes testifying to my lasting and ever growing bond with you.
(I have selected the strange and unfamiliar typed script for “social” reasons, albeit with a heavy heart, so as not to torment you with my handwriting.)
I particularly wish to thank you for sending me your works, from which the lectures on alchemy,323 especially, have given me a great deal. Mind you, they do not seem easy to me even after a second reading, probably because here, even more than in your other works, the background of the meanings and the underlying material is so unfamiliar that one must make do at times with interposing the little of one’s own experience into these huge contexts and allowing it to be stimulated by them.
I am very much in your debt for not even having delivered the beginnings of the much-vaunted Hasidism work324 to you as yet. In this letter I do not wish to simply justify myself, but to attempt to give a broad outline of my whole situation so that this “failure,” as I saw it for a long time, is accorded its due significance. My practice quickly became much more lively after my return from Zurich, i.e., I have constantly had an extraordinary amount to do, and that is saying a lot for local standards. As I was also teaching two private courses in the winter, and I had much work to do on the advanced “Soul Problems of the Modern Jew”325—quite apart from private and business matters—I was hugely stretched and had no possibility of doing any further work alongside.
However, something else has been decisive in this. Perhaps you will recall that when I was in Zurich a “rush” of archetypal material broke through in me, both images and voices. This development has continued and, alongside my professional work, has taken priority in this last year. I cannot put into words what this development has given me in every regard, and continues to do so, but without an external reference point, this work has its dangers, despite the assistance of my wife. A big difficulty is my skepticism about what is being so well represented from my internal world, but the relentless criticism on other occasions has reassured me on this score. Besides, the flow of images is so absolutely surprising and initially incomprehensible to me that I am now convinced of the authenticity of the phenomena. I am obviously expressing this in far too restrained a manner, as I am shattered by the superiority and unambiguity of the trajectory of the images up to the Zurich trip that have well and truly revealed themselves to me and whose object-subject I was.
At the moment I am standing, it seems, at a place of waiting, but have the certain feeling of being on the move. This is confirmed to me by my great internal equanimity and decreasing desolation. This may sound overly positive, but it would be ungrateful not to admit to the lighter colors, the appearance of something firm, new. The experience is also very present to me that much that is already in the picture is only being actualized very slowly.
All of this creates an isolation that is only barely compensated for by work. Apart from my wife, who is going through something similar in her own way, no one here understands anything of these things, and it is precisely Palestine, as it faces threats on a daily basis, and the unrest of Jews who are stirred up both internally and externally, which stands in a peculiarly stark contrast to my internal world whose horizon is, for me, no longer Jewish in the self-evident way it once was. Without succumbing to the danger of an internal syncretism of all external certainty of perspective, it seems to be all the more difficult as the more the internal world emerges, the more the most private matters show themselves to be bound up with universal human symbolism. On the other hand, I feel myself fully recompensed by this often-overwhelming sense of connection. The contrast of my situation with the concreteness of historical and contemporary Judaism is grotesque. More grotesque than you could ever imagine, since the rootlessness and spiritual mania of the Jewish people is experiencing a dangerous upsurge here in what is, for us, an eminently significant historic moment. So, precisely in my remoteness I seem to be in the right place, and the often-pressing smallness of the causal world is counterbalanced by its bigger permeability, by the bigger significance of the individual. Beside this, we live very close to the sea, have it constantly before us, and what this and the landscape means for me as a metropolitan Jew, cannot, I believe, be fully comprehended by you.
The end spirit—earth spirit problem stood in the center of what I have experienced and of my spiritual work. End spirit—Asmodeus;326 earth spirit, a contrasting principle that arises from below. Transformation of the anima, the red one; the earth spirit with the diamond in the breast; earth spirit arising, pregnant, blue, candle-holding anima in an arc between the trees and an angel air-like being coming from above.327 Then came—and I could do nothing to stop it—something like an altar image. Mary (?) on the bed holding Jesus (?) in a golden moon bowl holding the diamond up high. To the left, in a beautiful southern landscape is the satyr-like but quite human-formed earth spirit with a bunch of grapes, to the right a type of John of Patmos328 with a bowl of fire, lightning, apocalyptic. This is just an allusion; I do not know whether this is familiar symbolism for you, I write it because I assume so. I do not understand everything by any means, but it is exceptionally rich, and forms, together with the relevant conversations, substantial material for my thought.
In this way, Hasidism has retreated, but I must simply learn more patience and subordinate my will and ambition.
In the work, my greatest challenge is this, that I find it very difficult to reconcile the experience that things come to people when they are ready with my work, which has to stimulate or accelerate this process that is independent from me. I sometimes feel like a superfluous fool. For sure, success and my work can be linked in a certain way, but must it be so? Perhaps one has success with those who are ready and failure with the others? A comment from you about this would be very necessary and important for me.
Dream from a patient, apart from the neurotic things, menstrual disturbances treated successfully with hormones: “She sees lots of small worms through a microscope. A doctor tells her: that is your illness. She sees the worms are bloated full of red blood.” Nothing is found organically, the dream stands out in a series on another theme. What should one pay attention to?
Hopefully, dear Professor, you will excuse the scope of this letter that is only about me, but, as I do not write very often so as not to burden you too much, you must forgive my expansiveness. I hope the winter break has done you good and refreshed you somewhat, and that things are well with you so far. Did the Zarat. seminar continue or have you used the time for the book? What is your theme for the Eranos conference?
For this year, my wish for you is only that you will get back a fraction of what you give to others, and that not too much will come back to you in the sense that a Zaddiki once spoke of: Every word one speaks which finds no home among the people returns to the speaker and he sometimes feels the powerful force of its return.
I wish you all good wishes and a robust recovery.
Your ever grateful,
Erich Neumann,
Tel Aviv,
1, Gordon Street,
Palestine.
323 Jung’s Eranos lectures in 1935 and 1936 were dedicated to the topic of psychology and alchemy: “Traumsymbole des Individuationsprozesses: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der in den Träumen sich kundgebenden Vorgängen des Unbewussten” (“Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation”) (1936a); “Die Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie” (“Religious Ideas in Alchemy: An Historical Survey of Religious Ideas”) (Jung, 1937).
324 Cf. Neumann’s letter to Jung, 27 June [1935] (16 N). On Neumann’s work on Hasidism (Neumann, 1934–40), see n. 273.
326 Asmodeus, also Asmodai (Hebrew: Ashmedai), from the Avestan language *aēšma-daēva, aēšma meaning “wrath” and daēva “demon”: in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit an evil spirit, that killed the first seven husbands of Sara, “before they had lain with her” [Tob. 3.8]. In the Talmudic story of the Testament of Solomon the demon is tricked in helping to construct the Temple in Jerusalem (Testament of Solomon, 21–25). According to some kabbalistic schools he is a succubus that mated with King David and bore a cambion (half-human, half-demon) son. Asmodeus is generally regarded as the demon of lust and is, according to Christian belief, one of the kings of hell.
327 As suggested earlier (see 8 N, n. 230) Neumann sent copies of his Jung letters to Toni Wolff. Regarding the passage above she replied to him on 30 December 1937: “What you say about Asmodeus interested me very much. This is a very good point of view and allows conclusions to be drawn about the strongly eschatological attitude of the Jewish spirit, from which it may then follow that ‘materialism’ is more a consequence, a type of attempt at compensation” (Wolff and Neumann, 1934–52).
328 John of Patmos, author of the book of Revelation, lived on the Greek island of Patmos where he was seized by the apocalyptic vision, which informed the book of Revelation. Traditionally he is identified with John the Apostle, the author of the Gospel of John, as well as the first, second, and third epistles of John. Many modern scholars do not support this theory and regard John of Patmos as a separate author. In the book of Revelation 9:11 Abaddon (Greek: Apollyon), the angel of the abyss, is the leader of an army of locusts that torment those without the sign of God on their forehead. Some commentators identify Abaddon with Asmodeus (see n. 326).
Zurich, 27th September 1937
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon Street,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
Prior to his departure for Berlin (Copenhagen–New York),329 Professor Jung asked me to thank you for your kind letter. He asks you to excuse the fact that he has not replied to you as his “holidays” were so burdened with work that he was not able to reply to all correspondence.
With best wishes,
Yours truly,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]330
329 Jung was invited to Yale University in October 1937 to deliver the fifteenth series of “Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy” under the auspices of the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation. The lecture series was published under the title “Psychology and Religion” (Jung, 1938a).
330 Marie-Jeanne Schmid (later Boller-Schmid) (1911–1984): Jung’s secretary from 1932 until her marriage in 1952. She was the daughter of Jung’s friend and colleague Hans Schmid-Guisan (1881–1932, see Jung and Schmid-Guisan), who unexpectedly died in 1932 leaving Marie-Jeanne to find a position to augment the family income. Marie-Jeanne filled the position after several attempts of Jung to find a suitable private secretary had failed.
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
4th April 1938
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
As I thank you very much for your kind letter of July last year, I must apologize that I have not replied until now. Your letter came shortly before my departure for America where I was giving lectures at Yale University.331 On my return I had to set off almost immediately for India332 where I was invited to the 25th anniversary of the Indian Science Congress Association.333 I have only recently returned.
I was interested to hear of your condition. The images you describe seem very familiar to me. I have the feeling that this is in no way a question of syncretism but rather a recapitulated genuine historical development that comprises the modern problem at the same time. The internal work and the external run in parallel in a remarkable fashion. I do not wish to raise the matter of therapeutic success in connection with this, at least not directly.
The dream you reported to me in which a patient sees lots of small worms through a microscope which are supposed to be the cause of the illness means that there is a disturbance in the sympathetic nervous system, an abnormal charge, which has abnormally autonomized the smallest parts (worms) of the sympathetic nervous system. In my experience, it is related to contents that are unconscious at this level, but that, due to their creative character, would be synthesizable at least in theory. Whether it will come to this depends on fate and giftedness and equally on a proficiently led internal development. I have always found that drawing and painting serve especially well in such cases. When a person is dreaming in this way, the problem is still located in the physical, organic state and cannot be distinguished from either one of these. Only when the worms coalesce into a snake, for example, is there the prospect of becoming conscious. Parallel symbols are bacteria, small insects, and similar.
When I compare the content of your letter with what one reads in the papers about Palestine, I can well imagine what kind of a fantastic tension of opposites must exist for you. But, for the flourishing of internal development, such a tension is extremely advantageous because through it meaning emerges with particular clarity.
I have learned from Doctor Braband334—whom you probably know, that attempts are being made to gather together all those interested in analytical psychology. I have therefore sent some of my books and papers to the University Library in Jerusalem in support of these efforts.
It pleased me very much to hear that you have much to do. Hopefully it will continue in this way.
With best greetings and wishes,
Your ever loyal,
C. G. Jung
332 Jung was invited by the British government to take part in the celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Indian Science Congress Association at the University of Calcutta. He left Zurich at the beginning of December 1937 with Harold Fowler McCormick (1872–1941) and traveled in India for three months. On this occasion he received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Hyderabad, Allahabad, Benares (20 December 1937), and Calcutta (7 January 1938). See letters from the universities’ registrars in 1967 to Henry F. Ellenberger (Ellenberger archives, Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris); also Shamdasani (1996), pp. xxvii–xxviii, and Sengupta (2013).
333 The Indian Science Congress Association was founded in 1914 to enhance scientific research in India. The association meets every January. At the Silver Jubilee in Calcutta in 1938 the participation of foreign researchers was first introduced. The meeting was organized in conjunction with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and held under the presidency of Lord Rutherford of Nelson. After his premature death the presidential address on “Researches in India and Great Britain” was given by Sir James Hopwood Jeans. The opening session took place on 3 January 1938.
334 Margarete Braband, later Braband-Isaac (1892–1986): German-born Jewish psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Her interest in analytical psychology was first triggered by a presentation of Jung at the University of Zurich in 1928. She later participated in Jung’s Berlin seminar in 1933, which was also attended by Erich Neumann. She met Jung again at the congress of Bad Nauheim in 1934, where he wrote a recommendation for her to the Frankfurt patron of the arts Lilly von Schnitzler (1889–1981). Braband worked in Frankfurt until 1936, when she left Germany with her two children. On her way to Palestine she met Jung in Zurich at the end of March 1936. She settled down in Haifa, where she opened a clinical practice. Once in Palestine she also established contact with Neumann in Tel Aviv. As she wrote to Jung: “I often experience my being alone here in Haifa as very difficult and was glad to be able to finally go back to Tel Aviv once again and to be able to discuss all kinds of professional matters with Dr. Neumann from time to time” (Braband to Jung, 4 May 1937 [JA]). One of the participants of her seminar series in Jerusalem in 1938 wrote to Alice Lewisohn Crowley asking for a donation of Jewish Jungians in Zurich in order to acquire Jung’s books for the university library of Jerusalem. Jung promised to help her by sending available copies of his books: “I will send some texts and books of which I still have duplicates to the Jerusalem University Library” (Jung to Braband, 2 April 1938 [JA]). In 1939 Mrs. Crowley sent $100, which was used for the support of destitute patients of Braband. In 1938 Braband visited Zurich again, met Jung at the Eranos conference in Ascona, and did some psychotherapeutic work with Jung. After the war she moved to Tel Aviv, where she was in regular contact with Neumann and discussed her work with him. In 1953 Braband-Isaac, now married again, received a grant to undertake research with schizophrenic patients in the Friedmatt clinic of Basel. She intended to continue her project in the Burghölzli with Manfred Bleuler (1903–1994), for the purpose of which Jung wrote a recommendation. In 1956 she worked as a visiting medical doctor in Frankfurt, Washington (National Institutes of Health in Bethesda), and Oxford. Her research was mainly concerned with the psychotherapeutic treatment of schizophrenic patients experimenting with physical exercise, music, and chiromancy. She came to Switzerland on a regular basis to see Jung, attend the Eranos conference, and give seminars and lectures in Zurich and Basel. In 1951 she started the treatment of a psychotic patient, who had been referred to her by Neumann. While she was in Basel in 1953, the mental condition of the patient deteriorated. After her return the patient lived with her and her family, and she wrote a number of extensive letters about this case to Jung. The patient had several dreams about Neumann, and Braband asked Neumann for his opinion. Although they agreed on the diagnosis of borderline schizophrenia, there was disagreement about Neumann’s interpretation of the patient’s drawings and Braband’s use of music in the course of the treatment: “Interestingly, Dr. Neumann immediately said without prompting that the church is an apparition like the primitives make it, and he did not at all want to go into the fact that the patient had himself depicted it as church. […] Also Dr. Neumann found that I should rather have told him a dirty joke at the first dream about me and my mother with a kepi and tomato, I could have triggered an inflation with the music. I explained to him that the patient’s dream showed some months later that, through the ‘Song of the Earth’ he had arrived back in his childhood, at the scent and at his conceitedness which had existed even back then. But we could absolutely not agree and I soon kept my mouth shut as always” (Braband-Isaac to Jung, 17 October 1953 [JA]). Notes on Braband’s letters—apparently not written by Jung—found in the ETH archive speak of her resistance toward Neumann, the danger of her method, and her false assumption to be a representative of Jungian psychology. The same commentator judged her short unpublished text “C. G. Jung and Israel,” which she had written in 1947 and sent to Jung in 1953, as proof of her inflated attitude. Braband collaborated with John Layard (see n. 455) and Hugo Debrunner. In 1946 she met Martin Buber in Tel Aviv and had a discussion on Jung and “Abraxas.” Articles by Braband-Isaac are “Psychotherapie und Gymnastik” (“Psychotherapy and Gymnastic”) (1949) and “Musik in der Psychotherapie” (“Music in Psychotherapy”) (1952).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 5th Dec.-’38
Dear Professor Jung,
Since I have written you such a large number of unwritten letters, I am resolving—now that it is doubly difficult—to finally get around to writing to you for real. I don’t know if you can imagine how difficult it is today to maintain inner contact with someone like you who has inevitably been touched at best once by the events that are affecting us Jews. It is fully obvious and natural to me to know you live on a completely different plane from ours. Yes, I must say, it is almost a comfort to me to know that your age, if one might put it this way, has removed you some degrees from these horrific world events.
On the other hand, this naturally impedes access a little, for I am most deeply convinced one should not bother you too much, as you, as I know and daily experience for myself, are already “fully immersed,” as you once put it, in this world through your practice. Despite all this, it is a necessity for me to write to you once again if only to preserve the feeling that there is still a piece of Europe left, even for a Jew. Please do not misunderstand me. Although I, like all of us, am most deeply affected by the events in Germany335 that give me constant grounds to be glad that at least my father died before they happened336—in my heart of hearts I cannot break free from a sense of sympathy with or even compassion for this “German event.” This often seems to be an indication of my insufficiently developed feeling, but I don’t even know if this is correct. My experience with individuals has too often taught me that such states of confusion are necessary for their development to be able to simply pass a judgment about it here when it concerns me and my race.
Despite all this, I have too great a debt of gratitude to this nation to be able to identify this simply as the symptoms of its schizophrenic episode. Added to this is the fact that I believe that these entire events will be, in brief, the salvation of Judaism, while at the same time I’m clear that I do not know if I will be among the survivors of this upheaval or not. The enormous extraversion of Judaism that has led it to the brink of its grave will be cut off with the inexorable consistency of our destiny, and the terrible state of emergency that has gripped the entire people and will continue to do so will inevitably force the inner source energies to be called either into action or to their peril. It is both as clear to me that we will not be wiped out, as it is also that immeasurable numbers of us must perish in the process. And to watch this from the sidelines is a terrible torture. The reports that crowd in on one on a daily or hourly basis, and, sadly, the reports of eyewitnesses, make one glad to experience firsthand the terrible propensity of human beings to dissociate from overwhelmingly bad feelings.
Alongside this, in contrast with this, and to some degree also for its sake, I am attempting to write up the work I planned with you in 1933–34 that I have been working on ever since. This is very difficult alongside the thriving practice, the courses, and my “private life.”
It is, to some extent, an attempt to demonstrate the collective predeterminedness of a part of the problem of the modern Jew. It centers on the problem of internal revelation.337
In the first section I want to represent how, in Jewish antiquity, the principle of direct revelation applied, and how it stood in productive dialogue with the strong earth and reality bonds of the race.338 The Law as a secularization of the traumatic experience of exile whereby, in apparent acceptance of theocratic prophets, the earth-principle asserted itself to the exclusion of direct revelation.
Apocalypse, eschatological Messianism (Early Christianity), Gnosis as the emergence of direct inner revelation that had been suppressed into a sideline.
(This is as far as I have got in the first draft.)
After a short chapter on the repression of direct revelation in the Talmud and the countermovement in kabbalah, there follows a comprehensive chapter on Hasidism.339
The religious renaissance of Judaism with the individual as the central phenomenon but in a collective bond through the lasting adoption of the law as a binding cage of direct revelation.
(A course on this is already prepared in note form.340)
Assimilation and emancipation as a necessary de-collectivization of the Jewish consciousness. Uprooting and the loss of memory.
On the problem of the modern Jew. Illustration of the historic-collective contexts in dream and fantasy material. Reemergence of direct revelation but now in the individual, in direct connection firstly with individuation and secondly with the collective problem of revelation in Judaism. Emergence of the earth-side as location of revelation today—the converse of the position of the problem in Jewish antiquity—in a tension of opposites with the “spirit” principle that seems to hinder revelation. I.e., while the revelation principle used to stand in contrast to the heathen earth principle, now it appears in a positive form, coupled with strongly Near Eastern–Gnostic–pagan symbolism in a strong tension of opposites with the Law.
I have at least preedited this part of the material in several courses,341 so I hope I am no longer fully groping in the dark. Highly apparent is the strong presence of the religious problem in the first half of life in a strongly collective-toned manifestation, more or less unconnected with one’s private problems into which it grows in the course of the work.
You can well imagine how interesting this work is on the one hand, but how ill equipped I am for it on the other. I take the view, however, that I may collect materials for my living psychological work, even as a layman, as far as they are accessible to me and useful. This incursion into theological, religious, and historical areas is of course dillettantist in a certain sense. But the urgency of these problems for the Jewish situation seems so huge to me that even the inevitable arbitrariness of such an attempt is permitted, as long as it is conscious of its preliminariness and relativity.
I slid into these things, firstly, in the pursuit of the Jacob-Esau work into the general collective (I will take the liberty of sending you a supplement to the Jacob-Esau work soon), secondly in my engagement with images from the unconscious that I paint at longer and shorter intervals. A large part of my thought originates in the effort of capturing these images conceptually.
Actually these contents have occupied me incessantly in the last years, only infernal reality makes it extremely difficult to formulate things because I need time to do it and an occasional half day simply is not enough. In future, when a large group of relatives must be provided for and, on top of that, the economy is declining along with the practice, it will be a lot worse for sure. But on the other hand one’s concentration increases because of it and a certain despairing—joyful will to come to terms with reality precisely as an introvert and, what is more, as an intuitive.
Thus, the full uncertainty about any future and yet still having the feeling of being in the right place gives me—at least now and again—a remarkably paradoxical inner confidence, from which I believe that there could be a new, lively beginning in the individual and in the collective. And exactly because what has been experienced by the individual has such a strong connection with that experienced collectively and repeatedly with what has been historically effective, this connection between the most individual and the ancient has something strong and almost joyful about it.
Dear Professor, I ask you to forgive both the length of this letter as well as its poor form, but, in my case, badly typed is still better than well handwritten, and the length arises from the great distance from here to there, which, can only be bridged by a certain comprehensiveness, if at all. As a trip to Zurich under the current circumstances has been put back further than ever, you must please tolerate the long letter.
In thanking you very much for the Zosimos work,342 I would like to take this opportunity to ask whether anything else of yours has appeared since “Psychology and Religion.”343
With best wishes,
I am your ever grateful,
E. Neumann
[handwritten addendum:]
P.S. By the way, is it true that the dreamer in “Dream Symbols”344 and “Psychology and Religion” is a Jew? Will you publish anything on the specifically Jewish features of this development or do you see nothing specific about it. E.g., The “voice.” And what about “Jewish material”? If you can say something about this, I would of course be very grateful.
335 In the night of 9 to 10 November 1938 a pogrom against Jews took place throughout Nazi Germany. The atrocities were organized and carried out by SA paramilitary and the Hitler Youth. During the riots at least ninety-one Jews were murdered, a further 30,000 were arrested by the SS and Gestapo and deported to concentrations camps. Shops and buildings owned by Jews were destroyed, Jewish homes, schools and hospitals ransacked, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, and numerous synagogues were burned to the ground. This all happened under the eyes of the German authorities, who were told only to intervene in case non-Jewish lives or property were endangered. The pogrom is also known as “Crystal Night” (“Kristallnacht”), referring to the shattered glass paving the streets in the wake of the destruction. The attacks were presented by the Nazis as retaliation for the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old German-born Polish Jew. The Crystal Night is widely regarded among historians as a turning point of the anti-Semitic policy of the Nazis, from political suppression and anti-Jewish agitation to forced emigration, deportation, and the organized mass murder of European Jews. On the Crystal Night, see Gilbert (2006), Pehle (1991), and Read (1989).
336 Erich’s father, Eduard Neumann, died in 1937 in Berlin from the effects of a brain hemorrhage, an injury sutained from a savage beating by Nazis. See Lori (2005).
337 Ursprungsgeschichte des jüdischen Bewusstseins (On the Origins and History of Jewish Consciousness) (Neumann, 1934–40). See n. 273.
338 Beiträge zur Tiefenpsychologie des jüdischen Menschen und der Offenbarung (Contributions to the Depth Psychology of the Jewish Man and the Problem of Revelation), the first volume of Ursprungsgeschichte des jüdischen Bewusstseins (On the Origins and History of Jewish Consciousness) (Neumann, 1934–40). See n. 273.
339 Der Chassidismus und seine psychologische Bedeutung für das Judentum (Hasidism and Its Psychological Relevance for the Jewry) became the second volume of Ursprungsgeschichte des jüdischen Bewusstseins (On the Origins and History of Jewish Consciousness) (Neumann, 1934–40). See n. 273.
340 From 9 November 1939 to 30 May 1940 Neumann held a seminar series on “Analytische Psychologie und Judentum: Der Chassidismus” (“Analytical Psychology and Jewry: The Hasidism”) (Neumann, 1939–40).
341 In 1937/38 and 1938/39 Neumann held courses on the “Seelenprobleme des modernen Juden: Eine Reihenanalyse von Träumen, Bildern und Phantasien” (“Soul Problems of the Modern Jew: An Analysis of a Series of Dreams, Images, and Phantasies”) (Neumann, 1938–39).
342 Jung’s lecture at the 1937 Eranos conference titled “Einige Bemerkungen zu den Visionen des Zosimos” (Zurich, 1938).
343 Jung’s lectures at Yale University of autumn 1937 (see n. 329) were published for the Terry Foundation by the Yale University Press (and by Oxford University Press, London) in 1938 (Jung, 1938a).
344 Jung’s Eranos lecture 1935, “Traumsymbole des Individuationsprozesses: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der in den Träumen sich kundgebenden Vorgänge des Unbewussten” (“Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation”) (Jung, 1936a); extended version published as the second part of Psychology and Alchemy (Jung, 1944).
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
19th December 1938
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv,
Palestine
Dear Colleague,
Please do not be concerned that you have written me such a long letter. It has long interested me to know what you are actually doing. You must not imagine that I have retreated to the snow-clad heights, enthroned high above world events. I am right in the thick of it and am following the Palestinian question on a daily basis in the newspapers, and think often of my acquaintances there who have to live in this chaos. When I was in Palestine in 1933,345 I was unfortunately able to see what was coming all too clearly. I also foresaw great misfortune for Germany, even quite terrible things, but when it then shows up, it still seems unbelievable. Everyone here is shocked to their core as it were by what is happening in Germany. I have a great deal to do with German refugees and am constantly occupied with accommodating all my Jewish acquaintances in England and America. In this way I am in constant contact with contemporary events.
What you write about your plan of work interests me very much. You are proceeding in parallel with the experiences that I have been having in Europe for many years. I think you must be very careful when evaluating your specifically Jewish experiences. While there are, for sure, specific Jewish traits in this development, it is at the same time a general one that is also happening among Christians. It is a question of a general and identical revolution of minds. The specifically Christian or Jewish traits have only a secondary meaning. So, for example, while the patient you asked about is a pure Jew raised as a Catholic, I could nowhere describe his symbolism, inasmuch as I could delineate it, as Jewish with any certainty beyond doubt, although certain nuances strike one as Jewish occasionally. If I compare his material with my own or with that of many other academically educated patients, it is only the surprising consistency that strikes one, the difference is negligible. The difference between a typically Protestant and a Jewish psychology is especially small when contemporary events are taken into consideration. The whole problem is itself of paramount importance for humanity that is why individual and racial differences only play a small part. All the same, I can imagine very well that among Jews who live in Palestine the immediate impact of the environment brings the chthonic and old-Jewish into view. It seems to me as if anything specifically Jewish as well as specifically Christian could be best discovered in the way and form that unconscious material is assimilated by the subject. In my experience the resistance of the Jews to this seems more obstinate and thus the defensive effort seems to be much more vehement. But this is nothing more than a purely subjective impression.
The Zosimos essay was the most recently published piece from me. But still to come are an article on India (in English in an American journal),346 two lectures on the mother complex,347 which will appear in the 1938 Eranos Yearbook, and a longer commentary on Zen Buddhism,348 and finally a comprehensive introduction to the individuation process for the American edition of my Eranos lectures.349
Dr. Stern350 has informed me of his comprehensive correspondence with you. It is obvious from this that the devil has stirred things up between you.351 As soon as one notices this, one must not say any more, but return to oneself.
I was very pleased to hear that you are fully employed although it would be even better if you had time to realize your big plan. In the hope that your health is good, with good wishes, I remain your always loyal,
[C. G. Jung]
345 See n. 216. This letter has been printed in the Jung letter edition (Jung, 1973, pp. 317–18), but in the 1973 edition the year of Jung’s visit to Palestine was wrongly rendered as 1923 (p. 317).
346 “The Dreamlike World of India” and “What India Can Teach Us” (Jung, 1939a, 1939b).
347 “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (Jung, 1939). Speakers at the Eranos conference were asked to deliver two lectures.
348 “Foreword to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism” (Jung, 1939c).
349 Text was originally written in English and published as “The Meaning of Individuation” in The Integration of the Personality (Jung, 1939/40), an English collection of Jung’s Eranos lectures; the editors of the Collected Works decided to include the revised German version “Bewusstes, Unbewusstes und Individuation” translated as “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation” (1939d).
350 Max M. Stern (1895–1982): German-born Jewish psychoanalyst; a severe ailment contracted in World War I led to a partial disability and years of hospitalization. Once recovered, he studied medicine and became interested in analytical psychology. He took part in the IV General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy in Bad Nauheim (11–14 April 1929). In 1935 he left Frankfurt first for Paris, where he trained among others with Elisabeth de Sury, and later that year for Tel Aviv. In Palestine he continued his training with Erich Neumann until 1937. On Neumann’s recommendation he started working independently in 1936. Due to his ill health Stern left Palestine for America where he became a respected member of the psychoanalytical community. Since the 1950s he was a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center (formerly the Downstate Psychoanalytic Institute). His main work, posthumously published, is titled Repetition and Trauma: Toward a Teleonomic Theory of Psychoanalysis (1988). On Stern see Abrams (1983).
351 Max Stern wrote to Jung on 6 November 1938 (JA). In his letter he referred to an argument with Neumann that had arisen after a presentation in October 1937. During the argument Neumann declared himself as the only representative of analytical psychology in Palestine and denied Stern any right to publicly represent Jung’s psychology. In the aftermath a letter exchange between Neumann and Stern developed, which Stern sent together with the text of his presentation to Jung. Stern accused Neumann, who was his training analyst at the time, of breaking analytic confidentiality, of being ignorant of fundamental analytical concepts such as resistance and affect, and of deviating from Jung’s psychological theory. Jung replied to Stern on 19 December 1938 (JA) confirming that his presentation had been in line with Jung’s psychological understanding and that Neumann’s remark about the unconscious character of affects would have been ambiguous. He finished his letter with a declaration of impartiality: “Therefore: where dispute arises, the wise man remains silent” (“Darum: wo sich Streit erhebt, schweigt der Verständige”). For Neumann’s reply to Jung, see 29 N.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 15th November 1939
Dear Professor Jung,
The fact that I have been so absent and that I have not written to you for so long, against my own best intention, has a familiar internal explanation, I’m afraid. To some degree, I have also been absent to myself and have not come back to myself fully even now. Of course, it does not look like this from the outside, i.e., I am working, but am more or less swallowed up by the work with individuals and the private work on the Jewish. At the same time neither the one thing nor the other any longer seems as important as it did, say, a year ago. I do it as well as I can and as badly as I must, but I always have the feeling that I am playing a role as a Jew, mindful of the Gods, while a quiet ironic feeling—battle of Thermopylae352—resonates at the same time.
Two things are colliding in me that cannot easily be reconciled, the one namely the consciousness of belonging to a dying people, and the other is the knowledge that something new is emerging—not Palestine—that is quite secondary—and that I am co-responsible for this. That this new thing should be done precisely to the impossible object,—to the Jews—seems to me to be a paradox that strikes me as really Y.H.W.H.-like and Jewish. Please do not misunderstand me, I don’t mean anything to do with chosenness or the prophetic, indeed it seems to me that it is precisely the sacrifice of these principles that is what we face today and that is so difficult for me. It is indeed characteristic that I tried to portray the danger of the intuitive type as part of the first, separate section of my work on the revelation problem in Jewish antiquity. Overall I have not at all lost an accompanying and supervisory consciousness, but I see myself over and over again so collectively imprisoned, in a nonprimitive sense, that I am afflicted with self-limitation and know that I must suffer from it.
Sacrifice of intuition is my own problem, but I think it is also a central Jewish problem that is most closely linked with the rootlessness of the Jewish structure and exactly this link between the collective and individual seems to me also to be Jewish.
In the meantime, I have also recognized that Jewish symbolism—at least that of Western Jews—is consistent with that of European people, that here something secular is taking place. Of course, I knew this before, but the problem of the singularity of the Jews would have been simpler if a specific symbolism could have been demonstrated. I have abandoned this and stand without preconceptions before something that is incomprehensible to me. In the course of history, individuation is the consequence of Jewish development; at the same time it seems to be the abolition of the Jewish. My slogan: it is no longer about Judaism but it is about Jewish people, about the individual as revelation-center and realization-center of the Self—but it seems to me, along with the dissolution of the old Judaism, to require and to signify something like a new Jewish beginning, and how should I believe in it, why must I believe in it?
You see, dear Professor Jung, if I may interweave a very personal confession here, I do not believe in it, everything speaks against it, and I am so tired of the Jews and the Jewish—and every free minute and every thought belongs to these subjects, and I must protect myself from being completely swallowed up by this work. I am after all no “ignoramus,” and Moses identification, prophet identification, etc. are not unknown facts to me. But, you see, my position toward Judaism is extremely revolutionary and even my attempt to create the continuity through to the modern Jewish person from the openness to revelation of antiquity via the inner Hasidic revolution is, as I of course will know myself, a new interpretation—how can I help myself in this paradox?
The following dream of mine comes to mind in relation to this: June ’39
I, probably identical to the personality of an old pilgrim.(?)
At first, as if in a pub or similar, with the Nazis (?), not trapped, but suitably threatened. With the help of small pictures that he was showing to them, he did something revolutionary, shows it to the others cautiously; but it was like being among people who half belonged together. When it was time to leave (Journey?) something like father and son stood next to him (Landlord? The father) and he tore up all these pictures all of which were unremarkable, at which the landlord looked at them all but said nothing. The son was favorably disposed, the father became like an old prince. Scene in a big castle. The prince came to the pilgrim and said: “Go.” This was preceded by a judgment scene in which the son had protested in vain. (?) He—I—rose, took the wide-brimmed hat and staff, nothing more. There was a wooden hat (begging bowl?) which I was not allowed to take and threw angrily against the ceiling of the castle so that it shattered, and the sound resounded echoingly through the high castle, down the massive stairs. I asked may I not even say goodbye to the son? He shook his head with a mocking smile.
The pilgrim then left, the ship was supposed to collect him. At the foot of the castle the prince asked (something like): So you think I am letting the pardes353 be worked on incorrectly? He, the pilgrim, said humbly, as if excusing himself: No, only I have learned to do it in a different way, you should clear the weeds.
Then it was like the end of a drama. The ship did not dock, but sailed past, upon which the prince scornfully stabbed the pilgrim (Dagger made of gold with a transparent glass-green stone blade). The pilgrim pronounces the demise of the prince. He had secretly covered the whole ship with needle script beforehand, piercing in the news of the unjust prince. The ship now sails on the open sea to Milan or Boulogna [sic] (or similar), where the High Court passes judgment and, with a huge army in its wake, besieges the town of the prince, kills him, destroys his rule and installs a new one.
The end is like a dialogue being read out loud in a drama, last pages of a manuscript. The dying pilgrim rising above the prince in the dialogue, he in an ascending curve, the prince in a descending and sinking curve.
The Gnostic motifs are clear, as is the mystical pardes motif. On the whole I would be able to say much about the dream. Pilgrim—Wotan—Intuition, Prince-Landlord-Sensation. New order, the son, the inner work that calls forth the new: needle script, etc. Despite this, the link between the personal and the collective is once again obscure. Especially, the “sacral” killing of my pilgrim soul by the prince is rather sinister, just as the pilgrimage is all in all rather surprising. I would ask you very much, if it is possible for you, to say something about this. My cohesion with reality seemed gradually so strong that I did not have so much to do with the wide-brimmed hat of Wotan any more. If I understand the dream correctly, the revolutionary part triumphs only and precisely because it is killed by its opposite. This seems to be most tragic, as the whole has something mythopoetic about it that moves me deeply, but that I cannot properly grasp. It has something of epoch change about it that I keep finding in my pictures and understand passably, but whose connection with myself is disconcerting to me.
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you something else. My last picture shows me a huge hermaphrodite of such comical size that I become dizzy. But what is striking is its division into the male upper half and lower female whereas the whole of space with its starry sky resides in the unconscious water part,* which, in feminine form reaches as far as the navel. Out of the navel as the connection point grows a botanical unifying symbol. But this whole figure stands, as it were, in a world space, as we do in ours. Naturally, I know that you can only say something about this to me when this being is what it purports to be, an archetype. Now my Jewish work circles around the Y.H.W.H. earth opposite, the positive tension between these poles, their contraction, destruction, and reconstellation. I understand this image, among other things, as the unity aspect of this opposite and the development that emerges from it, but it has such a strange and ghostly character that all of this is not enough for me by a long way. I even understand the feminine as Godhead of the world and the Y.H.W.H. life in his being, which breaks in from above. At least as an aspect of unity, i.e., no longer in the tension of opposites, it is a matter for my consideration. I would like to know only whether another quite different collective matter is behind it and that can be expressed.
I take the fact that the war prevents me from sending you my just completed German manuscript (part one)354 as a commission to write the Hasidism section for its duration. Everything here is extremely serious and difficult. My “worries” tell you enough about my situation that, surrounded by much work and many “nice” people, is naturally very isolated.
*[handwritten insertion: There is air space everywhere, but to the side, a water lily blossoms at the height of the navel, so that the lower space is “water space” after all.]
We are all well; my closest family, though destitute, are in England,355 so we must not complain. Zurich would have been very important for me and it is more unattainable than ever, but if things become too pressing, ways will be found.
I do beg you, dear Professor, not to take this letter and its inquiries as a claim on your time. If you do happen to find the time to say something to me, I will be very happy, but you know better than I that these things take a long time anyway and much becomes clearer gradually in the process of development, so there is no hurry. The lack of shape in this letter corresponds to the certain blockedness in me and my long silence. The fact of only ever “developing” myself alongside work and not being finally able to present either to you or to myself any “achievement” makes me more silent than is good for me.
Very many thanks for the last Eranos work that has clarified much for me. One more remark about Dr. Stern.356 Without question, the devil has stirred things up there, the affair has taught me a great deal, also about myself. Anyway, the fact that he has become a passionate Freudian with all the accessories in the meantime confirms to me that his analysis with me was abysmal, but it has also shown me that my skepticism toward him that he did not “experience” and realize the contents was not completely incorrect. I understand that one cannot always reach Jung from Freud, but to regress from Jung to Freud seems to me to be a moral defect, perhaps I am wrong, or better said to correspond to a Jewish-destructive nature. Anyway. My complex to feel too responsible still exists in any case, at least in part.
I wish you and all who belong to you that these momentous times will pass you by as much as possible without putting you in harm’s way, and am,
In old gratitude,
Your E. Neumann
[handwritten addendum] P.S. I am not as completely swallowed up as this somehow rather inhuman impersonal letter strikes me at this time. Please believe me about the personal matters. It is almost unhealthy to almost only have oneself to check things out with, so that this letter is a bit too much like an “analytic session.”
352 Battle of Thermopylae (“The Hot Gates”), 480 BCE, fought between an alliance of Greek city-states and the army of the Persian Empire under Xerxes I. Despite being vastly outnumbered the Greek troops led by King Leonidas of Sparta were able to hold the narrow pass for three days until they were betrayed by a local resident. Most of the Greeks were killed in the final standoff, and the Persian army advanced toward Athens. The name is synonymous for bravery and heroism in defending ones homeland, even when the odds are against one.
353 Pardes, meaning orchard; etym. from Persian root, cf. the English word “paradise” or the German word “Paradies.” According to the Talmud the exegeses of two biblical texts is not allowed: the “ma’ase bereschit” (“book of creation”) and the “ma’ase merkava” (“book of the chariot throne”) [Ezekiel 1 and 10]. The explanation of this law is accompanied by the Talmudic story (Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 14b) about the dangers four sages face by attempting to “enter the pardes”: one dies, another one loses his mind, the third one becomes a heretic, and only the fourth one—Rabi Akiba ben Joseph—enters and leaves the garden peacefully. The three concepts of “ma’ase bereschit,” “ma’ase merkava,” and “pardes” have subsequently become key aspects of many Jewish mystical interpretations and texts. See Dan (2007, p. 14). Pardes also used an acronym for the four methods of the interpretation of the Torah: Peshat, Remez, Derash, Sod (plain or contextual, allegorical, metaphorical, and esoteric meaning).
354 Beiträge zur Tiefenpsychologie des jüdischen Menschen und der Offenbarung (Contributions to the Depth Psychology of the Jewish Man and the Problem of Revelation), the first volume of Ursprungsgeschichte des jüdischen Bewusstseins (On the Origins and History of Jewish Consciousness) (Neumann, 1934–40). See n. 273.
355 Most of Julie Neumann’s family fled to London after 1933. Erich’s brother Franz also immigrated to England. Their mother Zelma Neumann was in London on her way to Tel Aviv when the war broke out and stayed with Franz and his family. She joined Erich and Julie in Tel Aviv in 1947. Julie’s youngest sister Ruth Goldstone (neé Blumenfeld) described the fate her family: “Martin and his family immigrated to Australia, Julie and Erich went to Palestine, I went to England where I married my cousin Salo. Finally I succeeded in finding a job for my sister Lotte, and my parents were soon able to come after her. I was able to get a transit visa for Argentina for my brother Paul. As the war broke out shortly after that he was no longer able to use the visa. So he stayed here in London with his wife. […] Julie visited us several times in London and had good contact with my children. At the end she visited me in London with her husband in order to see our mother who was over 90 years old. Erich was already very ill on this visit and wanted to visit his brother Franz who was a doctor. Very soon when he was back home he died from cancer” (letter from Ruth Goldstone to Angelica Löwe, 3 June 2007; Löwe, 2008, p. 42).
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
16th December 1939
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
It pleased me to hear something from you again. You obviously waited rather too long before writing to me again for your letter is so concentrated that a complete response to it is absolutely impossible in writing.
With your dream I had the need of a dilution or an elaboration. When dreams assume this legendary form, content is present for elaboration, which should be taken up and developed through active imagination. I would have needed to dramatize the dream even more so that it would reveal its secrets sooner. The Wotan association does not refer to the Germanic regression in Germany, but is a symbol for a spiritual development that involves the entire cultural world (Wotan as the wind God = Pneuma).357 This also explains why Wotan also makes an appearance with the Jews, albeit only with German ones, as I have seen many times.
The hermaphrodite is indeed an archetype. It represents a unity of the pairs of opposites and is probably a symbol of duality that corresponds to Aquarius and would thus roughly equate to the same value as the fish symbolism at the beginning of our era.358 As the alchemical symbolism already sets forth, it means the Self whose Indian symbols are also male-female. (C./f., e.g,. the Atman figure at the beginning of the B[ri]hadaranyaka Upanishads.)359 This problematic transcends racial differences and emerges from the spiritual wind that blows over Europe or probably over the whole world, for even in the far East all of these things are in a rapid flux.
We are naturally very impacted by the immediate danger of war in our own land but for the time being everything is on hold.
In my lectures I am dealing with the Eastern orientation linked with yoga philosophy and the Western orientation linked to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.360
Please accept my best wishes,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
357 Jung talks about Wotan as a storm god in his article “Wotan” (Jung, 1936) and in his seminars on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to Jung the seizure of Nietzsche’s consciousness through the Wotan archetype is indicated by the image of the wind and can be seen as a foreboding of Nietzsche’s insanity (see Jung, 1934–39, pp. 1073–75, 1227–28). Nietzsche’s fate, Jung concludes, anticipated the development in the Germanic unconscious in the 1930s. See also introduction, pp. xxxi.
358 Cf. Aion (Jung, 1951, § 142): “If, as it seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the hostile brothers, then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites.” For a commentary on Aion see Edinger (1996). On Jung’s understanding of the Age of Aquarius in regard to Aion and Liber Novus see Owens (2011).
359 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣhad, I, iv, 3: “He was not at all happy. Therefore people (still) are not happy when alone. He desired a mate. He became as big as man and wife embracing each other. He parted this very body into two. From that came husband and wife. Therefore, said Vājñavalkya, this (body) is one-half of oneself, like one of the two halves of a split pea. Therefore this space is indeed filled by the wife. He was united with her. From that men were born.” (Mādhavānanda, 1965, p. 99).
360 In his weekly lectures at the ETH Jung (cf. n. 320) dedicated the winter semester 1938/39 and summer semester 1939 to the philosophy of yoga interpreting Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Amitāyur-Dhyāna-Sūtra, and the Shrī-Chakra-Sambhāra Tantra (see Hannah 1934–41, vol. 2 (= Modern Psychology, vols. 3 and 4], pp. 11–143). In the summer semester 1939 and the winter semester 1939/40 he contrasted this view on Eastern spiritualism with a psychological reading of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia Spiritualia (see Hannah 1934–41, vol. 2 (= Modern Psychology, vols. 3 and 4], pp. 149–264). (Theses lectures will be published as part of the Philemon series by Martin Liebscher and Ernst Falzeder.)
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv,
1, Gordon St.
11 May 1940
Dear Professor Jung,
Precisely now that uncertainty about the future has grown greater than ever I want to send you a sign of life and to leave all my extensive but unfinished letters to you to one side.
It seems to me that the everyday is taking a back seat right now and only the most personal matters still have the right to be perhaps worthy of communication. Please understand my sending you my talk in this vein. I gave it here in relative privacy, i.e., to a quite small circle. It would be important for me to know whether you could identify at least to some degree with its formulations, or whether this way of seeing things is foreign to you.
The talk belongs to a certain extent in the third section of my book: On the Depth Psychology of the Modern Jew, whose second section, “The Psychological Meaning of Hasidism,” I am now writing, and whose first section, “The Problem of Revelation in Jewish Antiquity,” happily needs only now—after the umpteenth reworking—, to be typed up.361
If it is technically possible I will permit myself to send you this section shortly.
I hope very much that the contact with you, dear Professor, will not be interrupted, even through the passage of time; I am pretty much out on a limb and know very well that my work on the Jewish is very incomprehensible and untimely even for the Jews. All the more important, then, is “Zurich” if I may call it something so impersonal when I mean something so personal. It is not so much about consensus as about the feeling of solidarity beyond what is different, of this you may be sure.
I remain, in old gratitude,
Your E. Neumann
[handwritten addendum] The Manuscript is being sent under separate cover,—hopefully you will get it.
361 Neumann (1934–40). See n. 273.
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
7th December 1940
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
Your letter of the 11th May 1940 has just arrived, along with the manuscript: Religious Experience in Depth Analysis.362 So it has taken a very long time to get here, as you can see.
I thank you very much for your letter. Naturally I have not yet read the manuscript, but will report to you as soon as I have.
I hope things are going well otherwise. As you know, we live here in Switzerland on an island with reduced heating. Otherwise, there is nothing new to report.
With best wishes,
Your always devoted,
C. G. Jung
362 This might be the first draft of the unpublished typescript “Zur religiösen Bedeutung des tiefenpsychologischen Weges” (“On the Religious Significance of the Way of Depth Psychology”), dated “Tel Aviv, 1942” (Neumann, 1942). During the war Neumann also wrote a text titled “Die Bedeutung des Bewusstseins für die tiefenpsychologische Erfahrung” (“The Significance of Consciousness for Depth-Psychological Experience”) (Neumann, 1943), dated “Tel Aviv, 1943,” which was divided into four parts: 1. “Symbole und Stadien der Bewusstseinsentwicklung” (“Symbols and Stages in the Development of Consciousness”), 2. “Bewusstseins-Entwicklung und Psychologie der Lebensalter” (“Development of Consciousness and the Psychology of the Life Stages”), 3. “Der tiefenpsychologische Weg und das Bewusstseins” (“The Way of Depth Psychology and Consciousness”), and 4. “Stadien religiöser Erfahrung auf dem tiefenpsychologischen Weg” (“Stages in Religious Experience on the Way of Depth Psychology”). Neumann’s typescript from 1942, which was probably based on his 1940 presentation, is very likely to have been intended for use as a fourth part of this project.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 1st October 1945
1, Gordon St.
Dear Professor,
For a long time I have felt the urge to write to you and to renew the connection that means so much to me. But as the date shows, the inner difficulties that had to be overcome were not small. The years in between in which I did not dare to write to you so as not to endanger you were no small thing. I very much hope that you, your family, and all individuals close to you have withstood this time without serious damage, inside or out. Fate has wrapped a tight bow around us, we are healthy and are working, and all close family members of my wife and myself managed to get out in time. That means a great deal and yet in such a time as ours is not very conclusive.
I would like to briefly update you about myself. I can well imagine how you are being showered with updates from all over the world, but the contact to you and Miss Wolff is—even symbolically—the most precious thing, but also the only thing that is left to me of Europe. I know and affirm it so that I may also remain linked to the German cultural circle in this way, more than with all else.
My inner life is moving in a certain dialectical opposition to the times we live in. This is conditioned by my intuition, but I could hardly say that I suffer because of it. My relationship to the external world is amply (for me anyway) engaged through my large practice, the courses and a few close people, otherwise I am substantially taken up with the continuum of my internal work and the writing that flows from it, regardless of what may come out of it. But right now that is starting to change, as I would like to tell you later. But to return to my dialectic. After I had completed the large work on Jewish antiquity—on the Soul History of the Jew—(it is now obsolete and only useable as source material), I wrote a book on the psychological meaning of Hasidism for the modern Jew, which I still stand by.363 But then, after I had arrived at my current internal state, the Jewish problem and the work on it was ended as far as I was concerned, precisely at a time when it was becoming palpable in the world in an indescribably horrific way. I, meanwhile, was coming back to “pure” psychology. Firstly in essays and lectures from which I took the liberty of sending you the larger work on Depth Psychology and a New Ethic.364 All these things are unpublished, of course, some of them have been made public in courses, a few in lectures. The practice and the local community are predominantly almost exclusively German. Psychologically, psychoanalysis reigns in blinkered, dogmatic proponents with around 25 registered members in the country, a free polyclinic, training, etc. It is understandable both from the social, rational, and national situation, they are about 50 years behind here intellectually, but much is made more difficult because of this, even when I disregard my own personal unsuitedness to publicity.
But now I am in the middle of a large work and I would like to arouse your interest in it, i.e., I’d like to briefly tell you about it. “Archetypal Stages of the Development of Consciousness.”365 Myth, childhood, science of neurosis. The first book, “Psychology of Myth,” is almost complete,—I’m writing the last chapter of it. Mythology as a projection of the ego—and the development of consciousness. The individual stages with their symbols as mythological cycles through which the “ego” passes in its development. The archetypal stages as transpersonal preconditions that are passed through in the course of the history of humanity and in the individual’s own childhood history. What is important for me here is, for example, the debate with Freud—that is essential. E.g., when, in the “Life of Childhood,” Fordham366 simply accedes to or takes for granted the Oedipus complex,367 that simply will not do. Primal parents instead of Oedipus complex, the clarification of the incest stage, the concepts of castration, building on the transformations, that I believe, were superseded by you later. Stages: Uroboros, Great Mother, separation of the primal parental couple, fight with the dragon. From the creation myth to the hero myth. Matricide, patricide, etc., auto conception of the spirit in the Osiris myth and the kings’ ritual. Much is old, summarizing, clarifying, some seems to me to be important as a completion. Represented deductively because it is the only possible way to do it if it is to be clear. Important, among other things, for a transpersonal psychology of childhood and for a therapy that can first refer to stages and cycles of symbols but that acquires an orientation in this way. In a sense, a history of the development of the libido in the sense of transpersonal analytical psychology. For sure, it can only be an attempt at something, but perhaps a helpful one. Both for remedial teachers or the child analysts, who work, I say, in a “Jungish” way, as well as for us Jungians ourselves, the lack of such clarifications in the work was always very troubling. I must say though that child analysis has extremely frequently proved itself to me to be important and decisive in the work. Also in the analyses of the second half of life. Do you have a different opinion about this? The fact that in your publications, the work on the discovery of the archetypes and on the individuation process is center-staged does not seem to me to be proof of the contrary. It seems to me that problems such as that of the stability of the ego and the possibility of its realization have their roots in childhood experiences. For example, an unsuccessful dragon fight in which the transpersonal contest takes place with the personal parents onto whom the primal parental couple is projected. So, when the first section is finished, the Psychology of Myth, I will allow myself to send you one “for inspection” and would, of course, be exceptionally grateful to you for any comments on it, all the more as it is crucially important for me to know what your take is on this. My experience is so terribly inferior to yours; the foundations of the work reside in your psychology, so that in a certain sense your approval of my efforts is of essential importance.
As you can imagine, I am very busy with my writing, which must be done alongside 8–9 hours of practice, courses, etc. This has its disadvantages, but on the whole I am balancing it and it me, so that it works. Those that feel hard done by announce themselves sorrowfully, whether it is my wife, I myself, or someone else, but as I have learned quite well to put up with myself, I am managing to get others to tolerate me also. Working under these conditions of time and climate is, at times, inevitably consuming, but when it gets too bad and I don’t notice, my wife lets me know, sometimes even my own unconscious too. This is really quiet. Times of making pictures368 and imaginative series alternate for me with productive times of writing, they rarely overlap. Mostly I live off the images, etc., for years and never actually manage to be done with them. I really should work through much of this with you, overall I am faced with all these contents unfortunately pretty much alone, i.e., no one is there who can correct me in my general processing. But dear old reality prevents one from slipping too far inward, which I am not always thankful about, as my work compels me. With my large practice and a very big and growing practice on the part of my wife we are still managing to keep up with inflation “elegantly.” I.e., we can take 4–6 weeks holiday per year, which I need for my work, my wife—who is very overstretched, needs it to relax.
You see, dear Professor, I am writing nothing about the times, nothing about Palestine. My inner dialectic indicates the only possible path for me. At these times, the general human condition moves me, and this only. How else could one bear it. This “passionate intensity,” if I may say so, makes life meaningful for me. And although I often check this out in myself, it does not seem to be a flight from the reality of the day. My practical work extends into this everyday reality, perhaps my other work will also do in future. The fact that, on the whole, I live in such an insular way here I regard as a requirement for my development and my work, which I must accept. I do not know where in the world I could have gone on working and maintaining my family in the last decade as I have been able to here. Much here is dangerous, absurd, and almost unbearable, but everything remains comprehensible at the same time, all too comprehensible. My distance will, I fear, and must, remain. But where in the world would I have less distance than here?
I hope very much that this letter—which has become all too long,—finds you well and fully employed. G. Adler sent me your work on the child archetype recently,369 which I like very much. You can imagine how important it would be for me and how much I would enjoy hearing what you are working on. I think your illness of which Adler wrote to me370 is long since overcome and has remained without aftereffects. It is good that your 70th birthday fell in peacetime at least.
You will forgive me that, apart from the “official greeting,” I did not write to you on that occasion. This letter of reconnection had to be written first, and I am not very good at writing formal things. Is your great alchemy work371 of which Adler wrote now complete? We are up to date with all the English works, only Baynes’s bombed-out book372—which would have been very important for me—has not made it to Palestine.
With that, I will end this mammoth letter. I would be very grateful if you would pass on warmest greetings from my wife and me to Miss Wolff. I will write to her soon.
With best wishes to Mrs. Jung, I remain,
Your grateful,
E. Neumann
I wrote the letter on the typewriter out of “consideration” only. I don’t like doing it, but my writing is known to be illegible.
363 Neumann (1934–40). See n. 273.
364 Neumann (1949b).
365 This later develops into The Origins and History of Consciousness (Neumann, 1949a).
366 Michael Scott Montague Fordham (1905–1995): English analytical psychologist and child psychiatrist, coeditor of Jung’s Collected Works in English. The beginnings of Fordham’s interest in Jungian psychology dates back to 1933. He enters analysis with Helton Godwin (“Peter”) Baynes (see nn. 221 and 372), followed by an analysis with Hilde Kirsch (see nn. 172 and 178). In 1945 he is appointed editor of the Collected Works and a year later is one of the instigators of setting up the Society of Analytical Psychology. He was the first editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. His lifelong interest in the works of Melanie Klein led him to undertake a Kleinian analysis in the 1980s. Fordham’s works include New Developments in Analytical Psychology (1957), The Objective Psyche (1958), and The Self and Autism (1976). His memoirs are titled The Making of an Analyst: A Memoir (1993). The Life of Childhood: A Contribution to Analytical Psychology was published in 1944. Fordham sent a copy to Jung, who replied in a letter of 14 September 1945: “Thank you for your kind letter. I have received your interesting book about ‘The Life of Childhood.’ It arrived during my illness and that is the reason why I never thanked you for it” (MFP). On Fordham see Astor (1995), on Fordham’s relation to Neumann and his critique of Neumann’s child psychology (Fordham, 1981), see introduction, p. lvi–lviii.
367 In The Life of Childhood (1944) Fordham cites the Oedipus myth as the classic example of the process of identification, which would occur universally in childhood (p. 20), and uses it to describe the relationship between the parents and their effect on children: “The development of the child differs according to sex owing to the functioning of the Oedipus and Electra myth, whereby the boy has a negative attitude to the father and a positive erotic one to his mother, while the reverse holds good for the girl” (p. 47).
368 In 2006, eighty-one of Neumann’s dream paintings were sold at an auction at Sotheby’s London (see Sotheby’s, 2006, p. 150). The paintings dated from 1933 to 1948, annotations were added until 1959. Drawings can also be found in Neumann’s two dream books titled Buch der Einweihung (The Book of Initiation) written between 1940 and 1959, which were auctioned as well (Neumann, 1940–59; Sotheby’s, 2006, pp. 148–49). In the 1930s Neumann also drew three books for his children, one of which depicts the biblical story of Jacob (NP; see the cover of Harvest, 2006).
369 The Psychology of the Child Archetype in Jung and Kerényi (1941); see also Jung (1941).
370 Gerhard Adler’s letter to Neumann is missing. On 11 February 1944 Jung slipped and broke his ankle. Twleve days later, probably due to the immobilization following the injury, he developed a pulmonary embolism and suffered a heart attack. During three weeks of a semiconscious state Jung had a series of visions that he describes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961, pp. 293–301). After a year of convalescence Jung suffered a second heart attack in 4 November 1946. See also n. 393.
371 Psychology and Alchemy, published as volume 5 of the Psychologische Abhandlungen (Jung, 1944), is the extended version of Jung’s Eranos lectures from 1935, “Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation” (Jung, 1936a), and 1936, “Religious Ideas in Alchemy” (Jung, 1937).
372 Helton Godwin “Peter” Baynes (1882–1943): Analytical psychologist, Jung’s assistant and translator of his work. London-born Baynes studied medicine. Because of the breakdown of his first marriage with Rosalind Thornycroft (1891–1973) he came to Zurich for therapy with Jung shortly after the end of World War I. Over time he formed a friendship with Jung and became his first assistant. He organized and joined Jung’s journey to Mount Elgon in 1925 (see n. 221), shortly after the tragic suicide of his second wife, Hilda (née Davidson). English translations of Jung’s writings by Baynes include Psychological Types (1926) and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928), which he translated with his third wife, Cary F. Baynes (née Fink). Despite reservations by Jung and Toni Wolff, Baynes left Zurich in 1931 in order to marry Agnes Sarah “Anne” Leay and settled down in England. Baynes became the leading figure of Jungian psychology in England. He wrote two influential books, Mythology of the Soul: A Research into the Unconscious from Schizophrenic Dreams and Drawings (1940), which used material from two cases, one of them being Michael Fordham (see n. 366), and Germany Possessed (1941), a psycho-biography of Hitler. During the days of the blitz, Reed House, in West Byfleet near London, where Peter, his wife, and their three children lived, was frequently endangered by bombs and doodlebugs. At one time three incendiary bombs landed in the garden, one on the roof of the house, and two on the lawn (Baynes-Jansen, p. 9). In a letter to Jung he describes the pressure of the situation: “We had a streak of bombs straddle the house last night; one fell among the trees just beyond the ditch at the bottom of the field and one on the wood the other side of the road. But the only damage was a couple of window casements blown out by the blast in the summer-house, and some glass in the greenhouse. That was at 8:30 in the evening. So now we all sleep down in the hall” (unpublished letter, quoted in Baynes-Jansen, pp. 312–13). The book Neumann refers to in his letter might be Mythology of the Soul, as he seemed to have a copy of Germany Possessed as a quote in the unpublished typescript “Die Bedeutung des Bewusstseins für die tiefenpsychologische Erfahrung” (“The Significance of Consciousness for Depth-Psychological Experience”) (Neumann, 1943) indicates.
Küsnacht, Zurich,
Seestrasse 228
8th January 1946
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
As Professor Jung is still away on holiday I would like to let you know that your work on the occasion of his 70th birthday373 has arrived here safely. Your work on Depth Psychology and a New Ethic as well as your letter of 1st October have also reached Professor Jung. I am sorry that I did not let you know of their safe arrival immediately, as Prof. Jung intended to do so himself personally. Unfortunately in the last year there has been so much urgent work to attend to that he has not yet got round to reading your works. Since his illness, he must use his energy sparingly and this means sadly that some things have to be laid to one side. I know, however, that he hopes very much to be able to write to you at length very soon.
I don’t know whether you will remember me. As you will see, I have remained faithfully in my post since you were last in Switzerland.374
With belated best wishes for the New Year and best regards,
Your,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
373 It is not clear to which text Schmid refers. Neumann did not contribute to the festschrift for Jung’s seventieth birthday. Probably he sent an unpublished typescript. No matching text could be found in the ETH archive, the Jung family archive, or in the Neumann papers in Jerusalem.
374 Marie-Jeanne Schmid worked as Jung’s secretary from 1932 to 1952 (see n. 330). The last time she had met Neumann was when he visited Zurich in May/June 1936 (see letters 19 N, 20 N, and 21 J).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 4. VI. 46
1, Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
In the last post I have sent you the first section of my book on the archetypal stages of the development of consciousness, which deals with the psychology of myth. The second section will follow very soon; I am just rewriting some elements of it. As you can imagine, this work is very important to me and I would like to publish this work this time. I think it is now ready to come out. The isolation of my existence in Palestine is probably greater than you imagine, and I fear a part of the deficiencies of which I was fully conscious on sending the manuscript to you has to do with this basic fact of my life. I have virtually no opportunity of discussing any scientific matters with peers, and this may be evident. How much my work is damaged by this and where its errors lie I expect to learn from you, dear Professor. Although I have, I think, achieved a certain degree of personal equilibrium, at least as much as my affective and “marslike” nature will allow, I am quite shaky in my self-evaluation as well as in the evaluation of my work. Sometimes, especially when I am caught up in the work, I find it important, at other times everything becomes doubtful once again. I.e., my presentation and my ability to formulate adequately what I have to say becomes problematic, but not the matter itself. Even here, of course, I come up against the limitations of my nature, that I expect too much from the material that I am starting from and I distance myself too far from it.
The fact that I have heard absolutely nothing from you apart from the confirmation of receipt from Miss Schmidt [sic] is naturally rather disappointing, but I hope that only the best reasons were behind this, namely, copious and productive work, but not over exertion or illness. The Alchemy,375 Paracelsica,376 and the Mythology377—this unfortunately only very recently—are the latest works of yours that are in my possession, I do not yet have the book on contemporary events378 and the Eranos essay on the mass.379
The alchemy book is, it seems to me, the most important book since Transformations, for me anyway, though I must also say that for me, as remarkable as that may sound, it is a type of “West-East Divan”380 in which I browse to repeatedly discover something new. As the third in the league I love, by the way, Mann’s Joseph novel.381 I express a quiet wish that I would love to read something from you about it. Jung-Kerényi, Mann-Kerényi,382 but why not Jung-Mann?383 To my mind, Mann has been confusing Freud with you for a long time,384 but, anyway, the history of ideas will not be disturbed by that. For me, these two names are most closely interwoven with each other as discoverers of the mythical world. Please do not be angry with me because of this, I do know, of course, that it is not my job to demand even more of your already overstretched energies.
So now to return to me and my book. I once dreamed, almost three years ago, that you said to me: “I would like to eat some more fruit with you.” This sentence got into me in its own or in my own way, and independently of the complexity of its meaning, it has been a strong incentive for me. For, as paradoxical as it may be, it was a challenge to me, and for me, the book is a fruit, which, I am sending you herewith “to eat.” Should you have a taste for it, it would be a great pleasure for me, and if “eating together” could find expression in an introduction from you, my egotistic interpretation of the dream would come fully true. But, of course, I withdraw this request in the first instance because your response cannot be predicted. But I do not withdraw my request that you read this book and write something about it for me.
It is my plan to come to Zurich next year, but its viability is still uncertain. It would be highly significant for me to discuss very deep seated fantasies and images that it will take a very long time to come to terms with otherwise.
Although I don’t like not writing by hand, I have typed this because of the illegibility of my handwriting, as well as I can, I hope you will value my now writing a few lines. I hope very much that you are well; here we are “physically” well, psychically there is too much to process that is difficult, collectively more than individually.
I hope that both letter and manuscript arrive before your holidays. As soon as the second section is ready—I think in about 6 weeks—I will send it to you too.
With best wishes and greetings,
I am your,
E. Neumann
376 Two lectures given in 1941 on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Paracelsus: “Paracelsus als Arzt” and “Paracelsus als geistige Erscheinung” (Jung, 1942).
377 Essays on a Science of Mythology (Jung and Kerényi, 1941).
378 Essays on Contemporary Events (Jung, 1946) includes ‘Wotan,’ ‘After the catastrophe,’ ‘The fight with the shadow,’ and ‘Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life.’
379 Jung’s Eranos lecture of 1941, “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass” (Jung, 1942).
380 Collection of lyrical poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, inspired by the Persian poet Hafis, first published in 1819.
381 Thomas Mann (1875–1955): German literary Nobel laureate (1929), wrote a four-part novel on the biblical stories of Genesis titled Joseph and His Brothers. The four volumes retell the biblical stories from Jacob to Joseph and were written between 1926 and 1943 (Mann, 1933–43). Paul Bishop argues that Jung’s archetypal theory played a significant role in the development of Mann’s novel (Bishop, 1996). In 1952 Neumann sent a copy of his commentary on Apuleius’s Amor and Psyche to Mann, who replied: “I am reading the small book with the greatest attention and feel very at home in it. An eternally charming story and a brilliant, deeply lively commentary” (Mann to Neumann, 31 May 1952 [NP]).
382 Karl Kerényi and Thomas Mann were in correspondence with each other from 1934 to 1955. In 1945 Kerényi published the volume Romandichtung und Mythologie: Ein Briefwechsel mit Thomas Mann on the occasion of Mann’s seventieth birthday (Kerényi, 1945), which is most likely the collaboration to which Neumann refers in the letter. The entire correspondence was published in 1960 (Mann and Kerényi, 1960).
383 Although Mann spent his first years in exile from 1933 to 1938 near Jung in Küsnacht there was almost no personal contact between the two men. On the relationship between Mann and Jung and an alleged meeting in the 1940s, see Paul Bishop (1999). After having read Jung’s “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (Jung, 1934a), Mann noted in his diaries on 16 March 1935: “Another one [sc. article; ML] about psychoanalysis in Germany and the revolting conduct of Jung has caused me to reflect on the ambiguousness of human and intellectual phenomena. If a highly intelligent man like Jung takes the wrong stand, there will naturally be traces of truth in his position that will strike a sympathetic note even in his opponents. Jung is correct when he insists that only a kind of ‘soulless rationality’ would overlook the fact that there is something positive about neurosis. […] Jung’s thought and his utterances tend to glorify nazism and its ‘neurosis.’ He is an example of the irresistible tendency of people’s thinking to bend itself to the times—a higher class example. He is not a loner in the sense of the Schlamm article, is not one of those who remain true to the eternal laws of good sense and morality and thereby find themselves to be rebels in their time. He swims with the current. He is intelligent, but not admirable” (Mann, 1983, p. 235).
384 Mann read Sigmund Freud extensively in 1926 and held two speeches on Freud: In his 1929 speech, “Freud’s Position in the History of Modern Thought” (“Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte”), Mann depicts Freud’s antirationalism as a radicalization of the enlightenment. In 1936, Mann was invited to hold a speech in Vienna on the occasions of Freud’s eightieth birthday. His presentation was titled “Freud and the Future.” On 14 June 1936 Mann visited Freud in order to present his speech to Freud in person (see Hummel, 2006).
Küsnacht, Zch, 11th July 1946,
Seestrasse 228
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
I would just like to let you know that your letter of 4. VI. has arrived safely as well as your manuscript a little later. Professor Jung has taken your manuscript and your earlier works to Bollingen with him where he hopes he will soon be able to read them. Unfortunately he has been so overloaded with work and all kinds of obligations this semester that he could only deal superficially with correspondence and, besides that, is now in urgent need of some relaxation.
With best wishes and greetings,
Your devoted,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
5 Aug. 1946
Dear Doctor,
I must not keep you waiting any longer, although I am by no means finished with all the reading you have sent me. In particular, your magnum opus385 gives me much to do. I am especially impressed by the clarity and precision of your formulations. I must tarry with any further impressions and ask you for corresponding patience. You can hardly imagine how overloaded with work I am, predominantly with letters. Recently I had to deal with around 100 letters in 14 days. The post connections with other countries were barely reinstated and the floods of letters began. It is also hailing manuscripts that are especially onerous. Alongside this, I must see patients and take care of my own writing. Since my illness I am no longer as capable as I was and must conserve my energy somewhat. In consequence I am not keeping up with demands anywhere. I always wanted to write to you, but each time a matter got in the way that needed to be dealt with immediately so that I never found the space to write you in a substantial way. I have also been giving some thought to how we can get you back to Europe again. But for the time being I can’t see any way this can be done. The situation here is extremely difficult and everything is uncertain. While we are still living on our cultural island as before, everything around us is nothing but destruction, physically as well as morally. To do something reasonable oneself, you have to close your eyes. Germany is indescribably rotten. Letters I receive from there are, with a few exceptions, part childish, part obstinate, part hysterical, which convinces me more than everything that my diagnosis of the state of the German psyche was correct. In France, England, and Switzerland it is now Catholic scholars386 who are engaged with my psychology. By the way, a book has just come out by a reformed Theologian, Dr. H. Schär: Religion and the Cure of Souls in the Psychology of C. G. Jung (Rascher, Zurich).387 That should interest you. It is very good and positive. The author is a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of Bern. I have just formulated 2 lectures on the Spirit of Psychology for Eranos.388 It is a matter of fundamental explanations. I am sending you off-prints. In the near future my small book on the Transference will appear.389 It is a risky matter but when one is old one can say more than when one has life still ahead of one.
Figure 5. Neumann talking to Gershom Scholem, Adolf Portmann (right), and Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at Eranos (Eranos Archive; courtesy of Paul Kugler).
The situation in Palestine seems to be very difficult. The new age is announcing itself with endless birth pains.
Recently I met Scholem390 here at the home of one of my kabbalist pupils.391 He is an interesting phenomenon. He’s plunging into the unconscious from the roof and since the corns on the feet are blind, he can’t see what he’s getting into.
In the meantime with best greetings and wishes,
Your always devoted,
C. G. Jung
385 Jung refers to the manuscript of The Origins and History of Consciousness. See Neumann’s letter from 4 June 1946 (35 N).
386 Since August 1945 Jung had been in contact with the Dominican priest and professor for Dogmatic Theology in Oxford Victor White (1902–1960). In his first letter to White Jung wrote: “I am highly interested in the point of view the church takes with reference to my work. I had many discussions with catholic priests in this country too and it is on my instigation that catholic scholars have been invited to the Eranos lectures of which you presumably have heard. We enjoy the collaboration of an extremely competent scholar of the patristic literature, Professor Hugo Rahner S.J. of Innsbruck University. Quite a number of of catholic publications have been occupied with my psychology in this country too and there are some among them, which are really very understanding” (Jung to White, 26 September 1945; Jung and White, pp. 4–5). Next to Hugo Rahner (1900–1968), Catholic theologians attending the Eranos meetings until 1946 included Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881–1946), professor for Church History, excommunicated in 1924; and Henri-Charles Puech (1902–1986), professor for History of Religion at the College de France. Via Jolande Jacobi, Jung got in contact with Père Bruno de Jésus-Marie (1892–1962), the editor of the Etudes Carmélitaines, who came to see Jung with Hans Schnyder von Wartensee (1895–1987) in June 1946 (Jacobi to Jung 13 June 1949, Jung to Jacobi, 2 July 1946; see Jung and Jacobi [JA]).
387 Hans (a.k.a. Johann Friedrich) Schär (1910–1967): Protestant theologian, professor of Science of Religion, Psychology of Religion, and Pastoral Theology at the University of Bern. Religion and the Cure of Souls in Jung’s Psychology (Religion und Seele in der Psychologie C. G. Jungs) was published in 1946. Jung praised the book in his inaugural speech of the C. G. Jung Institute on 24 April 1948: “Of particular interest are the repercussions of complex psychology in the psychology of religion. The authors here are not my personal pupils. I would draw attention to the excellent book by Hans Schär on the Protestant side, and to the writings of W. P. Witcutt and Father Victor White” (Jung, 1948, § 1135). His book Erlösungsvorstellungen und ihre psychologischen Aspekte (The Idea of Salvation and Its Psychological Aspects) (1950) was the second volume of the publication series of the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich. Schär, among others, delivered a eulogy at Jung’s funeral service.
388 The topic of the Eranos conference 1946 was Geist und Natur (Spirit and Nature). In accordance with the tradition of the conference Jung delivered two lectures titled “Der Geist der Psychologie” (“The Spirit of Psychology”) (Jung, 1947). The text was later reworked and republished under the title “Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen” (“On the Nature of the Psyche”).
389 The Psychology of the Transference (Die Psychologie der Übertragung) (Jung, 1946).
390 Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem (1897–1982): German-born Jewish scholar of Jewish mysticism; born in Berlin, Scholem, a dedicated Zionist from 1911 onward, immigrated to Palestine in 1923. He knew Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin from his Berlin years. As part of his dissertation he translated and commented on the kabbalistic books Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Illumination) (Scholem, 1923). In Jerusalem he first worked as a librarian, before he obtained a position at the Hebrew University, which he served until the end of his life. Scholem was arguably the most important scholar of the kabbalah in the twentieth century. He published numerous books and articles, including Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Sabbatei Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (1973). Scholem’s name is inseparably linked with the Eranos conference, which he first attended in 1949. In a letter to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn from 3 April 1948 Neumann expressed his disappointment that Scholem would not attend the conference. In a letter from 14 April (probably 1949) he urged Fröbe-Kapteyn to put money together for Scholem’s attendance: “Please see to it that you get the money together for Scholem, it would be very nice and important” (Neumann to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn [EA]). The relationship between Neumann and Scholem was on good terms and based on mutual respect (private conversation with Rali Loewenthal-Neumann). Neumann reviewed the German edition of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Neumann, 1958a). Scholem wrote an obituary for Neumann (Scholem, 1960), which he sent to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn “with sad greetings. Dr. G. Scholem” (EA). In the obituary Scholem wrote: “He [Neumann] came from C. G. Jung’s school of Analytical Psychology and was among its most respected and gifted representatives in the world. He was an autonomous man who thought through the Jungian ideas in his own way and sought to develop them further. I often heard him described as the logician of the Jungian school” (Scholem, 1960).
391 Probably Rivkah Schärf (see n. 398) or Siegmund Hurwitz (see n. 500).
2 January 1947
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
I don’t know whether you have now heard about Prof. Jung’s illness but, so that you do not remain too long without news in response to your letter of 14th December 1946,392 I would at least like to tell you that this latter arrived safely.
Prof. Jung had another serious heart attack393 about seven weeks ago from which he is recovering only slowly and with great effort. Although he is feeling quite a lot better—for the last week he has been able to sit for about an hour a day in an armchair—he is still very weak in every regard, and, since he must be spared all exertion, I have to keep all weightier correspondence from him. Unfortunately it cannot be predicted how long it will take until he can take up his work again and concern himself with his correspondence. So I have to ask you for your patience.
With best wishes and greetings for the New Year, I remain your devoted,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
392 Neumann’s letter is missing.
393 Jung’s second heart attack happened on 4 November 1946. Barbara Hannah recalled the incident: “Altogether, Jung’s health seemed to be particularly good in the autumn of 1946. […] It was, therefore, a completely unexpected shock to hear two days later that he had had another heart attack the night before and was again very ill. This time, refusing to go to the hospital, he had to have two nurses to look after him, day and night, in his own house. This illness was even more unexpected, especially to Jung himself, than the one in 1944. He had the feeling then that ‘there was something wrong with my attitude’ and at first felt in some way responsible for having broken his leg. But this time it was a real bolt from the blue. […] Jung remained ill for three months. About December 16 he sent me a message that he was still suspended over the abyss and warning me against optimism; he added that the real trouble was in the sympathicus. After his illness he told me that he was doubtful if he really had a heart infarct. At all events, it was mainly a disturbance of the vegetative nervous system that had the effect of giving him tachycardia (racing of the pulse). He again found himself confronted, like medicine men all over the world, with curing himself. The doctors insisted it was another heart infarct; and he was thus forced to find out for himself what was really the matter and how it should be met. Once again he said that he had an illness because he was faced with the mysterious problem of the hieros gamos (the mysterium coniunctionis)” (Hannah, pp. 293–94). Cf. n. 370.
[Küsnacht, Zurich] 8th January 1947
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
Just to inform you that your manuscript Part II has also arrived safely.394 I have sent the second copy on to Miss Wolff who is currently in the Rigi.395 She has not been very well for a while now, which may well be the reason you have not heard from her for a long time.
Professor Jung continues to be fairly well.
With best wishes,
Yours truly,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
394 Second part of The Origins and History of Consciousness. See Neumann’s letter from 4 June 1946 (35 N) and Jung’s letter from 5 August 1946 (37 J).
395 The Rigi is a mountain range in central Switzerland, located between the Vierwaldstätter Lake, the Zuger Lake, and the Lake Lauerz.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 1st February 1947
Dear Miss Schmid,
Firstly I would like to thank you very much indeed for your communications, which, as unpleasant and oppressive as they were, at least brought the unpleasant uncertainty to an end. No one knows how torturous the isolation is in which we live here and I would make a big request of you to keep me up to date if the time allows you to do so. To hear so belatedly about Prof Jung’s being taken ill is actually, as you will understand, an unbearable state. I have already received a letter from Miss Wolff, which pleased me very much, and who, having received the second section from you, has now read it, but I would very much like to ask you to write to me about the nature of Miss Wolff’s illness, if you can, as she only alludes to it and I don’t like to inquire about it to her. I hope it is nothing serious. She wrote to me that Prof. Jung is recovering well, but of course I am very concerned and would be glad to be briefed further.
It is obvious that my manuscript must be kept back, in any case I thank you once again for the trouble the manuscript gives you but all the same, I request you to keep me up to date with news. I hope you are well yourself, but can imagine how demanding the current situation is for you both inwardly and externally.
Once again many thanks and best wishes,
I am your,
E. Neumann
Tel Aviv, 1 Gordon St.,
Palestine
Küsnacht, Zch, 25th February 1947
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
I’m sorry I could not reply to your letter of 1. II. immediately as I had been wiped out by the flu, which is widespread here at the moment.
Prof. Jung’s progress continues to be encouraging. He can now spend the larger part of the day in the library and has even been able to undertake short walks as far as the garden gate. Now and then he receives brief visits, but he is not seeing any patients at all—and this will have to continue to be the case in order to avoid another catastrophe. But he has started to work on his own studies again, albeit at a very slow pace. He has revised last year’s Eranos lectures and is now working on his explorations into the Trinity.396 It’s not looking good for his correspondence, as he has neither the time nor inclination to bring to it, or only in very limited measure. I have, though, brought it to his attention that a letter from you was awaiting him and a second part of your manuscript. He remembered immediately that he had a read a part of section 1 and commented that he will read the second section whenever possible.
As far as Miss Wolff is concerned, she has been suffering for nearly two years now from a difficult arthritis. This has worsened so much in the course of this winter that she can now hardly walk—unfortunately the cure in the Rigi has also not helped in fact, although she has felt stronger on the whole since then. As you can imagine she is exceptionally brave, goes on working as always and takes part in all the Club evenings, etc. It is really painful to see her in this condition, mostly because one can’t actually hope for any improvement.
And—as you were kind enough to inquire about me—in general I am quite well. Only, as you rightly guess, the longer this goes on, the clearer it is that I feel like a policeman who has to hold back a huge crowd, and that is tiring in the long run. That, and the adaptation to the irrational in Prof Jung’s life and way of operating that is coming ever more strongly into the foreground. One can do nothing other than fulfill one’s role to the best of one’s knowledge and conscience.
In wishing you all good regards I remain your,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
396 Jung revised his Eranos lecture of 1940–41 “Zur Psychologie der Trinitätsidee.” The extended version, “Versuch einer psychologischen Deutung des Trinätsdogmas” (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”), was first published in 1948 in Symbolik des Geistes (Jung, 1942a).
Küsnacht, Zch, 21st April 1947
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
I have just seen Dr. Adler who was in Zurich. He informed me that you were asking after me. You have evidently not received the handwritten letter. According to my not entirely reliable memory it was written either in November or in February when I was gradually getting a guilty conscience that I had not finished reading your manuscripts, although they interest me very much. But so much has happened here that I can hardly find the time to take care of my correspondence, let alone the uninterrupted reading of manuscripts.
I asked you in my earlier letter whether you would be willing to have your manuscript printed here—I mean your great book. If you wish to publish it in this form, I would gladly recommend it to my publisher, Rascher. By the way, I have already hinted at this to him. In this book you have done a great deal better than I have and you have further developed much, where I got stuck in the difficulties of beginnings.397 I must tell you more about this—God willing. At the moment it is simply impossible for me as I am occupied with some things that are also to be published,—to be precise, with the work that will be published along with Rivkah Schärf’s398 dissertation that is now gradually taking shape.
In the meantime, best wishes, in anticipation of your reply,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
397 Jung reiterates that argument in his foreword to Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness: “It [sc. the book; ML] begins just where I, too, if I were granted a second lease of life, would start to gather up the disjecta membra of my own writings, to sift out all those ‘beginnings without continuations’ and knead them into a whole” (Jung, 1949, § 1234).
398 Rivkah Schärf Kluger (1907–1987): Religious scholar and Jungian psychotherapist; born in Bern, grew up in Zurich; received her doctoral degree in Semitic Languages and Religious History from the University of Zurich. Her doctoral thesis “Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament” (1948) (English: “Satan in the Old Testament” [1967]) was published together with several essays by Jung “Zur Pänomenologie des Geistes im Märchen” (“The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales”), “Der Geist Mercurius” (“The Spirit Mercurius”), “Versuch zu einer psychologischen Deutung des Trinitätsdogmas” (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”), “Zur Psychologie östlicher Meditation” (“The Psychology of Eastern Meditation”) in volume 6 of Psychologische Abhandlungen (Psychological Treatises) titled Symbolik des Geistes (Symbolism of the Spirit) (Jung, 1948a). Rivkah Schärf underwent a longtime analysis with Jung and became a close collaborator of his. After its foundation in 1948 she regularily held courses at the C. G. Jung Institute on mythological and religious topics until the early 1980s. After her marriage to Yehezkel Kluger the couple moved to Los Angeles in 1955 and to Haifa in 1969. In Israel they were instrumental in the further development of the Israel Association of Analytical Psychology, founded by Erich Neumann. Schärf Kluger and Neumann shared a common interest in Hasidism. Her works include Psyche and Bible: Three Old Testament Themes (1974) and The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh: A Modern Ancient Hero (1991, published posthumously by Yehezkel Kluger). On Schärf Kluger see Dreifuss (1988) and the recorded interview Remembering Jung: Rivkah and Yehezkel Kluger (2003).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 23. IV. [1947]
1, Gordon St.
My dear Professor Jung,
I have just received a letter from Gerhard Adler from which I learn that, to my greatest regret, a letter from you to me must have gone astray. It is possible that it will arrive belatedly, although that seldom happens, but even this is not ruled out at the moment in the chaotic circumstances that prevail here.
With great pleasure, I gather from Adler’s letter that you like my book, that you want to offer it to Rascher and are even willing to write an introduction for him—and for me. It goes without saying that I am exceptionally pleased about this, and especially, as you can imagine, about the introduction, and I am not only in agreement but, far beyond that, I am most gratefully obliged to you. For I know what each new additional demand means for you that diverts you from the “main business,” your own work.
Would you be so kind as to inform me whether I have to wait for a response from Rascher, or whether I should write to Rascher myself.
I am just revising the Ethic that you have also now read and that you also like—which I am very pleased about—because it has become too abstract and I feared it would be rather too “philosophical” for you. I think it ought to be published in England. But, of course, that is not as important as the publication of the book.
Now I have a further request, but it is one that, I hope, will be a job for Miss Schmid more than for you. My wife and I wish to come to Switzerland, if possible, in August. I would like to speak to you in person once again after such a long time, come to the Ascona conference, and possibly see Rascher. Since we’re all considered “terrorists” here now and find it hard to get a visa, it would be exceptionally important if you could request our attendance at the Ascona conference. I would attempt to arrange everything else so that we could be there in August. Such an attendance request would certainly be important both for here and for Bern.
I heard from Miss Schmid and also from G. Adler that you are quite recovered and already immersed once again in your work. I wish very much to be able to see this for myself in not too long a time. The distances make all contact so difficult, and besides it is now more than ten years since I have been able to speak to anyone. It is high time to speak with you, Miss Wolff, and Adler once again.
The situation here is desperate, not worse than in the whole of the Western world to which we belong apparently more for the worse than the better. But some time even this will reach a positive outcome, with and/or without us. In the meantime, I am working a great deal. Practice, course and the next book on the developmental stages of woman. The joy of writing and working is comparable now with little else.
Once again, dear Professor Jung, my thanks for your willingness. In the hope of hearing from you soon, I am
Your grateful,
E. Neumann
Küsnacht, Zch, 30th April 47
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
I was very pleased to receive your letter that arrived in about 4 days. I only hope that my letter of 21 April has also now reached you.
As I gather from your letter that you are willing to give me a free hand regarding the publication of your writings, I will now speak to Rascher in order to see what can be done. I will therefore attempt, in the first instance, to get your book out. After that, it might be possible to accommodate one or other of your essays in my Psychological Treatises. I will write a short foreword to your book as soon as we know it can be printed. The situation in this regard is quite difficult here as the printing presses are enormously overloaded. A further question will be the revisions. With the uncertainty of the post, this question is not completely straightforward.
I enclose the requested letter of invitation to Ascona. I’m looking forward to seeing you again after such a long time. I will however not be speaking at this conference as I must grant myself necessary peace and quiet. But I will be there whatever happens.
The things one reads in the papers about Palestine are not pleasant, for sure, but life elsewhere in Europe (with very few exceptions) is also not very pretty. I can’t ward off a certain deep pessimism. I can only compensate for it by studying atomic physics, which promises to become very interesting for psychology.
As soon as I have got things clear with Rascher I will write to you again. Meanwhile, with best greetings and wishes,
Your loyal,
C. G. Jung
45 J399
Küsnacht, Zurich, April 30th 1947
Seestr. 228.
Dr. E. Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv.
Dear Dr. Neumann,
As you know, there is another Eranos meeting to be held as usual in Ascona this summer. It will take place from August 18th to August 26th. There will be a number of very interesting lectures to be discussed, among them lectures by Prof. Erwin Schrödinger (Dublin), Prof. Charles Virolleaud (Paris), Prof. H. Leisegang (Jena), Prof. Erik Peterson (Rome), Dr. Leo Baeck (London), and others.400
The purpose of my letter is to invite you to this meeting and I hope very much that you are able to attend it. It would be of [the] greatest interest to us to hear of your own experiences in the field of medical psychology.
Hoping to see you in Ascona,
I remain,
Yours sincerely,
[C. G. Jung]
399 English invitation to Eranos meeting, Ascona 1947; first version; attached to Jung’s letter of 30 April 1947 (44 J).
400 Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961): Austrian/Irish physicist, Nobel laureate (1933); founder and director of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (1940–55). Charles Virolleaud (1879–1968): French archaeologist and religious historian; helped in deciphering the inscriptions of ancient Ugarit. Hans Leisegang (1890–1951): German philosopher and physicist, author of Die Gnosis (1924); lost his chair for philosophy in Jena in 1948 because of his political criticism. Erik Peterson (1890–1960): German theologian; converted from Lutheran protestantism to Catholicism and moved to Rome in 1930; in 1947 he became assistant professor for Patristics at the Papal Institute for Christian Archaeology in Rome. Leo Baeck (1873–1956): German rabbi, highest Jewish representative during the Nazi period in Germany; was deported to the concentration camp Theriesienstadt in 1943, which he survived; after the war he settled down in London. Baeck was the only one of those mentioned in Jung’s invitation who lectured at Eranos in 1947.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, II. V. 47
1 Gordon St.
Dear Miss Schmid,
I’m afraid I must come to you with another request even though I already have so much to thank you for. The difficulties of getting to Switzerland from here are very great because of the current anxiety about terrorists, and you will understand that both my wife and I are very keen to be able to come to the Ascona conference this year. My need to speak with Dr. Jung again after so many years is understandably very great, especially now in connection with my book.
First request: The enclosed letter from Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn401 needs to be redrafted in such a way that it also applies to my wife who, as you probably know, has been working as an analyst for ten years. It would perhaps be good to insert a sentence to the effect that the renewing of our cultural collaboration is very important precisely for Palestine and precisely at this time. (Which, by the way, is the truth.)
Second request: Please would you request Prof. Jung to write a separate letter to me and my wife in which he urgently requests us to come to the conference in Switzerland. It would be good to mention in it that we traveled from Palestine to Switzerland in 1936 and that we ought to do this again after such a long time. Perhaps to reinforce this, a remark about the book and Rascher.
I’m afraid that all this is very necessary, as without such letters, etc., the application for a visa is pointless.
Thirdly, I request permission to nominate Prof. Jung and Miss Wolff as Swiss referees.
The granting of a visa mostly takes longer than two months, and as I can only apply for it when I have these letters, I’m afraid I must ask you to speed things up as much as possible so that there is at least the possibility that this trip will come to something.
Dear Miss Schmid, Please forgive all this pestering, but I’m afraid I have no choice.
With many thanks in advance,
Your E. Neumann
PS Dear Miss Schmid! I have just received Prof. Jung’s letter with the “invitation” to me to which I will reply straightaway. Unfortunately though [missing]402
401 Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962): spiritualist, theosophist, and scholar, founder of the Eranos conference. Born in England to Dutch parents she first attended school in London and later the art school in Zurich. In 1909 she married Iwan Fröbe, an Austrian musician and conductor, who tragically died in a plane crash six years later. She moved to Ascona in 1920, where she developed her interest in Indian philosophy and theosophy. In 1928 she had a conference building, the Casa Eranos, built next to her house (Casa Gabriella). There she held annual conferences from 1933 on that were dedicated to dialogue between East and West. Neumann, who first attended the Eranos conference in 1947, gave presentations from 1948 until 1960. Fröbe-Kapteyn, who shared with Neumann the role of an outsider in the Zurich Jungian circles, became one of the closest friends and allies of Neumann in Switzerland. In 1954 she traveled with Erich and Julie Neumann to the Netherlands and England. Her collection of archetypal imagery formed the basis of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism in New York. On Jung, Neumann, and the Eranos conference, see introduction, pp. xv, xxxvii–xli, lii.
402 Line is missing. Neumann asks to rewrite and extend the invitation to his wife Julie. See 48 J.
19th May
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Doctor,
Enclosed the amended letter of invitation. I hope it achieves the desired outcome. I have sent the letter from Mrs. Fröbe to her with details of how you would like it amended. I hope she will send you the new draft straightaway too.
Prof. Jung is, of course, willing to serve as a referee, and Miss Wolff whom I have also called is willing to do so as long as this means only a “private” reference. (She has had difficulties because of patients of late.) But I am sure only Prof. Jung will be interviewed by the immigration authorities so she will not have any sort of unpleasantness so you can readily put her down for this.
In haste, with best wishes,
Your,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
48 J403
May 19th 1947.
Dr. E. Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv.
Dear Dr. Neumann,
As you know there is another Eranos meeting to be held as usual in Ascona this summer. It will take place from August 18th to August 26th. There will be a number of very interesting lectures to be discussed, among them lectures by Prof. Erwin Schrödinger (Dublin), Prof. Charles Virolleaud (Paris), Prof. H. Leisegang (Jena), Prof. Erik Peterson (Rome), Dr. Leo Baeck (London), and others.
The purpose of my letter is to invite you and your wife to this meeting and I hope very much that you are able to attend it. It would be of greatest interest to us to hear of both your experiences in the field of medical psychology.—At the same time it would be most important to be able to discuss the publication of your book, a thing that can hardly be done by letters.
Hoping to see you in Ascona,
I remain,
Yours sincerely,
[C. G. Jung]
403 Invitation to Eranos meeting, Ascona 1947; second version; attached to Marie-Jeanne Schmid’s letter of 19 May 1947 (47 MJS).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 24. V. 47
1 Gordon St.
My dear Professor Jung,
I do apologize very much for my rather late reply to both your letters, but a mild illness and subsequent increased workload are to blame for this. So firstly, many thanks that you want to attend to my book and, beyond that, maybe other works. I hope very much that the book can be released by Rascher. It belongs, it seems to me absolutely with this publisher. I would have the technical matters arranged, I think, it would just be a shame if everything drags on a long time. With time, even if it goes against my temperament, I have become patient. I have shortened the Ethic work and completed it too, it dates back to 1942–43; I have also outlined the links with my book. I will send you them shortly, please then dispose of the old copy. I fear the work would be too long for Psychological Treatises—I would personally be very pleased and in agreement. Only 2 come into question from among my other works, the Stages of Religious Experience, which I consider good (and which has been extended in the meantime) and The Depth-Psychological Way and Consciousness.404 Which needs to be revised. The other has been superseded by the book.
G. Adler wrote, to my great joy, of how well you have recovered and how deeply you are immersed once again in your work.405 This has made me very happy even if it also, on the other hand, gives me a guilty conscience to pester you once again with my affairs. This is one of the yardsticks of my life here that much could be said about. The political is not as bad as it sounds and is made to sound, but bad enough. Your pessimism is, I fear, all too justified. But apart from the stark isolation,—where would it be better?—the life here is nice and healthy for the children. It is better for them to grow up in freedom among Jews, everywhere the “end” is uncertain.
It interested me very much to hear that you’re taking comfort in “atomic physics.” I’ve just been reading a book about The Inner World of Atoms by Z. Bucher,406 which is very stimulating although I can’t yet recognize anything other than important analogies. It is remarkable for me that I am being thrust toward these analogical images in the second part of my book that you’re not yet familiar with. “Splitting of the archetype,” etc., appeared to me long since as a correlation with the physical event without losing sight of the symbolic nature of it. Your image of the crystallized nature of archetypes belongs naturally very much in this context, but—unmathematical as I am—the decisive thing for me is the image that distinguishes the psychical,—and the energetics, as legitimate as they are, are only an abstract approximation. If you would have a look at the second section, your critique would be very necessary and desirable, specifically on the issue of the energetic conceptions.
Our trip to Switzerland—many thanks for your help with this—is still hanging very much in the air, but I still hope it will be feasible and I will be able to talk with you “face to face” about some matters. It would be necessary and it would be very nice. Hopefully everything here will remain peaceful.
As I close for today, with best wishes and greetings for your ongoing recovery and work, I remain as ever in gratitude,
Your E. Neumann
404 “Der tiefenpsychologische Weg und das Bewusstseins” (“The Depth-Psychological Way and Consciousness”) is the title of the third part the unpublished typescript Die Bedeutung des Bewusstseins für die tiefenpsychologische Erfahrung (“The Significance of Consciousness for Depth-Psychological Experience”) (Neumann, 1943), whereas “Stadien religiöser Erfahrung auf dem tiefenpsychologischen Weg” (“Stages of Religious Experience on the Depth-Psychological Way”) is the title of the fourth part. This final part could not be located among Neumann’s unpublished material, but might be identical with the typescript “Zur religiösen Bedeutung des tiefenpsychologischen Weges” (Neumann, 1942).
405 The letters from Adler to Neumann are missing.
406 Bucher (1946).
Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 14 June
1 Gordon St.
Dear Miss Schmid,
Firstly I thank you very much for the prompt fulfillment of my requests; I’m afraid I must burden you one more time. I have been told at the consulate here that it would be desirable and useful if we could apply directly to Bern from Switzerland as it can take up to 3 months to sort out. As it would not be very sensible to acquire the visa for the Eranos conference after it had finished, I would now like to ask you to write in Professor Jung’s name to Bern on behalf of myself and my wife. Request, invitation, dates of conference, and petition would be accelerated in this way. Once again many thanks from my wife too.
Your,
E. Neumann
20th June 1947
To the Federal Immigration Authorities, Bern
Dr. Erich Neumann, Tel Aviv, and his wife and colleague have been invited to take part in this year’s Eranos conference. The conference runs from 18th–26th August in Ascona. Dr. Neumann is a student of mine, and it is a matter of personal importance to be able to see him at the conference as, among other matters, I wish to discuss the publication of various of his works. I can recommend Dr. and Mrs. Neumann in every regard and would ask you most courteously to grant them the entry visa for Switzerland as soon as possible.
With best respects,
[C. G. Jung]
Küsnacht, Zch, 1st July 1947.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
Having read your first volume, the only troubling terminology to strike me was that of the “castration complex.” I consider the use of this term to be not only an aesthetic error, but also an erroneous overvaluation of the sexual symbolism. This complex is a matter of the archetype of sacrifice, a term that is much more comprehensive, and that takes into account the fact that, for the primitive, sex does not have, by far, the same significance as it does for the modern individual. We must always keep in mind that in the psychology of the primitive the search for food in relation to hunger plays a sometimes decisive role. Thus the symbols of sacrifice are by far not only castration or its derivatives, that is particularly plausible if you take the taboos into consideration that all signify sacrifice, each and every one. The prohibition of words or syllables, for example, can only be derived from castration by really stretching the point. We must much more regard the occurrences of real or hinted castration in the spirit of the archetype of sacrifice, from which all of these multifarious forms can be much better understood, without difficulty. The expression “castration complex” is, to my taste, much too concretistic and therefore one-sided, even though it definitely proves to be applicable in a whole series of phenomena. But I would like to have avoided everything that would amount in the end to allowing psychic events to appear as a derivative of a specific instinct. We must place the existence of the psyche as a sui generis phenomenon in the first place and understand the instincts as being in a specific relationship to this. If one does not do this, then all psychic differentiation is basically nothing but…. What does one do with a castrated Origen?407
That is the only point that I must take issue with. Otherwise, I must say that I admire your clear and rich portrayal to a high degree. I have spoken with Rascher and he has said he is willing to take on the book, but not until next year for economic reasons. In fact, an unavoidable drop in prices is expected, which has made all publishers cautious. If I come across anything else, I will let you know. I will now subject your smaller writings to a closer inspection, as it is possible that Rascher may publish them as a collection. But this question has not been clarified adequately. So you see, since I have been better, I have been engaged with your affairs and am doing my best to facilitate publication. With such extensive things, this is of course not all too easy.
In the meantime, with best wishes,
Your always devoted,
C. G. Jung
407 Origen of Alexandria (185–245 BCE), also Origen Adamantius: Early Christian theologian and philosopher, well known for his neo-Platonic treatise On First Principles. According to Eusebius’s Church History Origen castrated himself in his youth: “At this time while Origen was conducting catechetical instruction at Alexandria, a deed was done by him which evidenced an immature and youthful mind, but at the same time gave the highest proof of faith and continence. For he took the words, ‘There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,’ Matthew 19:12 in too literal and extreme a sense. And in order to fulfill the Saviour’s word, and at the same time to take away from the unbelievers all opportunity for scandal,—for, although young, he met for the study of divine things with women as well as men,—he carried out in action the word of the Saviour” (Book 6, 8,1; Eusebius, 1890). To what extend this account is true or the repitition of rumors by adversatories has been subject of debates in scholarship. Jung’s library contains The Writings of Origen (1910–11) and a volume of selected texts by Eusebius (1913).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 8th July 47
1, Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
You can imagine how I pleased I was about your letter letting me know that Rascher has accepted my book. What is more, I am really touched by the active engagement you are showing toward me and my productions. I find myself in the rather precarious position of begging you really and seriously not408 to overburden yourself with my things on the one hand—you see this Freudian slip sums it up best—so after saying “not” to overburden you—and, then following on from this request, I dive right into the discussion of my works again straightaway. You will, I hope, make an allowance for my slip and for me, as the egotism of the drive to produce is very strong, and as you yourself know only too well, it knows how to defend itself with great violence against the attempts by consciousness to contain it.
I think by now you will have received the partly shortened, partly extended Ethic that would form the main part of a book of smaller works, should it come to the of publication such a volume. This has now been “brought into line with” the “Stages book,”409 which it predates, abbreviated, and illustrated in parts three and four with some dreams, but is otherwise unchanged. Of the essays you already have, I consider both the first two to have been superseded, as their essential contents have been worked into the second part of the book. My question to you concerns this. If it comes to a volume of essays and Ethic did not come out as a single publication, which I could well imagine, would further material still be needed? I still have a paper on the Personal and Transpersonal Psychology of Childhood410 and a work: Prolegomena to the Psychology of the Feminine,411 which is actually an introduction to the book on the psychological stages of woman that I am currently working on. It could absolutely appear as an essay in its own right. In any case, I will complete both and have them typed up.
But now to the other important point of your letter, the objection to the “castration complex” terminology. You will excuse me if I elaborate at length here, but it is a matter for substantial discussion.
Firstly, it goes without saying that I am in full agreement with you in this as we must avoid “everything that would amount in the end to allowing psychic events to appear as a derivative of a specific instinct.” You write: “I consider this term not only an aesthetic error but also an erroneous overestimation of the sexual symbolism…. The expression ‘castration complex’ is, for my taste, much too concretistic and therefore too one-sided.”
I have looked through the first section once again in response to this and I would like to make the following remarks:
1) That the term castration as it is implemented and employed can hardly be misunderstood in a concrete way.
2) That I—up till now—have found no term that could replace it, the reasons for this I will explain.
3) That—and why—the “archetype of sacrifice” in connection with the first section does not express what is meant by the castration symbol.
All these possibly relevant arguments change nothing in regard to the fact that you believe that my remarks could be misunderstood in this manner; the question is, whether this is helped by an annotation.
Re 1) On pages 63f., 66, 69, 80, 92, 100, etc., the equivalence of castration, death, dismemberment, madness, and delirium is repeatedly formulated in such a way that a “genital” misunderstanding of castration would have to be impossible, especially as the symbolic meaning of the sexual is explored at length in chapter one, pp. 18, 21. It seems to me absolutely necessary to retain the sexual symbols that are interpreted in a personal way by psychoanalysis. For this reason, I have also consciously retained “incest,” once because the transpersonal makes use of these symbols, and then by emphasizing its factual symbolic meaning.412
But why is it so hard for me to forego the castration symbol?
Re 2) The debate between the ego-consciousness and the unconscious proceeds substantially along symbolic lines: masculine opposed to feminine (C./f. “Prolegomena” above), Uroboros incest, matriarchal incest, matriarchal castration, the associated cycle of symbols of the fertility rituals, of the gorgon, of the phallic adolescent stage (p. 66), they all revolve around the symbol of the phallus. The entire Osiris chapter with djed-pillars, the sed festival, as well as the concept of the lower and higher masculinity stands and falls with the fact that the conscious ego-hero has the masculine character that he, however, only gradually achieves in stages in the course of his development (pp. 110, 140ff.).
In this sense, “castration” is the thing that threatens this masculinity at the varying stages and in different ways. Hence “higher castration” equates to blinding as castration of the “higher” masculinity, hence “patriarchal” castration as “annihilation by the spirit” (p. 212). I cannot imagine that one could misunderstand this in a concrete way where “castration” is used in such a symbolic way as are creative potency and impotency (c./f., p. 177, p. 105).
Re 3) In my opinion, for this reason, the castration symbol in the “Psychology of Myth” cannot be substituted by the notion of sacrifice, because the “sacrifice” is only a subsuming concept, but not a symbol. In castration, there is the threat to the ego and consciousness by the terrible mother of the unconscious. The ego is supposed to be sacrificed, against which it defends itself. This dramatization of the situation, as an expression of the conflict tension of psyche is not in any way denoted by the concept of sacrifice, but it is very much so by the castration symbol. Not until the hero stage does the sacrifice archetype become relevant, it seems to me, as a fulfilled act assumed by the ego (c./f., Transformations). But this situation is not to be subsumed with the other into one concept in which it is precisely the task of the ego to resist, to make itself independent and to sacrifice itself, i.e., to allow itself to be castrated.
I hope to have persuaded you, or else I would be grateful to you for a suggestion. In any case my “resistance” is not a matter of obstinacy. The concept of sacrifice belongs, just like the taboos, etc., to the “offering” in the sense of a positive relationship of the ego to the Self and belongs thereby on the side of consciousness—strengthening—expansion, etc., the castration symbol stands in the first part where it is a question of a disempowerment of the ego-consciousness and of a danger of violation by the unconscious.
Dear Professor Jung, I do hope that I have not bored you too much with my deliberations, but they do seem to me perhaps appropriate in such a fundamental problem of terminology whose significance was clear to me from the beginning.
I have in no way given up hope of being able to see you and speak to you personally. So far, the Swiss visa is still not here, but it could still arrive. The uncertainty of all dispositions is disturbing, but what can one do. The restoration of your health permits you now to get on with your own intensive work, thank God, so G. Adler wrote to me,413 and as I am only too much aware how indispensable everything is that you have to do, I would like to ask you once again not to waste too much time on my matters, “going over my mistakes.” Your efforts for my book, which is really important to me, is already almost filling me with feelings of guilt, I really could not expect of you any extra burden from the smaller works. In case I do get to Switzerland, I could probably do some things myself there.
Once again with the warmest of thanks,
I am always,
Your E. Neumann
[Remark:] Replied!
408 not” (“nicht”) has been crossed through and then inserted again.
409 The Origins and History of Consciousness (Neumann, 1949a).
410 Among Neumann’s unpublished material is the fragment of a text dated April 1939 titled “Bemerkungen zur Psychologie des Kindes und der Paedagogik” (“Observations on the Psychology of the Child and Pedagogy”) (Neumann, 1939).
411 On 7 October 1950 Neumann held a lecture at the Psychological Club Zurich titled “Zur Psychologie des Weiblichen im Patriarchat” (“Toward a Psychology of the Feminine in the Patriarchy”), which he repeated in Basel and Tel Aviv. This lecture was published together with “Die Urbeziehung zur Mutter” (“The Primordial Relation to the Mother”) (1951) as “Die psychologischen Stadien der weiblichen Entwicklung” (“The Psychological Stages of Woman’s Development”) (1953). See also letter 73 N, n. 457.
412 The page numbers here and in the following refer to typescript version of The Orgins and History of Consciousness and do not match the printed version. In his introduction to the published version Neumann clarifies his understanding of the castration motif and emphasizes its transpersonal symbolical character: “The castration motif, for instance, is not the result of the inheritance of an endlessly repeated threat of castration by a primordial father, or rather by an infinity of primordial fathers. Science has discovered nothing that could possibly support such a theory, which moreover presupposes the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Any reduction of the castration threat, parricide, the ‘primal scene’ of parental intercourse, and so on, to historical and personalistic data, which presumes to paint the early history of humanity in the likeness of a patriarchal bourgeois family of the nineteenth century, is scientifically impossible. It is one of the tasks of this book to show that, in regard to these and similar ‘complexes,’ we are really dealing with symbols, ideal forms, psychic categories, and basic structural patterns whose infinitely varied modes of operation govern the history of mankind and the individual” (Neumann, 1949a, pp. xxi–xxii). See also introduction, p. lviii.
413 Letter is missing.
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
19 July 1947
Dear Colleague,
Whatever I can do toward publication of your highly valuable works, I do with pleasure. Unfortunately everything is very delayed due to my illness, which has cost me a good half year. In old age, one feels the pressure of time, and the years become fewer, i.e., one now sees it palpably: utendum est aetate, cito pede labitur aetas—Nec bona tam sequitur quam bona prima fuit!414
I cannot repudiate the justification of “castration complex” terminology and even less its symbolism, but I must take issue with “sacrifice” not being a symbol. In the Christian sense it is even one of the most significant symbols. The etymology is unclear: as many say offerre as they do operari. “Sacrifice” is active and passive: one brings a “sacrifice” and one is a “sacrifice.” (Both of these together in the sacrifice symbolism of the mass!) With incest it is the same thing, which is why I had to use the additional term hierosgamos. Just as only the twin concepts “Incest-Hierosgamos” describe the whole situation, so also “castration-sacrifice.” Could one say castration symbol instead of castration complex, to be on the safe side? Or castration motif (like incest motif)?
You still have to gain experience for yourself as far as being misunderstood goes. The possibilities exceed all terminology. Perhaps you had better insert a short explanation in the text on the negative and the positive aspect of the symbol and, indeed, right at the beginning where you speak of the castration complex.
I hope very much that it will be possible for you to come to Switzerland. At the moment I am in my tower on the Obersee enjoying my holidays, which were most urgently needed. Our club wants to start a “C. G. Jung Institute for Complex Psychology.”415 The preparations are already underway. Mrs. Jaffé will be the secretary.416 She has written a magnificent work on E.T.A. Hoffmann, which I will also publish in my Psychological Treatises.417
I am very well again, but the weight of 73 years is palpable.
With best wishes,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
414 “Life’s to be used: life slips by on swift feet, what was good at first, nothing as good will follow” (Ovid, Ars Amatoria III, 65–66; trans. A. S. Kline).
415 The foundation of the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich took place on 24 April 1948. On this occasion Jung gave an address outlining the direction and goals of the new institute (Jung, 1948). Although, officially, the institute began its courses on 25 October, the teaching had already started in the previous term.
416 Aniela Jaffé (1903–1991): German-born Jewish psychotherapist, Jung’s secretary from 1955 to 1961. Orginally from Berlin Jaffé studied medicine in Hamburg. She did not finish her studies as she fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland in 1933. She underwent analysis with Liliane Frey and Jung. Jaffé was the secretary of the C. G. Jung Institute from 1948 until 1955, when she became Jung’s full-time secretary. In the last years of Jung’s life she recorded and edited his biographical account Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961; cf. Jaffé, 1968). Jaffé was a close confidante of the Neumanns. The friendship between Jaffé and Julie Neumann lasted until Julie’s death in 1985. Jaffé was the editor of the three-volume German edition of Jung’s letters and collaborated with Gerhard Adler on the English edition (Jung, 1973). Her own work includes Apparitions and Precognition: A Study from the Point of View of C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology (1958), The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C. G. Jung (1967), From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung (1968), and C. G. Jung: Word and Image (1977). She was also one of the contributors to Man and His Symbols (1961).
417 Aniela Jaffé’s Bilder und Symbole aus E.T.A. Hoffmanns Märchen “Der goldne Topf” (Images and Symbols in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fairy Tale “The Golden Pot”) was published in Jung’s Gestaltungen des Unbewussten in 1950 (Jaffé, 1950).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 21. VII. [47]
1 Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
I would like to send you my most heartfelt greetings for your birthday and hope that you will spend this year in the best of health and work. This last year brought me renewed and deepened contact with you and your lively interest, and I can only hope that the next years and my work will take further what has begun to be a great enrichment for me. I do hope that you know how much your interest means to me, and what a necessary affirmation it is for me in an intellectual situation that often comes dangerously close to splendid isolation.
I hope still that we will soon be able to speak to you in person. So far the Swiss visa has not yet arrived and it is high time it had. (By the way, has Mrs. Schmid applied to Bern in your name to telegraph the visa as I asked her to do in writing?)418
Here, it is beginning to be very unsettled again, the future is very bleak here as it is everywhere, and it will be difficult for us to leave the children on their own in Palestine while we are in Switzerland. But first of all it would be good to know what’s going to happen.
I hope you are now restored to the best of health and recovery, and am, once again with all those hard to express wishes that are in me,
In gratitude,
Your
E. Neumann
418 See Neumann’s letter to Marie-Jeanne Schmid, 14 June 1947 (50 N).
now: Bollingen, Kt. St. Gallen
24. 7. 1947
Tit.
Federal Immigration Authorities Bern
At the beginning of July I took the liberty of making an application to you to arrange, soonest, a visa for Dr. med. Erich Neumann, 1 Gordon St., Tel Aviv, to enable him to participate in this year’s Eranos Conference that begins on 18th VIII. I am very concerned to resume international scientific relationships. These efforts are of great importance for Switzerland. Dr. Neumann now informs me that on 15th. VII he was still not in possession of a visa and that the Swiss Consulate in Jerusalem is refusing to inquire about this by telegraph in Bern. I would be very obliged to you if you could expedite the granting of the visa as quickly as possible.
Yours faithfully,
[C. G. Jung]
9th August 1947
To the Federal Immigration Authorities,
Bern
I write to express my thanks to you for granting the visa to Dr. and Mrs. Neumann in Tel Aviv. My second letter has crossed with yours. I have since received direct news from Dr. Neumann.
In the meantime I have been asked to endorse an application from England. It is for Dr. Lotte Paulsen419 (145 Fellows Road, London, NW3), who has been recommended to me as a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology, London. This lady is a well-known psychologist who would like to take part in this year’s Eranos Conference, which runs from 18th–26th August.
I can warmly support this application and would request you to grant the visa as quickly as possible to enable her arrival in good time.
With many thanks in advance,
Yours truly,
C. G. Jung
419 Lotte (“Lola”) Paulsen (1902–1994), née Fulda: German-born psychotherapist, founding member of the Society of Analytical Psychology; studied in Leipzig where she went into analysis with Ruth Benedict; after her immigration to England in 1937 she continued her analysis with Michael Fordham. See Plaut (1995).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
27th Sept. 47
Geneva
Dear Professor Jung,
As I actually wanted to write to you in detail, I kept waiting for a peaceful hour only now to find myself writing to you at the last minute, very belatedly and quite briefly.
I have much to thank you for from my stay in Europe, not only for your time that you gave to me and for your efforts with Rascher to which I attribute “substantially” the fact that he has taken on my book and Ethic.
I had the impression of being strongly accepted and permitted into your midst and I very well have this to thank for the fact that now the central question—which I never actually asked you and which is also difficult to ask—seems to me, in hindsight, to have been answered. It is like in the—rationally hard to grasp—Hasidic stories where the Zaddik knows the question already and answers it in his sermon or in his conversation. But this is precisely one of the “last things” which I had to ask and it has become almost “unaskable,” now that a new window, if not even a door has been opened to me once again.
If the significance of my rather isolated self-sufficiency in Palestine has also become very clear to me once again, precisely because of Zurich, you will therefore understand how terribly much the possibility of meeting with you means and must mean.
Tomorrow my wife and I fly back to Palestine, back to work. But if you understand the depth of my gratitude and my attachment to you, you will also believe me that I will do everything in my power to bring this “impersonal-personal” into a living reality.
Your E. Neumann
Please will you give your wife my best wishes. Should your wife have any comments on my manuscript, I am, of course, very grateful for them.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 17th Dec. 47
Dear Professor Jung,
So once again not weeks but months have past before I have got around to writing to you. But you will understand that after the holidays, my practice demanded my full attention first of all, and then the corrections of Ethic, the preparation of the great book, course preparations and, not least, political events420 have very much laid claim to me.
In the meantime, though, much that is new has constellated—very much with your gracious help. I received the invitation to speak at the Eranos conference on the “Mystic”421 and to write the introduction to the Great Mother publication of the Eranos archives.422 Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn has been corresponding with me about this up till now423 and I have now received the papers from America to apply for a Bollingen fellowship. If I receive this, as I hope to do, it will finance not only the Swiss trip, which I am already very happy about, as I will see you and speak to you again, but it will also give me the opportunity to limit my practice somewhat that is almost growing over my head, and to get down to my own work in peace.
It is very important to me to first complete the Psychology of the Feminine as a completion of the Origins History424 in which the deviations from the masculine stages in the psychology of consciousness will be portrayed. All this costs time, of course, and circumstances are such here that I earn just about what we need with my workload of 50–55 hours per week. The fellowship would be granted for the Eranos lecture and for the introduction to the Great Mother that you proposed me for, as Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn wrote to me. I would like to thank you very particularly for this, as this work will be a special pleasure for me since this volume will be highly valuable as an illustration for the Great Mother chapter in my book. You will understand how happy I would be if, in addition to this work, I could get to write my next book in peace and quiet. As I am a difficult author and know that, so far, I have had to write every book twice, I dread every new beginning anyway, but especially, of course, if I must always write “on the hoof” and without continuity.
If Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn hadn’t kindly forewarned me, the questions on the Bollingen form would probably have really terrified me. I recognize contritely everything that I am not and everything that I cannot offer. I am not a member of a “scientific, artistic, or other learned society” and even with the “complete list” of my publications, it is an ugly business. So I urgently need your help once again, dear Professor Jung. Would you be so kind as to write me a letter of recommendation for the foundation that bears the name of your tower that is so dear to me?425 I think that with two further letters of recommendation from Miss Wolff and G. Adler, I’ll manage it.426 But beside that it says in the form: “Give names and present addresses of three persons from whom the foundation can obtain further information with regard to your qualifications, and who can give expert opinion concerning the value of your project as a contribution to knowledge.” Here I need to put three other names. If that is really necessary, it would be a bad thing, for who can assess my highly unfamiliar qualifications and offer an expert opinion about the value of the matter? Since Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn requested that I did not speak with anyone about the Eranos book apart from with you, I ask you for your advice in this matter that is certainly only a formality. I have the intention of simply putting your name a second time instead of the desired three names. It goes against regulations but I think it should suffice.
The time in Switzerland, as I hinted to you from Geneva, has had an effect on me that is palpable more indirectly than directly. The fact that you have now pinned the “mystic” on me, as it were, is closely connected to this for me. Personally, I don’t feel fully up to the task, but, of course, precisely that is a big incentive, and I will attempt to do it justice. For this reason, too, it would be good to have a bit more space to plunge once again into the sea of mysticism.
There is not much to report from my personal domain. There is the hope that we will get through unscathed. It is impossible to write about this as the events are too close and get to one too closely.
I hope your plans for the institute are shaping up in the meantime, without, dear Professor Jung, your having to invest too much energy and work into it all yourself. I only hope that the exertions of the summer were not too much for you. Please do not make too many demands of yourself, because so much is rightly demanded of you. I would have gladly laid before you the plan for an International Journal of Analytical Psychology, but heard to my regret from G. Adler that you and the Zurichers are not in favor of it.
Despite this, I am of the opinion that a broader publication for analytical psychology is immensely important and is, in no way, substituted by the institute. Such a centralization would be urgently desirable exactly because the circle of colleagues is still scattered in every sense. Could one not affiliate the journal to the institute—alongside the publication of documents that you plan? A selection of the lectures held there, together with other contributions, could well be published in this way. The whole project could almost be financed by the subscriptions of those attending the lectures. I can well see the difficulties, but I consider them easier to overcome than those related to the institute. While large publications from our circle are still appearing in such small numbers, the abundance of smaller pieces not in the club archive or hiding on people’s desks should not remain without impact. I think the Zurichers could easily do some more work. Analytical psychology must not be allowed to become a secret doctrine; to some degree it is this inevitably anyway anywhere that it seeks to grasp the essential secret of the psychical. But it means that the possible reach of analytical psychology is curtailed in a dangerous way if even the younger colleagues behave as if—you will forgive my malice—only the third half of life has any significance for humanity. Indeed, Dr. Scherf [sic]427 expressed the suspicion, when I was ranting in this way, that I must be an extravert and you can imagine what sort of a vote of no confidence this implied. But, in the name of all Gods, you know just what a hopeless introvert I am, and despite this, something needs to happen in this direction. Joking aside.
I didn’t want to neglect alerting you to the urgent need for a journal, which, by the way, Dr. Meier428 absolutely appreciated when I spoke to him about it.429 In my opinion, it is a simply matter of an official “analytical-psychological” duty, and the difficulties that exist must be overcome.
In any case, I am very much looking forward to the fact that in all probability I am returning to the Eranos conference and will be able to speak to you. Please excuse this huge letter; I am already typing it to be on the safe side, so that no deciphering is necessary. I very much hope that in the meantime your health is good and that you are managing at least a part of the massive workload you have planned for yourself. I wish you, dear Professor Jung—and also Mrs. Jung—a joyful Christmas and a good and healthy new year.
With best wishes, I am as ever,
Your grateful,
E. Neumann
My wife also sends you and Mrs. Jung best wishes for the New Year.
420 Under increasing international and domestic pressure because of its anti-immigration policy to Palestine, the constant combating of violence inside the territory, and the increasing economical problems at home, Britain, which had held the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) mandate over Palestine since 1922, asked the United Nations in February 1947 to find a solution to end the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. A report issued on 1 September recommended the foundation of two separate states. The plan was discussed and accepted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November. The Jewish celebrations were immediately followed by Palestinian attacks against Jews and looting of Jewish shops. In the twelve days following the UN voting eighty Jews were killed, the number was even higher in Arabic cities outside Palestine. See Gilbert (2008), pp. 141–55.
421 In 1948 Neumann gave his first Eranos lecture, “Der mystische Mensch” (“Mystical Man”) (Neumann, 1949).
422 Neumann was asked by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Jung to write an introductory text to the first publication of the Eranos Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. The plan for the book was that it would feature symbolic representations of the Great Mother. The material was first shown as an exhibition at the Eranos conference 1938 on the topic of “Gestalt und Kult der Grossen Mutter” (“The Gestalt and Cult of the Great Mother”). But Neumann’s introduction grew extensively and became a manuscript in its own right. It was finally published in 1956 under the title Die große Mutter: Der Archetyp des großen Weiblichen (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype) illustrated by images of the Eranos collection.
423 Letter from Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn to Erich Neumann, 30 October 1947: “We would like to invite you to speak on the ‘Mystic’ from the Perspective of Psychology. Jung considered that this theme would appeal to you and we would be delighted if you would accept this invitation.” Travel expenses should be covered by Bollingen; a fellowship should be offered. […] Even before the war, the Bollingen Foundation planned to publish a series of publications from the Eranos picture archive. They will each consist of around 100 images in large format with a foreword. All images of each volume must relate to a single archetype or primitive image. I have proposed that we commence with the archetype of the Great Mother” (Neumann and Fröbe-Kepteyn [NP]).
424 See nn. 411 and 457. Although Neumann did not write a monograph on the psychology of the feminine, he used the title “Psychologie des Weiblichen” for the second volume of his collection of essays, Umkreisung der Mitte (Circling the Midpoint) (Neumann, 1953b). This volume consisted of the articles “Die psychologischen Stadien der weiblichen Entwicklung” (“The Psychological Stages of Woman’s Development”) (Neumann, 1953), “Über den Mond und das matriarchalische Bewusstsein” (“The Moon and Martriarchal Consciousness”) (1950b), and “Zu Mozarts Zauberflöte” (“On Mozart’s Magic Flute”) (Neumann, 1950a).
426 Gerhard Adler’s letter of recommendation is dated 27 December 1947 and reads: “I have been familiar with Dr. Neumann’s work for the last twenty years, and he seems to me to be one of the most distinguished and original psychologists which I have ever met. His work on the development of consciousness (‘Stadien der Bewusstseins-Entwickung’) which I have read as manuscript, is undoubtably one of the most important books written by a follower of Professor C. G. Jung, and also in the general field of psychologiocal research.” Toni Wolff’s reference was written on 2 January 1948: “I should like to recommend Dr. Neumann warmly for obtaining the benefit of a Fellowship of the Bollingen Foundation. His qualifications for the work in question are of the first order. He is about to publish the first part of an extensive book on the origin of the mind. I have read the manuscript and am thrilled at the prospect of a very original contribution to the history and psychology of human consciousness” (NP).
427 Neumann refers to Rivkah Schärf, see n. 398.
428 Carl Alfred Meier (1905–1995): Swiss psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. Born in Schaffhausen Meier studied medicine and psychiatry in Zurich, Paris, and Vienna. He went into analysis with Jung in the late 1920s. Meier was honorary secretary of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy during Jung’s presidency (1933–39/40). After the war he became the first president of the C. G. Jung institute in 1948 and succeeded Jung as honorary professor of Psychology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1949. Meier cofounded and presided over the Clinic and Research Center for Jungian Psychology in Zürichberg (1965–2011) (see Meier, 1964). His works include Antike Inkubation und Modene Psychotherapie (Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy) (1949) and Lehrbuch der Komplexen Psychologie C. G. Jungs (The Psychology of C. G. Jung) in four volumes (1968–77). See also the festschriften Experiment und Symbol (Rüf, 1975) and A Testament to the Wilderness (Joan Meier, 1985). On Neumann’s problematic relationship with Meier see introduction, pp. xxxix–xli, xliii–xlv.
429 In a press release regarding the foundation of the C. G. Jung Institute C. A. Meier writes on 11 October 1948: “The findings of this scientific study are to be published in a series ‘Studies from the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich,’ which will be brought out in occasional frequency by the Rascher Verlag, Zurich and is already in preparation. It is also the later intention to publish a multilingual Journal as there is a strong need to create a platform and meeting place for Jung’s students, scattered throughout the world” (Meier, 1948 [NP]).
Bollingen, 8th January 48
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv
Dear Colleague,
I was very pleased to hear from you again. As requested, I enclose a certificate for the attention of the Bollingen Foundation. I really believe that on this occasion my recommendation will suffice. By the way, I have already worked as much as possible on the gentlemen in Ascona about you. Incidentally, you must not take the demands of the Bollingen form too seriously. It is mainly red tape. Despite this, if you do have any difficulties, let me know immediately so that I can approach Mr. Mellon430 personally in a letter.
You must not stress too much about the “mystic.” It is enough, for example, if you treat this problem of mysticism within an area, e.g., that of kabbalah—perhaps historically, as a representation of the history of the main influential symbols in kabbalah.
I fully appreciate what you argue in respect of the journal. Up till now, the difficulty has been with the staffing of it. There were and are too few active people available, and if something like this is to be initiated, we must be certain that someone very responsible will devote themselves to it so that something decent comes out of it. Everything has been so delayed by the war. We are only gradually starting to implement a plan of action that we should really have started years ago. Once the institute gets going and documents are published, then the next point on the action plan will be the journal. But for this, we must have assembled the necessary team. We can only expect real participation from you, from Switzerland, from America, and a bit from Holland. The English are rapidly going daft, and Germany is at ground zero to such a degree that one does not know at all what is going to happen there. France and Italy are not even in the picture as they are at least 50 years behind. As far as the Zurichers are concerned—you are completely right: they are still quite asleep. In this regard, I hope the institute will have an educative function and will awaken people out of this dream state.
I read with great apprehension the news about Palestine in our newspapers431 and brood on ways and means of ever getting you out of this hornets’ nest. I can’t see any way at the moment, but I hope that your publication will have an effect.
With best wishes and greetings,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
430 Paul Mellon (1907–1999): American philanthropist and art collector, son of Andrew W. Mellon, US secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1932. Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover Mellon (1904–1946), met Jung at the Bailey Island seminars in 1936–37 (Jung, 1936/37a). They attended the Eranos conferences in Ascona and settled down in Zurich in 1939 in order to undergo analysis and take part in Jung’s seminars. In 1940 they returned to the United States. On Mary’s initiative a foundation, named after Jung’s Bollingen retreat, was set up in 1945. It was dedicated to the wider dissemination of Jung’s works and ideas and lasted until 1968. After Mary’s unexpected death in 1946 Paul carried on with the project in memory of his late wife. He married again in 1948. His contribution as a benefactor to both the art world and the educational sector was recognized through several awards and honors—among those the Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (1974), the National Medal of Arts (1985), and the National Medal of Arts and Humanities (1997). His autobiography is titled Reflections in a Silver Spoon (1992). On Jung and the Mellons see also Schoenl (1992).
431 See introduction, pp. xxxiv–xxxv; also nn. 420 and 433.
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH |
January 8th 1948.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.432
I have known Dr. Erich Neumann for more than ten years. He is a very conscientious and reliable scientific author. Through the most unfavorable contemporaneous circumstances he was forced to leave his country and to settle in Palestine. The war with all its difficulties has hindered the normal publication of his work. But now, since normal connections could be reestablished, the publication of his work becomes possible. Indeed, the contracts for the publication of some of his works have already been signed.
I can very highly recommend Dr. Neumann for a scholarship. He is one of my most gifted pupils who has contributed important researches that are by far the best among the more recent publications in the field of psychology. I have read his work in manuscript form and, because it does not exist hitherto in any other form, Dr. Neumann is unable to produce further references, since I’m the only one who knows of its contents. It is my opinion that Dr. Neumann is most worthy of receiving a scholarship.
C. G. Jung
Prof. Dr. med. et jur. hc C. G. Jung
Seestr. 228 Küsnacht-Zurich
432 Jung’s reference for Neumann’s application for a scholarship by the Bollingen Foundation. It was written in English.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 24. 1. 48
1 Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
As I think this letter will only be a short one, I am risking writing it by hand, although it is unfortunately you who must bear the risk. Firstly, I would like to thank you warmly for your extremely kind letter, most especially for your letter of recommendation, which I hope will do the trick for me in America.
I am really in suspense to hear the outcome on which a great deal depends. As far as the “mystic” is concerned, I will have to make it easier and more difficult for myself at the same time. I cannot work it around a special area as both you and Miss Wolff advised, as I’m afraid I am lacking the qualifications to do so. This would mean that only something rather “third hand,” as it were, could emerge. But to interpret psychologically the “mystic as type” seems to me an interesting problem that has, besides, long concerned me. But of course this leads all too easily into the boundless, i.e., indeed, into the mystical, but not yet by a long way to the Eranos conference, nor to something with perspective.
Slowly it is getting so uncomfortable here because of the British betrayal433 that one cannot fail to see what will come out of it all. As a minor side issue, the post is in chaos. For this reason, I have already sent Rascher a larger section of the Origins manuscript, and am now coming with another request.
Would you have the time to write the foreword to Origins as you proposed back then? I do not believe it is urgent, i.e., I am sure there is no hurry, but since Origins is to be preannounced with The New Ethic that is actually based on it, I would like to come to you with this request already, esteemed Professor. I hate having to pester you again and again and to rob you of your time, but I must admit that your foreword to my book is the greatest pleasure that the coming year holds before me.
If I can assist you in some way with a summary or such like, I will of course do this very willingly. I do not know, for example, whether the comprehensive contents list to Part 1 has now turned up. In case Rascher can’t give it to you, let me know via Miss Schmid, and I will have one typed up.
I hope very much that your health and your strength leave nothing to be desired, and equally, that the institute is taking shape and, as far as possible, without your having to do too much on your part. You will surely know, too, that, if it does get as far as a journal, I am at your disposal to the best of my abilities.
Warm greetings to Mrs. Jung,
And once again very many thanks,
E. Neumann.
433 Neumann refers to the civil war between Jewish and Arab communities in British Mandate Palestine in the month after the decision of the United Nations to create two independent states. The war lasted from 30 November 1947 to 14 May 1948. When Arabic states intervened on the side of the Palestinian Arabs after the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (15 May 1948), the Arab-Israel war, or War of Independence, began, lasted until 10 March 1949, and ended with a victory for the Israeli forces. See also introduction, pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 3rd April 48
Dear Professor Jung,
Although I still do not have any definitive reply from Bollingen and therefore don’t know whether my trip will come to anything, quite apart from the fact that no one here can be sure what will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, I am behaving in everything as if all will continue normally, and I would also like to commence my preparations for Switzerland. If I reckon with a stay of about 6–8 weeks, of which a proportion will belong to Ascona and the work in the Eranos archive, I would very much like to know when would suit you best as I hope very much that you will have time for me once again, if your health allows. I was very pleased to hear that you have even given another lecture and that you will speak at Ascona, for this best proves that you are feeling well again. Regarding my trip, it is a question of whether, for example, the second half of July suits you better than the first half of September, excluding August. Would you be kind enough to let me know.
There is not much new to report from me. The practice that has become a bit—not a lot—smaller—(nearly everyone under 35 has been called up)—is, pleasingly, giving me rather more time during which I have for sure enough to do. Since the danger of being without any postal connection looms once again, even with Switzerland by the way, I have urged Rascher to go to print quickly. For this reason, I have prepared New Ethic and Origins ready for printing, which, as you know, is a ridiculously huge job. I am working on the Eranos lecture in any case, but in the main I am engaged with the Psychology of the Feminine, which is promising to become very interesting.434 I’m doing a course with notes, writing individual sections for it, but the development will still take a long time, hopefully we still have enough.435 The book will actually be the counterpart to Origins but seen from the feminine side, whereas, in Origins, it was a matter of the development of the masculine-patriarchal consciousness.
I hope that the institute is now beginning to get going and the world gone crazy does not bury all that has been carefully started with another world war. This is applies everywhere, and one must have the paradoxical faith that the meaning of what one is doing does not need to be obvious for us to be able—and to be allowed—to press on patiently. The difficult thing about this paradoxical position is—for a skeptical nature like mine in any case—that such inner attitudes and “certainties” threaten to be denounced and reduced by the “ego” as an ideal position. This inner dialectic is unquestionably one of my weaknesses and threats, possibly also a drive—which one has to come to terms with, as it enhances the work of the “ego.” This is why I have such a strong resistance to the mystical, which is of course very close to me. I will rename the title of my lecture “The Mystical Man” because that gives me more leeway and makes it possible to do away with the subtitle. I am mulling over the subject with difficulty and I’m afraid I can’t make it easier for myself by restricting it to a special study as I don’t have the time or inclination to do so, but besides I must somehow stay within the bounds of my own and others’ experience to be able to say anything at all.
I am sure you will speak to Dr. Braband;436 as I have the fully ungrounded impression that she wishes to leave Palestine, I would like to urge you not to believe all the negative things she says—if she does so. She does not see the truly hellish shadow problem at all, not in micro or in macro, it seems to me. Possibly we will all perish from it—only we?—but it is terribly overwhelming to see how the acceptance of the shadow, earth and blood all belong together and how obviously, even today, the longing for roots and the offering up of blood sacrifices to the earth belong together. The fact that one has the “evil eye” because one comprehends but is distanced from it does not make it easier, especially as one can only do anything about it in individual work and otherwise one must be silent for the time being.
Dear Professor Jung, would it be possible for you to write the introduction to Origins perhaps rather earlier than intended? In this situation, i.e., with these pressures from me, that I ask you to forgive, it is becoming clear to me how uncertain everything seems to me in reality, and how much I would like to have “finished” at least the little that I have done.
Greetings from your ever grateful,
E. Neumann
Please do not be angry with the ugly typed letter, but in my experience my handwriting is barely legible.
Best wishes, by the way, also from my wife, to Mrs. Jung.
434 See nn. 411, 424, and 457.
435 Fragments of seminar protocols from February and March 1948 show that Neumann discussed the female aspect in fairy tales such as the brother Grimms’ “The Nixie in the Pond” (“Die Nixe im Teich”), Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul,” Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine,” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (“Die kleine Meerjungfrau”). The texts were introduced and interpreted by Dr. J. Mendelssohn, and the discussion was led by Neumann (Neumann, 1948 [NP]).
14th Apr. 48
Dear Professor Jung,
I’m afraid, unless a miracle happens, which one should not count on, nothing is going to come of my Swiss trip and my Eranos lecture. After a long correspondence, I have today received notice from the Bollingen Foundation,437 which I must admit to you I consider to be an unsubtle disgrace but at the very least incomprehensible, if one rules out obvious reasons.
The comprehensive and precisely defined offer of a total of $1,100 covers little more than the travel and Swiss residential expenses, i.e., I am supposed to cover myself the preparations for the book that must be written, for which I will lose about 2 months work, and my family must hopefully also continue to live during this time.438 Therefore, I am supposed to write the Introduction Book to the 100 images for nothing, a fine work that I had been looking forward to, but a difficult work all the same, sandwiched between my practice and the situation in Palestine, and in addition without any certainty of publication. It is a mystery to me what these gentlemen were actually thinking. You will appreciate that, under these circumstances, I will turn this “Fellowship” down and will write my Psychology of the Feminine instead.
Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn wrote to me exceptionally confidently and seemed to have accepted that such an award would be offered to me as an intermediary award for the preparatory work, and that the fellowship would follow for the writing of the book.439 That would have made sense. She wrote that normally a sum of around $150 per month for three years would be granted, and compared with that, this total award that has been granted me is particularly grotesque.
You will understand that I am very disappointed, but there are worse things to deal with these days. But besides the fact that my “lion nature” is wild, which easily amuses me, I am very sad that I will not be able to speak to you in this way. I am sorry about the Eranos lecture, the conference, etc., but the most bitter thing is that the personal contact from the previous year cannot be continued. And this is not for political reasons that have made and make everything uncertain in any case, but because the Americans are….
As there is now no hurry, I will take my time over my reply to America; do you have any advice for me in this matter?
Everything here continues to be terrible and uncertain. One has to simply wait and carry on working, which is what I am doing.
I hope the institute is now open and is working contentedly, the post has been functioning excellently and I would like to ask you to think of me if any of your publications have appeared in the meantime. The Symbolism of the Spirit is not yet in Palestine.440
At least my work has been going well so far; I am writing individual sections, and am not allowing myself to be deterred by the times we live in, which is not always easy. I Ching has been positive so far. Dreams not referenced to the times.
Many thanks for your efforts with the Bollingen matter and very best greetings,
From your grateful,
[E. Neumann]
P.S. Have my letters from January and April arrived? I only ask because of the postal situation.
437 Letter from the Bollingen Foundation (signed by Vice President D. D. Shepard) to Neumann, 5 April 1948 (Neumann and Bollingen [EA]).
438 Bollingen Foundation to Neumann, 5 April 1948: “You have applied to this Foundation for a grant in aid or fellowship to assist you in the carrying out of a project consisting of research in the Eranos Archive, maintained by the Eranos Foundation at Ascona, Switzerland, and the preparation, upon the basis of the archive material, of an extensive introduction or separate volume, designed to accompany a contemplated illustrated volume designed The Great Mother. […] The fellowship is for the sum of $1100. This sum shall be payable only if you reach Ascona, Switzerland, as planned, during 1948” (Neumann and Bollingen [EA]).
439 On 24 March 1948 Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn had written to Neumann to reassure him and to inform him that the Bollingen Foundation had asked her to organize the reimbursement (Neumann and Fröbe-Kapteyn [NP]).
440 Jung (1948a).
Küsnacht, Zch. 10th May 1948.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv.
Dear Colleague,
I am most profoundly disappointed by the (to put it mildly) extraordinary ruling of the Bollingen Foundation. I do not know what is behind it. I’m afraid I am completely powerless in this matter. I have done everything in my power to recommend you and have explained in great detail to Mellon and his representatives why you are important to me. If all this is to no avail, then I really don’t know what else can be done.
I have hesitated to write to you as the official postal connections with Palestine have been discontinued. I will now attempt to reach you via Nicosia, as you see.
I will have an interview tomorrow with the chief of the Department of the Interior441 in relation to the institute and will use this opportunity to attempt to implement my plan to get you to Switzerland, either temporarily or long term. I am writing this more to show you what a concern it is of mine to promote you and your work, but I also have the awkward feeling that I am—as they say—dangling a sausage in front of your nose without any guarantee that you will really be able to catch it. If one is not a public institute, one is restricted on every side. By the way, I will write to Barrett442 and let him know how great my disappointment is. There’s nothing to be done with Mellon as he has just got married—and Barrett has damn little influence.
I will do the foreword very soon. I won’t be able to write a long piece—it would be quite superfluous anyway as your work speaks for itself. I have a heap to do and can’t keep up with anything. My report cards will contain the grade: “Unsatisfactory” to an increasing extent. The comprehensive contents of volume 1 has reappeared and is here with me.
With best greetings and wishes for which one might hope they had magical powers,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
*PS. As we have already discussed together, your book will appear in the monograph series of the institute and moreover as contribution II that I wanted to duly let you know.
*[handwritten addendum]
441 Philipp Etter (1891–1977): From the Christain Democratic People’s Party of Switzerland, Etter presided over the Swiss department of the interior from 1934 to 1959. His positive attitude toward Jung and his psychology also becomes evident through a number of requests for Jung’s autograph for his son’s collection. (I am grateful for Thomas Fischer from the Stiftung der Werke C. G. Jungs for prvoding me with this information.) On Etter see Kreis (1995).
442 John D. Barrett Jr. (1903–1981): Editor of the Bollingen series from 1946 to 1969 and president of the Bollingen Foundation from 1956 to 1969. See McGuire (1981).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 12. VII. 48
1 Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
I had just decided to send you good wishes for your birthday and to write to you of how much you have bestowed on us all with your good health, when your letter of 10th May arrived, albeit substantially delayed. You will have an inkling of how things are for us; as far as me and my trip are concerned it looks likes this: Bollingen’s strongly improved proposal makes the trip possible; a visa, even if crazily only for 14 days, has arrived and it can be extended. It is uncertain whether I will get the exit permit from here. I hope it will be OK. Everyone under 41 is in the army, I am 43. If, as I believe, there will soon be a cease fire, I could then come. As long as we’re being mindlessly bombed all over the place, I am unable to make the decision to travel. Yesterday a bomb dropped next to us, it can happen on every corner and at any time—to travel in this is impossible.443 But I still hope that it will work. Even so, I will come alone and perhaps for a short time, but all this will sort itself out.
I am very grateful for your efforts for me and for my work, this has nothing to do with the “results” anyway. Sometime something will emerge. I would not wish to remain in Switzerland long-term, a regular occupation for some months would be the fulfillment of a dream. But I don’t fully believe in it. The visa for 14 days, even if I am certain that it will be renewed, speaks a clear language. I will, for sure, always be on the margins in Palestine, sorry—in Israel, even on the most extreme margin, and almost on the outside, but here, there is no protected Judaism as an optimal state, and indeed a dangerous but healthy shadow development that at least makes a healthy and creative nation possible. For me, a paradoxical but apparently beneficial situation.
I am very concerned that Origins is apparently in no way in press, as it should have long since been by now. I have received no proofs. What’s happening with the monograph series of the institute? Apart from a hint in a conversation with you, I have heard nothing about it. Is everything still as it was with Rascher who has not written a word about it, and there has been airmail from Switzerland for three weeks now? What is Contribution no. 1? I would at least like to get to know the society who are good, I’m sure. What does this mean for the translation into English, which is, of course, very important to me? Please be so kind as to let me know about this. I must get this book—which I have been carrying around far too long—behind me. I am already in the middle of the next one and I know that the corrections will pull me right back. Every book that I read depresses me when I get the impression I need to change something, etc. After all, its latest, I believe, third revision goes back to 1946. You will, I think understand this my “distress.” In any case, I am looking forward to your introduction, whether short or long. While it is difficult, it is, despite everything, wonderful that you are unable to get to grips with all your work, as it shows how inexhaustible is what you have been commissioned to do, and what you are still able to manage. When you write that you would get the grade: “unsatisfactory,” that does not concern me too much. Certainly not objectively, and subjectively, i.e., applied to you, it does not seem to me that labels can be very damaging to you.
Esteemed Professor Jung, you know so well that I wish you a healthy, peaceful, and creative time that it is not worth wasting time on saying it, therefore I rather wish that we, your pupils, friends, relatives, do not have to rob you of too much energy and time so that you can give yourself a bit more peace and quiet—which you surely need.
I hope very much that I will be able to see you at the Eranos conference and that everything will work out. Otherwise, I will come later in any case when peace has come here and I am healthy—to select the images for Bollingen, i.e., the hope exists of speaking to you this year, despite everything.
Once again my warmest wishes for you with best greetings to Mrs. Jung,
I am your grateful,
E. Neumann
443 The house next to the Neumanns, Gordon Street 3, was hit and destroyed by a bomb. In his defense of Neumann toward Jolande Jacobi (see introduction, p. xli), Jung mentions Neumann’s isolation and endangered situation in Tel Aviv: “Neumann is coming from his hermit’s existence in the strange world of Tel Aviv. The house opposite him has been bombed to the ground, and ‘Israel’ is writhing in birth pangs. N. is strongly infected by the collective because of his fearful rejection of the external world. This attitude is responsible for the lack of empathy and must therefore be taken into consideration” (Jung to Jacobi, 24 September 1948 [JA]).
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 14. VII. 48
1, Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
I have just received a letter from Rascher about Origins.444 Since I previously only heard about the plan from you, but have heard nothing more, you will not hold it against me if I ask for some information. Is the institute that will publish my book independent from the Psychology Club, does it stand under your leadership, and who is “publishing”? I assume that it is independent, stands under your leadership and you are publishing. Then everything is in order.
But secondly and most importantly. I have a contract with Rascher stating that he will publish my book by September. I consider this necessary for many external and internal reasons and therefore have fervently fought with Rascher—and successfully. I have to reluctantly accept a small delay because of the situation here. But I am in no way in agreement with Rascher’s statement that “it will appear after a work by Dr. C. A. Meier-Fritzsche, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy.”445 I am writing to Rascher by this same post in this vein. Whether my book is no. 2 or no. 5 in the studies has nothing to do with it, I do not want its publication date to be postponed. If I have understood this incorrectly, which may be possible, then everything is fine. Otherwise the studies numbers and the publication date would not fall together, which would also not be the worst thing to happen. Therefore I hope very much that the delay is not connected to the adoption of the book into the studies series of the institute. You wrote to me in May that my book was in press, but I’m afraid that was an error. The proofs that were promised me in February still have not arrived as of today, there is another format for the studies, etc. I only hope that Rascher does not achieve the planned postponement of the print in this way.
Please excuse the technical questions, but as I have not even received a communication from the institute of its very existence, let alone one informing me that it wishes to publish my book, I must, for better or for worse, turn to you once again.
So, no hard feelings, as they say …
Best wishes,
Your E. Neumann
444 Rascher to Neumann, 6 July 1948: “Now concerning your second work ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness,’ the C. G. Jung Institute has demanded that this work appear in the series: ‘Studies from the C. G. Jung Institute.’ This series appears per contractual agreement in the format […]; your second book, which will simultaneously be the second book in the ‘Studies’ series, must therefore also be in this format […], and not in the same format as ‘Depth Psychology.’ Apart from this, our contract of 19th September 1947 applies, also for the second work which will appear after a work by Dr. C. A. Meier-Fritzsche, ‘Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy’” (RA).
445 Meier (1949).
Küsnacht, Zch., 30. July 1948.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv.
Dear Doctor,
As I do not know whether Prof. Jung will get around to responding to your letters at the moment, I would like to quickly let you know the reasons for the delay. Prof. Jung was ill when your letters arrived and although it fortunately was nothing serious, he was still unable to take care of his correspondence and has now gone to Bollingen to recover, from where he will hopefully write soon.
Since I could only read your letters fleetingly and they are now in Bollingen, I cannot make a response to them, but I am sure that the matter of the publication of your book in the monograph series of the institute will be clarified to your satisfaction. If you would like to see Prof. Jung before Ascona—I very much hope that it will in fact be possible for you to come to Switzerland—I ask you to write directly to Prof. Jung in Bollingen, St. Gallen Canton, as I am myself going away on holiday for 14 days and it is still quite uncertain when Prof. Jung will be back in Küsnacht.
With best wishes and greetings,
Your,
[Marie-Jeanne Schmid]
17. VIII. 1948
Dear Colleague,
I finished reading your lecture yesterday.446 I can only express my admiration to you for the manner and style in which you have mastered your difficult task. It has turned into a quite excellent representation, as clear as it is thorough, of the problem of the mystic. This has never before been captured in such an extensive way and in such depth as in your work. The saint who bought firewood instead of a fur has found a particular sympathy with me.447 It is good that you did not say less, and more would have been unwise. τώ ϰαιρώ πρόσεστι πάντα τά ϰαλά448 (everything good rides on the correct quantity). I thank you for the work.
With best greetings and wishes,
Your devoted,
C. G. Jung
446 Neumann’s Eranos lecture 1948 titled “Der mystische Mensch” (“Mystical Man”) (Neumann, 1949).
447 This is the passage from Neumann’s lecture: “Not only the heroic character of these mystics’ efforts but also the results at which they aim reveal that these mystics are not uroboros nihilists. There is a Hasidic maxim which sums up this problem with popular simplicity. A famous rabbi is said to be a ‘Zaddik [a perfectly righteous man] in a fur coat.’ The explanation is: ‘One man buys a fur coat, another buys firewood. And what is the difference between them? The first one wants to warm only himself, the second wants to warm others as well.’ Just as it is a basic fallacy to confuse individuation with this ‘fur-coat Zaddikism,’ it is a misunderstanding of the intention of the high mystics to regard them as essentially hostile to the world” (Neumann, 1949/2007, p. 405). The Hasidic tale “Im Pelz” (“In a Fur Coat”) can be found in Martin Buber’s Die chassidischen Bücher (Buber, 1928, pp. 600–601) and in Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim): “The rabbi of Kotzk once said of a famous rabbi: ‘That’s a zaddik in a fur coat.’ His disciples asked him what he meant by this. ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘one man buys himself a fur coat in winter, another buys kindling. What is the difference between them? The first wants to keep only himself warm, the second wants to give warmth to others too.’” The story is also quoted in Neumann’s volume on Hasidism (1934–40: vol. 2, p. 47).
448 “ϰαιρώί πάντα πρόσεστι ϰαλά” (“Nothing too much; all that is good is attached to ‘Right Season’”) (Diels and Kranz, 1951–53, vol. 2, p. 380/9). Critias of Athens (460–403 BCE) attributed the phrase to the pre-Socratic philosopher, poet, and statesman Chilon of Sparta (sixth century BCE).
Küsnacht, Zch., 27th October 1948.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1 Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv,
Palestine.
Dear Colleague,
I am afraid I am charged with communicating to you a rather unpleasant development. At the time we agreed that your book should be published under the auspices of the institute’s publications, there was as yet no close agreement between Rascher and the institute. Since then, a contract has come into force that states that for texts that appear under the auspices of the institute, 2% of the author’s honorarium must be diverted to the institute. Rascher, who actually should have told you of this, has asked me whether I had told you about it, to which I of course replied that this was not the case, but as you see, this is what I am now doing.
However, on the other hand, you must take into consideration that the fact that I am willing to publish your book in the institute’s series has been a strong motive for Rascher to venture into the printing of your comprehensive works at all. I had to bring all kinds of persuasive skills to bear in this regard. Besides, the “C. G. Jung Institute” brand carries a certain propaganda value.
I am sending you at the same time an off-print in the usual post. I would have liked to send you my new book, but I am not sure if it would get through. If you are persuaded that one can trust the regular post, please let me know and then I will send it to you.
With kind greetings and best wishes,
Your always loyal,
C. G. Jung
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 13th Nov. 48
1, Gordon St.
Dear Professor Jung,
Many thanks for your letter. I had already written to Rascher that I was in agreement with the symbolic payment to the institute, and now a letter from Meier declares everything to be invalid and my contract to be the only valid thing.449 I find it just outrageous that you are being troubled with this nonsense and confusion.
As far as the post is concerned, it arrives late, but it does always arrive and there is no risk involved in sending things here. Naturally I am exceptionally grateful to you for every dispatch. Even if I am generally glad to be here and not in Zurich for many other reasons, envy still naturally grips me when I see the Zurichers referring to manuscripts of yours that are still unknown to me. Would it be possible to have a copy of “Mysterium” for a while, for example? I imagine that working through this could help me with a great deal. Please do not take this as an expression of envy. But as I now know how long it takes from the preparation of a manuscript to its publication, it is naturally difficult for me to have to wait so long. But if this is impossible, as I assume, I would like to approach you once again when I am back in Switzerland. If all goes well, i.e., if Bollingen renews, I do hope to be able to come to the next Eranos conference in Switzerland again.
Here things are going well for me and for all of us, with plenty of work, and we are all quite optimistic. Without the world noticing, something remarkable is happening here—and despite everything—it is positive.
Dear Professor, I hope that you find yourself restored to the best of health and that you are enjoying being creative once again, and, with warmest greetings, also to Mrs. Jung, I am
Your ever grateful,
Erich Neumann
449 C. A. Meier’s letter is missing. Cf. Neumann to Rascher, 4 November 1948: “Prof. Jung wrote to me that 2% of my honorarium is allocated to the C. G. Jung Institute; I am in agreement with this, but would like to have sight of the usual contract for Institute publications”; Neumann to Rascher, 13 November 1948: “Dr. Meier has since informed me that the inquiry from Prof. Jung is based on an error; nothing from my book is to be paid to the Institute, which I, by the way, also find in order” (RA).
Küsnacht, Zch., 10th December 1948
Dear Colleague,
Please excuse my writing to you by hand. I can better concentrate my thoughts in this way. The “Myst. Coniunct.” manuscript is not yet ready to travel, and the last chapter has also not yet been written. There are however one or two other manuscripts that are more or less ready for printing of which a copy could be sent to you.
Your text on the Ethic has appeared here and is already stirring up the dust and, indeed, in such a way, that it might come to my having to speak out about it.450 At the institute the question has arisen whether it would now be wise, given the circumstances—and taking advantage of your kind willingness—to bring out your book as part of the institute’s series of publications. The fear exists that future discussions would be prejudiced by this, and that the institute would be defining itself by certain formulations, even if only morally, or that it would be giving the appearance of doing so. A small institute, which still stands on weak legs, must not risk too many opponents. (Side glances to university and church!)
I have reread your text and again had a very strong response to it, and I am certain that its effect will be like that of a bomb. Your formulations are brilliant and of incisive sharpness; they are therefore challenging and aggressive, an assault troop in an open field, where there was nothing to be seen in advance, unfortunately. Naturally the opponent concentrates his fire on the unprotected troops. It is precisely the obviously bold but unambiguous formula that is most vulnerable because it has an unprotected side. One cannot fight a war without losses, and one gets nowhere with a static equilibrium. Even the title “New” Ethic is a trumpet cry: aux armes, citoyens!451 We will get some poison gas in the nose and some dirt on the head. In Tel Aviv you risk occasional Egyptian bombs for it.
I am not quarrelsome, but I am strident by nature and therefore I cannot conceal from you my secret pleasure. But I will have to act concerned and possibly exercise my duty as commandant of the fire brigade. Your writings will be a petra scandali,452 but also the powerful impetus for future developments. For this I am most deeply grateful to you.
With best wishes,
Your very devoted,
C. G. Jung
450 See introduction, pp. xlii–xlix.
451 French for “To arms, citizens,” from “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France; the orginal title was “Chant de Guerre pour l’armée du Rhine” (“War Song for the Army of the Rhine”), written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792, and used as anthem of the First Republic: “Aux armes, citoyens, / Formez vos bataillions, / Marchons, marchons! / Qu’un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons!” (“To arms, citizens, / Form your battalions, / Let’s march, let’s march! / Let an impure blood / Water our furrows!”).
452 Latin for “rock of offense,” from Greek petra skandalou (πέτρα σκανδάλου) in 1 Peter 2:8 “And, a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense, even to them who stumble at the word, being disobedient: to which also they were appointed” (KJB), where this phrase was seen as a reference to the Jews “who rejected the Saviour on account of his humble birth, and whose rejection of him was made the occasion of the destruction of their temple, city, and nation” (Barnes’ Notes on the Bible).
Tel Aviv, 1. 1. 49
1, Gordon St.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
My Dear Professor Jung,
Your letter was as much a great joy as a surprise. I must admit to you that I in no way expected to cause a stir or even a scandal in the close-knit circle of Jung students with my Ethic. In my opinion I have only summarized, thought through to the end, and formulated in a way that cannot be misunderstood what you yourself have stated or implied countless times. It is absolutely fair enough that the emphasis of your interest did not exactly focus on the ethical consequences, but shifted more and more to the later phases of psychic development, and that seems to me to derive from your own development. You went through the weight of the ethical problematic in your time as student, friend, and opponent of Freud and then grew beyond it. But then the necessary polemic against Freud has caused a section of your students to turn a blind eye to how much blood was spilled in this debate, and how your moral courage in separating from Freud perpetuated Freud’s moral courage with which he set himself against his time. Indeed, you have personally emphasized over and over again—at least in many conversations with me—the significance of the moral stance of the “ego” and of the strength of the “ego,” but, in your writing, this aspect is often less evident as is the obvious therapeutic aspect in general. My inner “consternation,” to formulate it in an exaggerated way—about the condition of the Jung students in Zurich, now evidently to me at least, seems I fear, to be substantiated. If I found something amiss, for example, or not as it should be, there were only two reactions, either they said—in a highly satisfied way—yes, yes that is just the shadow, or they smiled in a rather superior way about my provincial attitude, which was thought not quite up to it simply because I made a value judgment about where one ought to allow the wisdom of the unconscious to prevail, beyond good and evil. But they seemed to me all too often to mistake the unconsciousness of the ego for the wisdom of the unconscious.
If pure ambition and casting side glances at both “university and church,”—and also power and money—belong to the foundations of the C. G. Jung Institute, then one should let this institute be eradicated, because it is, in fact, abusing your name and endangering your life’s work. You know, and I know all too well, that my strong Mars tendency signifies a danger, but my heart rose when you wrote to me that you have a “strident nature.” I understand most deeply that it can no longer be your task to get involved in the battle of the day, and for God’s sake please do not misunderstand me and think that I am requesting a defense of Ethic or even of my person, but I do request you—in your role as “fire brigade commandant”—not to extinguish too enthusiastically, where the fire, that ancient cleansing method of humanity, could possibly eradicate some filth. Some of the reservations against your teaching are based on the unrevolutionary and all too bourgeois stance of your students who always wish to anticipate the wisdom of the “third half of life” before they have the struggles of the first behind them. The synthetic and superior stance of your age, which contains the opposites, conceals from your “heirs,” who ogle at the so-called treasures of this world and want to have everything at once, the aggressive and revolutionary character of your work—and despite everything—of your being. I do not wish to conceal from you that it sometimes seems to me that you are yourself rather complicit in this. I know that psychologists are not a “religious order,” but I do not understand fully how it can be that the necessary fourth is the devil, and in the patronage of the institute can sit enemies of this devil—legitimate and serious enemies. I confess even that I am naïve enough to consider Mrs. Jacobi’s453 Catholicism as offensive—to put it unkindly etc., etc. Where’s the “new ethic” now, you will perhaps ask me, and you could say that what I am attacking, like “Savonarola,” is precisely one of their and your conclusions. But I believe that is not the case. In my experience, this acceptance of the fourth is, as the fine German language puts it, a “devilishly difficult”454 matter, and in no way so pleasant and easy a thing as, say, a compromise. You see, the neutral stance of Switzerland also has its risks alongside all that is good. With the exception of you, of course, they have not experienced the evil that has the whole world by the throat, and this is the bourgeois-ethical inadequacy that endangers your students. (This is what, for example, brings a man like Layard,455 despite everything, much closer to me than Mrs. Jacobi with her Shadow Lover and the Rautendelein.456)
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean one individual thing and I can be mistaken in every detail, but what frightens me is the absence of passion of the spirit that, for example, is suggested in your implied reaction to my text, everywhere seeking reassurances against the truth.
Figure 6. Erich Neumann with John Layard at the Eranos conference 1958 (Eranos Archive; courtesy of Paul Kugler).
Of course there is nothing I would want less than to damage you or the institute and I can now assure you that I would respond positively to a request from the institute not to publish my book there. At the same time, though, I would like to assure you that my fervent efforts will continue to prove myself worthy of “the hate of the pussyfooters.”
I am doing a lot of work—a small text, an interpretation of Eros and Psyche.457 I have taken a chapter from the large book Psychological Development of the Feminine and wish to publish it separately.458 I’m working on the images volume for the “Great Mother,” etc., etc. It gives me much pleasure. For this New Year, I wish for myself that everything will sort itself out and that it will be possible to speak to you this time in connection with the Eranos conference. I hope there will be peace here by then. Anyway, I am eternally grateful that it has always been possible for me to go on working “undisturbed” or, better, unhindered by wars and unrest. But precisely this fact strengthens the feeling of responsibility in me of producing something at least passable. (Many thanks by the way for the help on the index for Origins, which is a great vexation.)
In hoping that you understand me when I am possibly overstating things—as is my tendency—I remain,
Your grateful,
E. Neumann
453 Jolan[de] Jacobi (1890–1973): Psychotherapist and close collaborator of Jung; born as Jolande Szekacs in Budapest to baptized Jewish parents, she married the lawyer Andor Jacobi in 1909. When the communist Bela Kun came to power in Hungary in 1919, the couple moved with their two sons to Vienna, where she got involved in Karl Rohan’s conservative Europäischen Kulturbund (founded in 1922). In her capacity as executive vice president (1928–38) she got in contact with the cultural and intellectual elite of Europe. Her friendship with the author Albert von Trentini made her convert to Catholicism in 1934. She met Jung for the first time in February 1928, when he gave his lecture “Die Struktur der Seele” (“The Structure of the Psyche”) (Jung, 1928a) at the Kulturbund in Vienna. In order to become a student of his she studied psychology at the University of Vienna with Karl and Charlotte Bühler. She wrote a dissertation on the “Das Altern” (“The Aging”) (1938) and came back to Vienna, which she had fled after the Anschluss, under the risk of her own life, to sit her final exam. Jacobi settled down in Zurich to work with Jung. Her parents and husband remained in Hungary and fell victim to the Nazis in 1944. After the war Jacobi was pivotal for the creation and development of the Jung Institute (see n. 415). She was a member of its curatorium for years. She taught, practiced, lectured, and wrote several books on Jungian psychology, including Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung (The Psychology of C. G. Jung) (1940) and Komplex, Archetypus, Symbol in der Psychologie C. G. Jungs (Complex, Archetype, and Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung) (1957), for both of which Jung wrote an introduction (Jung, 1940; 1956b). Jacobi also contributed to Jung’s Man and His Symbols (Jacobi, 1964). For Jacobi’s difficult relationship with Neumann see introduction, pp. xxxix–xli, xliv, xlix, lii–liii.
454 “eine […] teuflisch schwere Sache”
455 John Willoughby Layard (1891–1974): English anthropologist and psychotherapist. In 1914 Layard went to the New Hebrides Islands in Melanesia to undertake anthropological studies (Stone Men of Malekula, 1942). Initial analysis with Homer Lane, later with Wilhelm Stekel and Fritz Wittels. In 1929 Layard attempted to commit suicide in Berlin. He survived and moved back to England. In the early 1940s he started to see patients as an analyst while continuing his own therapy with H. G. Baynes, Gerhard Adler, and Jung himself in Zurich. His main psychological work is titled The Lady of the Hare (1944), which describes the dream series of Mrs. Wright, a countrywoman and devout Christian, whose dream of a hare initiates her psychological healing process. Layard’s interpretation reveals his Christian faith, to which Neumann refers in the letter.
456 Jolande Jacobi, Der Schattengeliebte und das Rautendelein (1946). On Jacobi see n. 453.
457 Published first as commentary to a new edition of Apuleius’s Amor und Psyche (Amor and Psyche) under the title “Eros und Psyche: Ein Beitrag zur seelischen Entwicklung des Weiblichen” (“Eros and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius”) (Neumann, 1952). Neumann held a course titled “Zur Psychologie des Weiblichen: Anhand des Märchens Amor und Psyche” (“On the Psychology of the Feminine: Based on the Fairy Tale Amor and Psyche”) at the Zurich institute at the beginning of October 1950 (Protocol, 5 October 1950, AJP.) See n. 518.
458 The material in question could either have formed part of Neumann’s commentary on Apuleius’s Amor and Psyche or he could have used it for his lecture at the Psychological Club Zurich in the coming year (title “Zur Psychologie des Weiblichen im Patriarchat,” 7 October 1950), a presentation he held again in Basel and Tel Aviv. This lecture was later published—together with contents from his article “Die Urbeziehung zur Mutter” (“The Primordial Relation to the Mother”) (1951)—under the title “Die psychologischen Stadien der weiblichen Entwicklung” (“The Psychological Stages of Woman’s Development”) (1953).
10. II. 49
Dear Professor Jung,
It is difficult to get my bearings in the Zurich games of shadows and to differentiate between the “being” and its shadow, and although I should now be an expert in the shadow, it remains difficult. After I had written a letter to the “President” alone, I did the I Ching and cast: “Preponderance of the Great transforms into Inner Truth.” I wish therefore, against my nature but obedient to the I Ching, to “put rushes under it” with the knowledge that it is no flaw if despite this, “the water goes over one’s head.”459
Dear President,
I have been informed by the Curatorium of the institute that bears your name and whose president you are that it is not desirable that my book The Origins and History of Consciousness should be published as a publication of the institute.460 I had not sought this honor, but on the contrary, long after the contract with Rascher was agreed, I gave permission, post hoc, for the book to be taken on by the institute.461 At that time, following my good intuition, I immediately turned to you with the question regarding whether the institute was under your leadership and made my permission conditional on this (14 July 1948). I hereby lay aside this honor, as I have already communicated with you in my reply to your private letter, into the hands of those who have recalled it, with the requirement that Rascher Press is in agreement with these changes. I regret the decision of the institute exclusively for this reason: that the young institute, which sadly bears your name—in my unauthoritative opinion—has dishonored it out of ill-judged opportunism.
Collegial integrity alone, to say nothing of anything else, would have demanded that when one believes one must take such a step, at least to have admitted the truth that one is operating from opportunism and to declare this. The spurious justification of the vice president that, as the “New Ethic” is an object of controversy, they have decided only to publish monographs, is galling in its inelegant untruth because it seeks to obscure a clear fact. But the fact is that they do not wish to have my—compromising—name associated with the institute. With this, Esteemed President, you have declared yourself in agreement. This is what it is about, because it was, in fact, not Ethic but my other book that was to appear in the institute’s publications.
This Curatorium, from whom its vice president has distanced himself by saying “I can understand the Curatorium’s decision to this effect” and by the president having written me an unambiguous personal letter, is a remarkable institution. (I should not have said “unambiguous”—I had not applied your sentence: “One cannot fight a war without losses”—to myself.)
I would like to call upon you—although I am perhaps not entitled to do so—as the “Commandant of the Fire Brigade” in the old biblical style: “Philistines be upon thee, Samson!”
For two reasons, however, I am grateful for the decision of the Curatorium even though it has cut me off once and for all from your institute and its representatives. It seems to me to be fatefully correct that my book and I myself have been expelled from your institute. On the outside, I find myself quite well and in the best of company, namely, in that of C. G. Jung, provided he is not president. So herewith I accept the honor, dear Professor, of representing the truth of your psychology in the world, for which there is no room in your institute.
The second reason—which I have seen with some consternation—is that the [new] Ethic is much less up to date than I had believed, as the simple values of the old ethic, e.g., integrity, the love of truth, and courage, are still unknown in the circles of people whom I considered to be representatives of the new ethic. So yet again, the church is correct to have banned me—and you—in the name of the institute.
With the same post as the communication from the institute came one from Rascher—that Kegan Paul have accepted The New Ethic. Would you fancy writing a foreword for the English edition, dear Professor?
I send warmest greetings and the request that you would inform the board of my decision and my remarks about it,
I remain despite everything,
Your,
[Erich Neumann]
Do you recall the question, dear Professor, about why so few men come to you? It is not easy to accept the things you ask of us. Please imagine your own reaction if this had happened to you with one of your books at a Freudian Institute, moreover, in the case of a book for which Freud himself had written the foreword. But this example is wrong. That would not have been possible.
459 “Six at the beginning means: To spread with rushes underneath. No blame. When a man wishes to undertake an enterprise in extraordinary times, he must be extraordinarily cautious, just as when setting a heavy thing down in the floor, one takes care to put rushes under it, so nothing will break” (Baynes, 1940, p. 120); “Six at the top means: One must go through the water. It goes over one’s head. Misfortune. No blame. Here is a situation in which the unusual has reached a climax. One is courageous and wishes to accomplish one’s task, no matter what happens. This leads into danger. The water rises over one’s head. This is the misfortune. But one incurs no blame in giving up one’s life that the good and right may prevail. There are things that are more important than life” (Baynes, 1940, p. 121) See also n. 297.
460 C. A. Meier, vice president of the institute, wrote to Neumann on 3 February 1949 (NP): “Dear Colleague, As you already know from Jung, due to the fierce public and private controversy which has arisen about your ‘New Ethic’, the question has been discussed in the Institute about whether it would be right to publish the ‘Origins and History of Consciousness’ in the Institute’s own series. After a comprehensive discussion in the Curatorium, we came to the decision that it would be better for the young Institute not to expose itself to too much fierce public controversy. For now, we would prefer to publish works which have the character of monographs on questions of Complex Psychology which require a better material and scientific underpinning. Therefore, it also seems to me personally right if your large comprehensive work appears as a publication in its own right, and I can thus understand the decision of the Curatorium to this effect. I hope you will not have any difficulties with this and assure you that we are all very much looking forward to your book coming out. With best wishes, ever yours, C. A. Meier.” See also introduction, p. xlv.
461 Neumann to Rascher, 14 July 1948: “In principle I am completely in agreement with the acceptance of the book into the Studies, but only if it does not then lead to a delay in its publication. I have informed Prof. Jung of the same in a letter” (RA).
PROF. DR. C. G. JUNG |
KÜSNACHT, ZURICH, |
29th March 1949
Dr. Erich Neumann,
1, Gordon St.,
Tel Aviv.
Dear Colleague,
I can understand your annoyance but I had to marvel at your both mild and acquiescent reply in your last letter but one. I have concluded from this that it is not important to you anyway how your book is published. I have naturally communicated your previous response to Dr. Meier. Now, if you had protested immediately to the degree that you have done so in your recent letter, I would have attempted to push through my original intention of publishing your book in the series. You must understand my current situation somewhat: I have to try to operate under the current circumstances, but I would like to avoid the emergence of some sort of orthodoxy that pushes out other types of individuality. Since your clear reaction to my original proposal, I have now gone back to the Curatorium.
I will gladly fulfill your wish for a foreword to the planned English edition of your Ethic, albeit with the condition that you make a few more revisions to the current text. In the last fortnight I have occupied myself by nothing else but reading through your text three times and I have noted down my latest thoughts. I enclose these notes with revision proposals.462 I would like to comment that, in general, your text strikes me as a chapter from a larger context. This is probably because it lacks an actual introduction to the extent that you have not defined adequately the position you are writing from, and I fear that the reader cannot get a picture of the situation in which the newer ethical considerations take place. For an English edition, however, such an explanation would be most important, as the English-speaking public is not familiar with debating as it is practiced in Europe, with the exception of the Oxford dons, but they are hidden away in the background of Anglo-Saxon public life.
I am sorry that I am lumbering you with even more work. But it is very important to me that your text on the Ethic comes out in an acceptable form for its Anglo-Saxon audience.463 You can take nothing for granted, especially any knowledge of philosophical or psychological concepts. You must explain it carefully and in the simplest of language, at least the points it particularly depends on or which are particularly significant.
In the meantime, with best wishes,
Your devoted,
C. G. Jung
*P.S. I am also enclosing my foreword to which I have only made revisions that seemed necessary to me. I hope you are in agreement with them.
*[handwritten addendum]
462 See appendix II.
463 See Jung’s letter to Cary Baynes from 9 May 1949 (CFB). Quoted in introduction, p. xlvi. See also appendix II.
Dr. Erich Neumann,
Analytical Psychologist
Tel Aviv, 6th April [1949]
My dear Professor Jung,
Your silence in response to both of my letters464 has rather unsettled me, but I thought perhaps you had too much to do and so I was only a little sad. Now I see—as I have received a letter from Miss Wolff today—that I have “fallen from grace” and that the court has turned away from me.465 That troubles me little, even if I am astonished to hear from Miss Wolff that all of a sudden my point of view “is not actually that of depth psychology” that had never even once occurred to me, to you, or to Miss Wolff—until recently. However, if I must now accept that you are angry with me or that your silence has arisen from your breaking off your relationship with me—I would in no way be prepared to put up with this. I am willing to defend The New Ethic—which apparently no longer has any friends in Switzerland—in open battle against the whole institute, Protestants, Catholics, baptized Jews, unbaptized Jews, and even against Jungian analysts if any should show up, and I pledge to prove from the writings of C. G. Jung that my teaching is the real and unfalsified teaching of Holy Jungian Psychology that I believe myself to represent now, as ever, against friend and foe.
Who would have thought it! Never would I have thought that your droll warning that I had yet to experience how much one can be misunderstood would have to become a reality in this highly surprising way.466 May I quote you something from Miss Wolff’s letter that shows the “revised” position? “You no longer seem to be on good terms with nature, hence with the unconscious and the inner laws of nature. Your old testament perspective is getting in your way. This is why it must indeed be a text on ethics.” Dear Professor Jung—now tell me yourself,—it would be laughable if it did not make me cry. Here* one is indignant that I am so anti-Jewish, which I can understand, and all of a sudden one discovers—you must surely have vilified me—I am representing an old testament perspective in the Ethic. You see it has come to this, if you let them get away with casting “side glances at university and church” in “only” ethical matters. Why, for God’s sake, do you not understand the danger that threatens you and us and your work if such things are possible.
*[in I.]467
Please believe me that this is not about me and not about “being right” and certainly not about an endorsement of me by the—as far as I’m concerned—not very authoritative Jung Institute. I will be able [and will have to]468 make my way without that also, but I don’t want—through your covering of things with which you are yourself in no way identical for it to now come out—that yes means no and no means yes. Everything I have written is now supposed to be false because I have dared to exercise a critique of your technical position, because I, as has been shown, rightly do not believe that these things can be wielded technically or pragmatically. Of course, all this is happening—crazily—only to retrospectively reinforce your position “against” Neumann that, in my opinion was never intended as such by you. What intellectual disingenuous is all this! Can you not now at least understand from the outcome of this “affair” how justified my reaction is? I still dare to hope that if I am additionally roaring like a “lion,” shaking my mane and not simply letting my coat be ruffled by holy and unholy dogs, that you must understand this as a “Fellow Lion.”
I now have nothing more to say; I hope very much that this unfortunate, crazy, and ugly matter has not taken up your time and energy that you need for other things. I am anyway, now as ever, with and without Ethic—
Your grateful,
E. Neumann
464 Jung’s letter from 29 March (75 J) did not reach Neumann in time for this letter. See Neumann’s letter from 9 April (77 N).
465 Wolff’s letter is missing. Neumann replied to her writing that her letter had triggered “a prompt and so sharp a reaction […] that I thought it better to hold back my reply and to wait. […] I am convinced that if your letter had been spoken and not written that my reaction would have looked different, but in any case you will understand that the Zurichers’ reaction to my Mystic lecture and to the ‘Ethic’ have triggered my surprise and anything but my pleasure” (undated letter, Wolff and Neumann) He hoped that a personal conversation in Zurich would clear out further misunderstandings. Wolff responded in a letter on 27 July 1949 defending her position: “I just do not know if there is any point in talking any more about the Ethic. I wrote everything to you that I have to say. Evidently you have mixed me up with all the other. I was not even at Ascona last year, I have nothing to do with the publication of your book, I am just a regular lecturer at the Instiute and, otherwise, other ladies make the decisions. Also, I told everyone I am on personal terms with [you] that is my view that your book should be accepted as a publication of the Institute. I hope you still remember that I am one of those who recommended to you that you should even publish the ‘Ethic’” (Wolff and Neumann [NP]).
466 See Jung’s letter to Neumann, 19 July 1947 (54 J): “You still have to gain experience for yourself as far as being misunderstood goes. The possibilities exceed all terminology.”
467 Handwritten insertion by Neumann.
468 Handwritten insertion by Neumann.
