JUSTINUS KERNER’S The Seeress of Prevorst is not a case history in a modern sense, but as it were a dubious account of one of the peculiar and romantic lives that were quite common at the time. Kerner belonged to the school of Romanticists. He was not a scientist, 184 and his book contains a series of more or less naive observations and interpretations. So please do not think that I subscribe without reservation to anything and everything that my deceased colleague Dr. Kerner tells in his book!
Kerner describes the case of his patient Friederike Hauffe, who was born in Prevorst near Löwenstein in the German state of Württemberg in 1801. Her father was a forester. She had a number of siblings who suffered from infantile spasms, eclamptic fits, 185 which occur frequently during teething. In those days, these spasms could already be distinguished from epileptic fits, so we may assume it was not epilepsy. More important is another detail about her family history, namely, that her grandfather possessed what is called “second sight” in Scotland, that is to say, a strange perception of things that did not exist at the time, but which then, curiously enough, actually came true. 186
The Seeress was a normal, healthy, and happy child. Soon, however, it was noticed that she had a great number of colorful and graphic dreams. What struck people was that these dreams often came true. For instance, her father once reproached her for mislaying an object. The child felt innocent, and beheld in a dream the place where her father had left the item. 187 Now this is doubtless a most naive story, and the case might strike us as suspicious. We might well be tempted to suspect that the child had hidden the object herself before she ventured to find it again. Without doubt, such strange things, like a great many others, do happen in our world! On the other hand, we might also be doing the child an injustice by mistrusting her account. In such cases, we are well advised to bide our time and wait to see whether such events repeat themselves. Other strange events occurred, however. The child began to play with hazel rods and soon proved to be a good diviner. Divination was popular among farmers at the time, and she had probably observed some of them looking for the location of water veins.
Her grandfather would often take her out for walks. On these occasions, he observed that she would begin to freeze terribly, tremble all over, and become frightened in certain places. In some cases, he was able to prove that she reacted thus when they crossed ancient burial sites. Later, the child could no longer endure church, “because there were ancient tombs beneath the church floor,” and she had to go to the galleries because she could not endure sitting in the choir directly above the graves. Matters, however, became even more serious. She developed a sense of uncanny places, and she would see figures in places that were said to be “haunted.”
Thus, there was an apartment in the Castle of Löwenstein—an old kitchen—which she could never look into or enter without being much disturbed. In the very same place, some years afterwards, the spectre of a woman was, to her great horror, seen by a lady, who had never been informed of the sensations experienced by the child.
In itself, this report proves nothing, of course, for it could have been simply a fear of ghosts that brought about her visions. Her thoughts corporealized, however, even though she had not thought them. And this is a fact: no thought can take a bodily form once it has been thought, because by that point it has already been thought away, so to speak. If I imagine myself thinking in a dark room that it could be haunted, then it is definitely not haunted, because I have already thought away that thought. But if we do not entertain the thought, then it could well occur. There are also cases of a simultaneous “double vision.” Kerner continues:
To the great regret of her family, this sensibility to spiritual influences, imperceptible to others, soon became too evident; and the first appearance of a spectre to the young girl was in her grandfather’s house. There, in a passage, at midnight, she beheld a tall, dark form, which, passing her with a sigh, stood still at the end of the vestibule, turning towards her features that, in her riper years, she well remembered. This first apparition, as was generally the case with those she saw in after life, occasioned her no apprehension. She calmly looked at it, and then, going to her grandfather, told him that “there was a very strange man in the passage, and that he should go and see him”; but the old man, alarmed at the circumstance—for he also had seen a similar apparition in the same place, though he had never mentioned it—did all he could to persuade her that she was mistaken, and, from that time, never allowed her to leave the room at night.
It could be argued that her grandfather’s influence induced the girl to have such strange visions. But it is probably more accurate simply to assume that she, too, possessed this gift of “second sight,” that is to say, that she could actually see thoughts. The grandfather tried to reason her out of her belief in what she had seen, but he was unable to shake her conviction of the reality of these experiences. Kerner did not doubt that she really did see ghosts because he himself was convinced of their existence.
If you want to relate to such people, you will, of course, have to take it for granted that there are such things. Telling people who believe in ghosts that “There are no ghosts!” is futile. We have to meet them at their own level; if we do not, or if we immediately question or even mock what they believe, we will throw away any advantage. In any case, we can make no sweeping assertions in this field, for all proof is lacking—we do not know whether or not ghosts exist. It happened to me that I attended the palaver of some highly respectable Negroes. Naively I asked them whether they had ever seen a ghost. They all averted their gaze and looked as if I myself had just conjured up the most frightful specter. 188 One should not mention ghosts, for they are the unspeakables. Even uttering the word is perilous. This holds true even today—there are certain matters that you must treat only with kid gloves.
From all this, we may conclude that the girl inherited her grandfather’s disposition, and that she also possessed the gift of exteriorization, that is to say, she was able to “externalize” psychic processes. Such processes are based on psychological facts. From the point of view of science, the question whether or not ghosts exist is far from answered. Quite possibly, Kant’s prophecy, uttered in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), 189 will still become true:
[I]t will be proved . . . that the human soul also in this life forms an indissoluble communion with all immaterial natures of the spirit-world, that, alternately, it acts upon and receives impressions from that world of which nevertheless it is not conscious while it is still man and as long as everything is in proper condition. 190
This statement is both remarkable and most optimistic, since I cannot imagine how the existence of these things could ever be proven. For we are unable to discern whether we are observing processes of the unconscious or something outside ourselves, unless we had exact physical methods to be able to prove objectively reality in this field.
In my opinion, “second sight” is not an illness, but a gift that is not as such pathological—otherwise every other gift would be pathological, too, and we would be obliged to speak of an “intelligence disease,” an “art disease,” and so forth. All gifts also involve pain, however, not merely pleasure. With regard to her dreams, by the way, the “Seeress of Prevorst” is not extraordinary. Countless individuals have prophetic, anticipatory dreams. There is nothing peculiar about such dreams; quite often they are surprisingly banal.
The first truly pathological symptom afflicting the Seeress was a strange irritability of the eyes. 191 This condition lasted perhaps for a year. Nothing was outwardly wrong with the eyes, so it was probably a psychically induced sensitivity to light. Such a symbolic sensitivity to light is quite common: those people cannot bear the light, they squint psychically, so to speak, and are unable to tolerate a too clear consciousness. Something makes them shy away from clarity, for instance, because of an unconsciously bad conscience, out of a fear of being found out, either by someone else or indeed by themselves.
Her adolescence was more or less typical. As far as we know, nothing else noteworthy happened thereafter, not until she became engaged to a Mr. Hauffe, a merchant tradesman, who, however, plays only a very shadowy role in the subsequent course of events. On the day of their engagement, the seminary priest T. in Oberstenfeld, whom she greatly revered, passed away; he was over sixty years old and died of natural causes. The Seeress, who was about twenty years old at the time, attended the funeral and could not tear herself away from his grave after the burial. 192 She was evidently in a peculiar state. In actual fact, she had a vision, in which she beheld the deceased hovering above the grave as a ghost—an event that she later reiterated in a poem. 193 Contrary to earlier visions, this one had a tremendous impact on her, and she remained for a long time under its spell.
She married in 1821, at the age of twenty. At first, her life took a normal course; she went through an uncomplicated pregnancy and gave birth to a child. Thereafter, however, in February 1822, she had a dream that proved to be fateful for her. In the dream, she was lying in her bed, with the dead priest lying beside her. Next door she overheard her father and two doctors discussing the nature of what they considered to be a serious illness. She cried out: “Leave me alone by this dead man!—he will cure me!—no physician can!” She felt as if they wished to draw her away from the body, and cried aloud in her dream: “How well I am near this corpse; now, I shall quite recover.” Her husband heard her talk in her sleep and woke her up. The following day, she came down with a violent fever that lasted a fortnight. 194 No one knew what it was. The fever led to a severe neurosis, from which she died on 5 August 1829, at the age of twenty-eight.
What happened here? Imagine a patient came to my practice and told me this dream. I would obviously wonder why I should calmly let her rest side by side with the corpse, and ask her: “Why did you come to me at all, since you believe that no doctor can cure you?” If she replied: “The dream seems strange to me, I cannot imagine why I should think that the dead could cure me,” I would take her on as my patient; but if she gave the same answer as in the dream, it would be fatal, and I could do nothing for her. As a matter of fact, such a person would probably never come to analysis, and if she did, she would certainly manage to maneuver the doctor on to the side of death, unless he had great experience in such cases. One might say that the very fact of her coming to analysis would in itself be a considerable argument against her being wholly on the side of her dream. But it is a very ominous dream, and as a doctor I consider it very questionable whether anything could have been done for her. There are cases where it is better not to interfere. We must fulfill our duty as doctors, but the fact remains that some people are not meant to be cured, they are not fitted for life, and if you step in and interfere, fate always takes its revenge on you.
There is no doubt that the Seeress de facto took sides with the dream, and that it thus assumed a fateful meaning. We think we could not possibly allow ourselves to become entangled in a certain fate through a dream, but since her psychology was different from ours she did become ensnared in it. She identified with the dead man and already died as it were while she was still alive. She retreated more and more into this “back-world,” until she vanished from the “fore-world.” The particular fate of the Seeress became apparent from then on. The death of the old priest was the experience that made clear to her that she would live more with the dead than with the living. What really mattered to her were the encounters with her inner figures, beside which husband and child were mere shadows. She felt healed and normal when she accepted the dream, that is to say, when she slipped back into the psychic background, and she felt ill if she ventured into the real world where she encountered insurmountable conflicts; so she stepped ever further back into the unconscious, until she ceased to exist.
I have chosen this particular case, and am treating it in detail, in order to show you the immense reality of the inner world. There are a considerable number of people whose psychology is somewhat similar, in that from the outset the outer world means less to them than this “back-world.” We would assume that such people will ultimately see reason, or we would be inclined to some drastic, no-nonsense treatment. But that would be completely useless. For them, this background is infinitely more real than the outer world. The whole outer world means nothing to them. I have known cases where people became as it were somnambulists and disappeared into the unconscious. It was as if they had never been born completely and could consequently not trust this bright, sun-lit world sufficiently to be able to live in it.
This is not empty madness. Such matters exist in our lives, and a whole life can rest upon such realities. Although we do not notice them as long as all is well, they exist nevertheless. Our consciousness perceives the outer world; it is an organ of perception. But behind our consciousness there stands a perceiving subject, and this is no tabula rasa. This subject is not simply another exterior, but instead it comes endowed with a background, with whose help it is able to interpret perceptions in the first place. Human children are not born with empty brain capsules, but instead with a complete brain, created for eons. Consequently, every child is born with a predetermined assumption of the world, of which it is not conscious, but which is nevertheless at work. Failing this innate opinion, we would be unable to grasp the world at all. There is no escape from this psychic background with which we enter life, it can only be accepted. Endowed with it, however, we must comprehend the world according to this disposition.
Here, we must take into account certain tribal influences. Possibly, certain human tribes split themselves off from the common tree at an early stage, and consequently their genetic constitution differs noticeably from ours. Besides far-reaching differences, however, some highly remarkable parallels exist, too.
The fact that a thought can assume shape is a primitive fact: the primitive is incapable of abstract thought. When he thinks, something makes itself apparent within him, usually in the stomach. I experienced this myself once when a Pueblo Indian said to me: “Americans are mad! They say that we think with our heads. But only madmen think with their minds; reasonable people think with their stomachs!” 195 When “it” thinks in him, the Negro’s stomach rumbles. Occasionally, something might “sit heavily on our stomach,” too, but that would only affect those of us who think emotionally. Since not all thoughts are of an emotional nature, but touch upon our thoughts, they appear, in the case of primitives, in the world around them in projected form. 196
184. This may be too harsh a statement, however, in view of Kerner’s medico-scientific researches (e.g., the discovery of botulinum).
185. MS: Gichtern = an obsolete term for eclamptic fits; mistranslated in Kerner, 1845, p. 32, as “gout” (= Gicht). This condition was frequent among children at the time, also due to unhealthy and unhygienic food, and a not uncommon cause of death. In a village near Prevorst, Neuhütte, for instance, that “sort of St. Vitus’s dance” became even “epidemic, chiefly amongst young people” (Seeress, p. 31).
186. Kerner mentions a few instances of paranormal experiences of Johann Schmidgall, Friederike’s grandfather, into whose care she was put as a child (e.g., seeing specters or apparitions; cf. ibid., pp. 16–19, 34–35), but none of second sight. On “second-sight,” see ibid., pp. 85–88.
187. This, and the following examples, are taken from ibid., pp. 33–35.
188. On Mount Elgon, “in East Africa, . . . during a palaver, I incautiously uttered the word selelteni, which means ‘ghosts.’ Suddenly a deathly silence fell on the assembly. The men glanced away, looked in all directions, and some of them made off. My Somali headman and the chief confabulated together, and then the headman whispered in my ear: ‘What did you say that for? Now you’ll have to break up the palaver.’ This taught me that one must never mention ghosts on any account” (Jung, 1950, § 759).
189. Early on in his studies at the university, Jung not only read Kerner’s book, but “virtually the whole of the [spiritualistic] literature available to me at the time,” of which “Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer came just at the right moment” (Memories, p. 120).
190. Kant, 1766, ed. 1900, p. 61. This passage was also quoted by Kerner, Seeress, p. 82.
191. A “remarkable sensibility in the nerves of the eye, (without the least inflammation,)” when she was still a “young girl” (ibid., p. 35).
192. Ibid., pp. 36–37.
193. This poem was omitted from the English translation (1845), and is also missing in the most recent German re-edition (2012). In it, she described how she was absorbed, at the gravesite, by the “angel-image” [Engelsbild] of the dead priest on the burial mound (Seeress, orig. ed., p. 31).
194. Seeress, pp. 39–40.
195. Jung later wrote, however, that Ochwiay Biano (“Mountain Lake”), chief of the Taos Pueblos, had told him that they thought with their hearts, not stomachs (Memories, p. 276).
196. This paragraph refers either to remarks made at the end of this, or at the beginning of the following lecture, conceivably in answer to a question from the audience. There is no reference to this in Jung’s own notes, nor in those taken by M.-J. Schmid.