Introduction to Volume 1

ERNST FALZEDER

THIS VOLUME PRESENTS the collation of various lecture notes that were taken of the sixteen lectures that Jung gave during the first semester of his professorship at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, from 20 October 1933 to 23 February 1934. He entitled them “modern psychology,” thus partly realizing a program that he had described as a task of the future some three years earlier. There is “a particular current of thought,” he had written,

which can be traced back to the Reformation. Gradually it freed itself from innumerable veils and disguises, and it is now turning into the kind of psychology which Nietzsche foresaw with prophetic insight—the discovery of the psyche as a new fact. Some day we shall be able to see by what tortuous paths modern psychology has made its way from the dingy laboratories of the alchemists, via mesmerism and magnetism (Kerner, Ennemoser, Eschenmayer, Passavant, and others), to the philosophical anticipations of Schopenhauer, Carus, and von Hartmann; and how, from the native soil of everyday experience in Liébeault and, still earlier, in Quimby (the spiritual father of Christian Science), it finally reached Freud through the teachings of the French hypnotists. This current of ideas flowed together from many obscure sources, gaining rapidly in strength in the nineteenth century and winning many adherents, amongst whom Freud is not an isolated figure (1930a, § 748).

His account in the lectures starts at the dawn of the age of the Enlightenment, and presents a comparative study of movements in French, German, and British thought. He placed particular emphasis on the development of conceptions of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German Idealism. Turning to England and France, Jung traced the emergence of the empirical tradition and psychophysical research, and how these in turn became taken up in Germany and led to the emergence of experimental psychology. He reconstructed the rise of scientific psychology in France and the United States. In essence he described this as a constant development from a naïve “psychology,” which found the psychical contents where it had unconsciously projected them beforehand into the outer world (as in astrology, for instance), to “modern” psychology, that is, to psychology “as a conscious science,” as he puts it in these lectures.

As he wrote elsewhere,

the projections falling back into the human soul caused such a terrific activation of the unconscious that in modern times man was compelled to postulate the existence of an unconscious psyche. The first beginnings of this can be seen in Leibniz and Kant, and then, with mounting intensity, in Schelling, Carus, and von Hartmann, until finally modern psychology discarded the last metaphysical claims of the philosopher-psychologists and restricted the idea of the psyche’s existence to the psychological statement, in other words, to its phenomenology (1941, § 375).

In the second part of the lectures, he then turned to the significance of spiritualism and psychical research in the rise of psychology, giving particular attention to the work of Justinus Kerner and Théodore Flournoy. Jung devoted five lectures alone to a detailed study of Kerner’s work, The Seeress of Prevorst (1829), and two more lectures to one of Flournoy’s, From India to the Planet Mars (1899). These works initially had a considerable impact on Jung that can hardly be overestimated. As well as elucidating their historical significance, his consideration of them enables us to understand the role that his reading of them played in his early work. Unusually, in this section, Jung eschewed a conventional history of ideas approach, and placed special emphasis on the role of patients and subjects in the constitution of psychology. In the course of his reading of these works, Jung also developed a detailed taxonomy of the scope of human consciousness, which he presented in a series of diagrams. Finally, he presented a further series of illustrative case studies of historical individuals in terms of this model: Niklaus von der Flüe, Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, John D. Rockefeller, and “so-called normal man.”

Of the major figures in twentieth-century psychology, Jung was arguably the most historically and philosophically minded. These lectures thus have a twofold significance: On the one hand, they present a seminal contribution to the history of psychology, and hence to the contemporary historiography of psychology in general. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the developments which Jung reconstructed teleologically culminate, in his account of them, in his own “complex psychology” (his preferred designation for his work), 49 and thus present his own understanding of its emergence.

Jung was by no means the first to give a history of the budding science of psychology, however. Let us mention, in chronological order of their appearance, only the works by Théodule Ribot (1870, 1879), Eduard von Hartmann (1901), Max Dessoir (1902, 1911), G. Stanley Hall (1912), James Mark Baldwin (1913), Pierre Janet (1919), and Edwin Boring (1929). With regard to the development of so-called depth psychology, there is also Freud’s account in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914). Practically all distinguish, like Jung, between a prescientific and scientific period of the discipline, which some of them—such as Baldwin, Dessoir, Hall, and von Hartmann—also expressly call “modern psychology,” although they differ as to when the latter began. Von Hartmann (1901, p. 1) dates the beginning of “modern psychology” to the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance. Dessoir (1911 [1912], pp. 221 ff.) states that modern French psychology begins with Condillac, while Baldwin (1913, p. 95) maintains that “[w]ith the development of the dualism between mind and body up to the stage it reached in René Descartes . . . , the period properly to be called ‘modern’ commences.”

Many of these authors stress that psychology should be modeled after the natural sciences. In the early account of Ribot (1870, p. 19), for example, “experimental psychology alone makes up the whole of psychology, the rest being matters of philosophy or metaphysics, and therefore outside of science.” In 1879 (p. ii), he speaks of “cette séparation, qui devient chaque jour plus nette, entre l’ancienne et la nouvelle psychologie” [this separation between old and new psychology, which becomes clearer every day] and declares: “l’ancienne psychologie est condamné” [the old psychology is overthrown]. Fifty-nine years later, Boring (1929) concentrates only on experimental psychology in the first place, and tries to show how physics, as an experimental science, had set the pace for physiology, and physiology proceeded to do the same for psychology. Thus, Newton and Young led on to Purkinje, Weber, and Johannes Müller, to Fechner and Helmholtz, and so to Wundt and the psychological laboratory. (Boring also stressed that to become sophisticated the experimental psychologist needs a historical perspective, particularly in systematic or theoretical questions. Despite his theoretical orientation, by the way, he did seek personal help in psychoanalytic treatment for a year in 1933, with the Freudian Hanns Sachs in Boston, doing five sessions a week, but both agreed later that it did not help much, if at all.)

As in Boring’s account, the dominant narrative that emerged was a view that developments culminated in an ever more natural scientific methodology, based on physiology, reaching a high point in Wundt’s experimental program.

There are, however, some prominent exceptions to this conceptualization of psychology and its history. Eduard von Hartmann, although maintaining that “modern psychology” should be oriented towards the natural sciences (1901, p. 1), holds that it became, mainly through his own work, the “science of the unconscious”: “Just as natural science deals with conscious-less matter, psychology deals with unconscious psychic material” (ibid., p. 13). “Pure psychology of consciousness is impossible,” and “psychology is that science that investigates how conscious psychic phenomena depend, according to the laws of nature, on what lies beyond consciousness” (ibid., p. 25). He acknowledges, however, that leading protagonists such as Fechner, Lotze, and Wundt (and later Brentano) contested the existence of the unconscious, so that the focus of modern psychology shifted to the explanation of psychic matters through physiological dispositions and processes (ibid., p. 14).

G. Stanley Hall’s account (1912) may be of special interest in this context, because he personally knew both Jung and Freud, and was their host when they came to Worcester, Massachusetts, to deliver their lectures at Clark University in 1909. He gives Hartmann a prominent place in his studies of six founders of modern psychology, besides Zeller, Lotze, Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt (with four of whom he had personally studied, except Zeller and Lotze). “[M]en like Hartmann,” he wrote, “are true representatives of the modern spirit, for he conserves rather than ignores the best in the past” (ibid., p. 238). So, while holding fast to the importance of the natural sciences and their results, by the “erection of the Unconscious as a world principle” (ibid., p. 238), he was “at least partially satisfying the metaphysical needs of his contemporaries” and “made philosophy again an enthusiasm” (ibid., p. 191). When Hall points out that “Hartmann’s chief significance lies in his advocacy of the Unconscious and his opposition to the ‘consciousness philosophies’” (ibid., p. 239), we may understand why Jung counted him, along with Kant, Schopenhauer, and C. G. Carus, among those who “had provided him with the tools of thought” (McGuire & Hull, 1977, p. 207).

Janet’s book (1919) is essentially a thorough and systematic overview of the contemporary forms of psychotherapy and their history, beginning with the early magnetists, whom he had rediscovered, and hypnotism, and is naturally tinged by his own theories of the “subconscious” and “psychological analysis,” as he called it. This is not the place to enter into the old question of priority between Janet and Freud, but there is no doubt that many of Janet’s earlier ideas bear great resemblance to the views of Breuer and Freud, and he created a huge oeuvre that waits to be rediscovered. Jung repeatedly mentioned his debt to Janet, with whom he had studied in the winter semester of 1902/1903, and stated explicitly: “I do not come from Freud, but from Eugen Bleuler and Pierre Janet, who were my direct teachers” (1934 [1968], after § 1034; my trans.). Henri Ellenberger, who was inspired by Janet’s line of “dynamic psychology,” ends his long chapter on him thus: “Janet’s work can be compared to a vast city buried beneath ashes, like Pompeii. The fact of any buried city is uncertain. It may remain buried forever. It may remain concealed while being plundered by marauders. But it may also perhaps be unearthed some day and brought back to life.” At the time, however, “while the veil of Lesmosyne was falling upon Janet, the veil of Mnemosyne was lifted to illuminate his great rival, Sigmund Freud” (1970, p. 409).

This great rival wrote his own, highly subjective view of the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914), Freud’s only openly polemical work, which set the tone for the historiography of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology for a long time, and lay the basis for the Freudocentric reading of the origins of analytical psychology. Its secret purpose was, as becomes abundantly clear from Freud’s correspondence with the members of the so-called Secret Committee, to get rid of Jung and the Zurichers. Accordingly, Jung’s emerging different theory and methodology were heavily criticized as being “obscure, unintelligible and confused,” suggesting that much of this “lack of clearness” is due “to lack of sincerity” (ibid., p. 60).

Jung’s work on the associations experiment and on the psychology of dementia praecox were both annexed to psychoanalysis. For Freud, these only consisted in the application of the theory and procedures of psychoanalysis into areas that it had as yet not been utilized in—experimental psychology and psychiatry—for the simple reason that prior to the interest taken in psychoanalysis at the Burghölzli no other major psychiatric hospital or university clinic had extensively permitted such research. Freud’s assessment of Jung’s work in his history was that what was valuable in it lay in its application and extension of his own discoveries, whereas Jung’s supposedly new innovations would represent a secession. Jung did not publically reply to Freud’s account at the time. However, in critical respects, the comprehensive intellectual history that Jung presents in these lectures can be taken in part to constitute an attempt at a reply and a rebuttal.

Significantly, all of these authors were psychologists themselves (with the possible exception of Freud, who was a trained neurologist), who in their own work claimed to be establishing the one true “scientific” psychology. Writing the history of psychology had become one means towards this end, through constructing the genealogical lineages that culminated in their respective own work, and discrediting rival claimants to the throne. In this regard, Jung’s own account follows this pattern. For many decades, before the history of psychology started to become a properly historical discipline, it was largely Edwin Boring’s history that held sway in the field of psychology.

Against this background, it becomes clear how Jung’s own presentation of the history of “modern” psychology is an effort to situate himself and his theory in this tradition—be it by distancing himself from certain trends, be it by presenting himself as someone who carried out and further developed others, and, finally—in the coming semesters—as someone in whose new findings this development culminated.

At the outset, he made it clear that he would “attempt to convey . . . a sense of the field known as ‘psychology,’ ” in charting a path through the “incredible chaos of opinions” that characterized that field. He deliberately chose a quite general title—“modern psychology”—as he went on saying, “because the matters at hand are of a very general nature. Instead of engaging with specific doctrines, my aim is to paint a picture based on immediate experience in order to depict the development of modern psychological ideas.” When he twice received reactions from students that the lectures did not meet their expectations and, specifically, that the topics and case histories would be too far-fetched and historical in their opinion, and when they wished that Jung would talk more about contemporary problems and his own psychological theory, he stressed again: “You must bear in mind that I set out to give a course of lectures on modern psychology, and I cannot claim that modern psychology is identical with myself. It would be most immodest if I advanced my own views and opinions more than I already have.”

On the other hand, it is quite obvious that his presentation of the history of “modern” psychology gave a highly selective account of various philosophical systems, focusing on what they had to say about unconscious aspects of the human psyche, or “the” unconscious in general, and particularly stressing those characteristics of unconscious motives and contents that would play a crucial part in his own theory, for instance, the autonomy of the soul/psyche and its contents (e.g., complexes), the “objectivation” of unconscious contents, or the importance of “primordial images.” In fact, these lectures could have also be entitled, “A History of the Unconscious,” leading up to and culminating in Jung’s own concepts—or even, to put it provocatively, “My Predecessors.”

Talking about Kant, for example, he hardly dealt with the latter’s theory of cognition (apart from mentioning Kant’s relativization of the concepts of space and time), which had a tremendous impact and brought about a “Copernican Turn” in philosophy, but rather with his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Kant’s opinion “that the human soul . . . forms an indissoluble communion with all immaterial natures of the spirit-world,” or his concept of the field of “obscure representations” being “the largest in the human being.” With regard to Schopenhauer’s work, he stressed above all that he was “the first to declare that the human psyche means suffering,” and that he “might as well have referred to [the] ‘will’ as the ‘unconscious,’ ” but neglected his Kantian heritage and epistemological works, as well as his teaching of how to escape the constant suffering, namely, through negation of the will and asceticism. He also passed over Schopenhauer’s formulations of what Freud would later term defense mechanisms, or his critique of the principium individuationis, which stands in stark contrast to Jung’s own notion of individuation. In the case of Nietzsche, Jung did not enter into a discussion of his philosophy—at least not in the lectures of this semester—but cited a passage of his as an example of cryptomnesia, and used him as a case history with regard to his diagram of the fields of consciousness.

Here a word might be in order on Jung’s attitude towards philosophy and epistemology in general. Although he credited “[c]ritical philosophy” with being “the mother of modern psychology” (1954 [1939], § 759), 50 he emphasized time and again, throughout his writings, lectures, seminars, and interviews, that he was not a philosopher, but an empiricist. Here are a few choice quotations: “Not being a philosopher, but an empiricist . . .” (1926, § 604). “I am an empiricist, not a philosopher” (1938 [1954], § 149). “Although I have often been called a philosopher, I am an empiricist” (1939 [1937], § 2). “I define myself as an empiricist” (1962, only in German edition, p. 375). “You see, I am not a philosopher. I am not a sociologist—I am a medical man. I deal with facts. This cannot be emphasized too much” (Jung Speaking, 1977, p. 206). “I am an empiricist, with no metaphysical views at all” (ibid., p. 414). “You criticize me as though I were a philosopher. But you know very well that I am an empiricist” (1975, letter of 25 April 1955, p. 246). “[M]y concepts are based on empirical findings . . . I speak of the facts of the living psyche and have no use for philosophical acrobatics” (1945b, § 438). “My business is merely the natural science of the psyche, and my main concern to establish the facts” (1946a, § 537). In other words, he claimed to have freed psychology from the acrobatics and “phantasmagoric speculations of philosophers” (1955/1956, § 53), that is, from unconscious projections that posed as philosophical insights, and turned it into an empirical science. In short: “Everyone who says I am a mystic is just an idiot”! (Jung Speaking, 1977, p. 333)

But things are not that simple. In quite a number of instances, we find also very positive statements about philosophy. At times he even admitted that he himself was a philosopher at heart: “I have always been of the opinion that Hegel is a psychologist in disguise, just as I am a philosopher in disguise” (1973, p. 194; my ital.). In analytical practice, too, “we psychotherapists ought really to be philosophers or philosophic doctors—or rather . . . we already are so, though we are unwilling to admit it” (1943 [1942], § 181). Analysis “is something like antique philosophy” (Jung Speaking, p. 255). In fact, he criticized Freud for being too much of an empiricist: Freud “proceeded quite empirically” (1934a, § 212), but it would have been “a great mistake on Freud’s part to turn his back on philosophy,” whereas he, Jung, had “never refused the bitter-sweet drink of philosophical criticism,” which “has helped me to see that every psychology—my own included—has the character of a subjective confession” (1950 [1929], § 774). How does this jibe with Jung’s emphatic statement that his readers “should never forget . . . that I am not making a confession” (1951, p. x)?

In one instance Jung even admits that a purely empirical approach is impossible in psychology because psychology, just like philosophy, is a system “of opinion about objects which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be adequately comprehended by a purely empirical approach. . . . Neither discipline can do without the other” (1931a, § 659; my ital.).

Sometimes Jung voiced doubts about the overall validity of his conclusions:

I fancied I was working along the best scientific lines, establishing facts, observing, classifying, describing causal and functional relations, only to discover in the end that I had involved myself in a net of reflections which extend far beyond natural science and ramify into the fields of philosophy, theology, comparative religion, and the humane sciences in general. This transgression, as inevitable as it was suspect, has caused me no little worry. . . . [I]t seemed to me that my reflections were suspect also in principle. . . . There is no medium for psychology to reflect itself in: it can only portray itself in itself, and describe itself. That, logically, is also the principle of my own method: it is, at bottom, a purely experiential process (1946b, § 421).

All he could do was “to compare individual psychic occurrences with obviously related collective phenomena” (1946b, § 436). “What I have practiced is simply a comparative phenomenology of the mind, nothing else. . . . There is only one method: the comparative method” (Jung Speaking, 1977, p. 220; my ital.). Consequently, the “comparative psychologist” cannot help but draw “even of the most obvious and superficial analogies, however fortuitous they may seem, because they serve as bridges for psychic associations” (1959, § 900).

At the heart of the matter is the fact that anything humans say about themselves is self-referential and lacks, as Jung stated numerous times, an outside “Archimedean point,” from which objective conclusions could be drawn. 51 In other words, in psychology (as in philosophy) the observer and the observed coincide. This is a central point in Schopenhauer’s philosophy:

[E]ven in self-consciousness, the I is not absolutely simple, but consists of a knower (intellect) and a known (will); the former is not known and the latter is not knowing, although the two flow together into the consciousness of an I. But on this very account, this I is not intimate with itself through and through, does not shine through so to speak, but is opaque, and therefore remains a riddle to itself (1844 [1969], vol. 2, p. 196).

Schopenhauer compared the human condition to a tree:

[H]uman nature divides into will and representation, the former is the root, the latter the crown. The I is their point of indifference, 52 which unites the two and is part of both. . . . It is the point where the being-in-itself and its appearance meet: as an indivisible point it belongs in equal parts to the intellect and to the will, and this explains the miracle κατ’ εξοχην, 53 namely, that that which wills, and that which cognizes, are one and the same (1966–1975 [1985], pp. 179–180).

“This ‘I’—what a peculiar matter it is!” Jung wonders in these lectures. Well-versed in Kant and Schopenhauer, he saw the problem clearly: “The psyche [Seele] is the beginning and end of all cognition [Erkennen]. It is not only the object of its science, but the subject also. This gives psychology a unique place among all the other sciences: on the one hand there is a constant doubt as to the possibility of its being a science at all, while on the other hand psychology acquires the right to state a theoretical problem the solution of which will be one of the most difficult tasks for a future philosophy [sic!]” (1936 [1937], § 261).

As Schopenhauer had put it:

[W]e are not merely the knowing subject, but . . . we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without. Precisely as such, the thing-in-itself can come into consciousness only quite directly, namely by it itself being conscious of itself; to try to know it objectively is to desire something contradictory. Everything objective is representation, consequently appearance (1844 [1969], p. 195).

If we replace “thing-in-itself” with “unconscious,” this could well have been written by Jung. Psychology as a conscious science is the effort of the soul/psyche to understand itself. It is “a mediatory science, and this alone is capable of uniting the idea and the thing without doing violence to either” (Jung, 1921, § 72). But the human condition itself, the “miracle κατ’ εξοχην,” the identity of the observer and the observed, and the very limits inherent in pure reason, seem to prevent final self-knowledge. Is there really a “subterranean passage” that could place us in the otherwise impenetrable fortress? Can psychology really be an “ordinary” empirical science? How can it avoid becoming Munchhausen psychology, pulling itself up by the bootstraps, so to speak, or endlessly going in circles? Or will it really be possible for psychology to become queen of all sciences, their basis, fons et origo, will indeed “Nietzsche be proved right in the end with his ‘scientia ancilla psychologiae’?” 54 (Jung, 1930b, Introduction)

At times, Jung seemed to think that there is indeed an Archimedean point outside our self-referential system, from which to move the world of psychology. There would exist a “spiritual goal that points beyond the purely natural man and his worldly existence.” Not only would such a spiritual goal be “an absolute necessity for the health of the soul,” it would also represent “the Archimedean point from which alone it is possible to lift the world off its hinges” (1926 [1924], § 159). The unconscious is, by definition, not conscious, and as such not knowable. What may sound like a platitude is in fact the core problem of depth psychology. Does something like “the” unconscious exist at all? Or is this an inadmissible hypostazation? But if it exists, how can we ever expect to know it? Is this not a contradiction in itself?

Jung’s “official” answer, and the stance he is taking in these lectures at the university, was always that he was simply dealing with psychical “facts,” and that therefore he was an empiricist, period. It is a fact, for example, that some people experience ghosts, spirits, and even converse with them, or that they have visions. The difficulty, as he notes in these lectures, is just that the “only guarantee we have that such things do exist is the evidence of the I. People are confronted with them through the I, as if something existed behind the I whose source we are completely ignorant of.” In other words: “I am the sole proof, for no one else has seen the event.” Nevertheless, according to Jung, we have to take these reports, at least for the time being, at their face value. Some people do have such experiences, Jung repeats, and regardless of whether or not these experiences correspond to something in what others perceive as observable reality, they represent incontestable psychical facts and have to be taken as such by a psychology worthy its name.

Marilyn Nagy notes that “Jung struggled his whole life long to explain . . . that he did not intend to do philosophy and that ‘the psyche is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics.’ ” “Much confusion has arisen in the attempt . . . to understand Jung’s description of himself as an empiricist and at the same time his insistence on the ultimate reality of psychic life” (1991, pp. 1, 20).

Sonu Shamdasani observes that Jung’s attitude toward a purely scientific/empiricist approach, as opposed to a philosophical and metaphysical one, changed over time, notably after having chosen psychiatry as his profession:

Between Jung’s Zofingia lectures and his first publications, there are considerable discontinuities in language, conceptions, and epistemology, as the far-reaching speculations on metaphysical issues characteristic of the Zofingia lectures largely disappeared. Following his discovery of his vocation as a psychiatrist, he appears to have undergone something like a conversion to a natural scientific perspective. . . . [In 1900,] Jung stated that he would stand in for the standpoint of the natural sciences, where “one is accustomed to operate only with clear firmly defined concepts.” He then launched on a critique of theology, religion, and the existence of God, which led one person to remark on the fact that Jung had previously held so many positive views on these subjects, which he had now abandoned (Shamdasani, 2003, p. 201; my ital.).

A crucial turning point in this “conversion” seems to have been his experimenting with Helene Preiswerk: “[T]his was the one great experience which wiped out all my earlier philosophy and made it possible for me to achieve a psychological point of view. I had discovered some objective facts about the human psyche” (Memories, p. 128). 55

It can be questioned, however, if this change in orientation lasted. In Memories, Jung had talked about his “inner dichotomy” (p. 91), the “play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life” (p. 62). Although he was quick to assert that this had “nothing to do with a ‘split’ or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense,” and that this pair of opposites “is played out in every individual” (ibid.), it seems safe to assume that this dichotomy was particularly distinct in his case. Goethe’s Faust was like a revelation: “Faust . . . pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as personal. . . . Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher, encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow, Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negative disposition represents the true spirit of life. . . . My own inner contradictions appeared here in dramatised form. . . . The dichotomy of Faust–Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person . . . I was directly struck, and recognised that this was my fate” (p. 262). In Jung’s theory, this dichotomy is reflected in his oscillating stance toward a philosophical, metaphysical approach versus a natural scientific perspective. Although psychiatry, and then psychology, seemed to offer a way out of this quandary, he remained caught up in it: He wanted to create the science of dreams, and ended up with the dream of a science.

Jung complained repeatedly about being constantly misunderstood, and that only a “chosen few” would be able to understand what he was aiming to convey: “There are only a few heaven-inspired minds who understand me” (Jung Speaking, p. 221). On the other hand, we also find frequent hints that there was actually more to the whole story, that he held back something, that he did not tell everything he knew, or seemed to know, so as not to be seen as “crazy,” or even that the language that he used was deliberately obscure. It was his explicit “intention to write in such a way that fools get scared and only true scholars and seekers can enjoy its reading” (letter to Wilfred Lay, 20 April 1946; in Shamdasani, 2000). “The language that I use must be ambiguous or equivocal in order to do justice to the double aspect of psychical nature. I try deliberately and consciously to use ambiguous formulations, because they are superior to unambiguous ones, and correspond better to the nature of [our] existence” (Memories, only in German ed., p. 375).

“Everything profound loves masks,” Nietzsche had written (1886 [2002], p. 38), “the most profound things go so far as to hate images and likenesses. Wouldn’t just the opposite be a proper disguise for the shame of a god?” Was Jung one of those who are “hidden in this way,” someone who “wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander around in his place” (ibid.)?

But does it really need obscure and ambiguous language to investigate and describe the complexity, the double-sided aspects of a topic? In these lectures, for example, Jung gave a lucid and absolutely clear description of what he called the “tremendous tension between the two poles” in the human condition.

Here is what Jung said about himself and his personality:

I have intuitions about the subjective factor, the inner world. That is very difficult to understand because what I see are most uncommon things, and I don’t like to talk about them because I am not a fool. I would spoil my own game by telling what I see, because people won’t understand it. . . . So you see, if I were to speak of what I really perceive, practically no one would understand me. I have learned to keep things to myself, and you will hardly ever hear me talking of these things. That is a great disadvantage, but it is an enormous advantage in another way, not to speak of the experiences I have in that respect and also in my human relations. For instance, I come into the presence of somebody I don’t know, and suddenly I have inner images, and these images give me more or less complete information about the psychology of the partner. It can also happen that I come into the presence of somebody I don’t know at all, not from Adam, and I know an important piece out of the biography of that person, and am not aware of it, and I tell the story, and then the fat is in the fire. So I have in a way a very difficult life, although one of the most interesting lives, but it is often difficult to get into my confidence. [Interviewer:] Yes, because you say you are afraid people will think you are sick.] [Jung:] The things that are interesting to me, or are vital to me, are utterly strange to the ordinary individual (Jung Speaking, pp. 309–311).

A stunningly open self-diagnosis, one might say, if—well, if I had not taken the liberty of using a little ruse by replacing, in this quote, the term “intuitive introvert” by the first person singular. Still, Jung so often described himself as an intuitive introvert that I think we are justified in applying this description to himself, and that he might have even played a mischievous trick on his interviewer by providing some (again, veiled!) insight into his own personality.

These lectures, however, are a perfect counterexample to his intention to scare fools away, and can serve as a contrast (if we do not go so far as to see them as an example of how Jung “instinctively need[ed] speech in order to be silent and concealed” [Nietzsche, 1886 [2002], p. 38]). Here, Jung was very much concerned about being popular, that is, intelligible to all, speaking in layman’s terms. “[Y]ou asked,” a woman wrote him, “if your explanations would be popular enough,” and she assured him that many found the lectures even “too popular”! Here, he was the university professor, having finally secured, after a long and difficult detour, a prestigious and coveted academic position. He tried to confront his audience with simple and observable “facts,” but facts that were so strange and peculiar that he could thus prepare them for an acknowledgement and a discussion of a world much different from that which they readily acknowledged as “real.”

To this end, Jung devoted much time in the second half to the discussion of two exemplary historical case studies, that of Friederike Hauffe (the “Seeress of Prevorst”) and of Flournoy’s medium Catherine-Elise Müller, aka “Hélène Smith.” He took great pains to stress repeatedly that the psychic mechanisms that could be studied in these cases were by no means exceptional and to be found not only in such “border cases,” but that they were universal. Since Hauffe and Müller exhibited certain traits and mechanisms to an extreme extent, however, those could be studied in isolation with the help of their cases. Nevertheless, they existed in every human being, including the members of his audience, as he did not tire of pointing out: “You are simply unaware that your own case exhibits all these basic facts, too, only they lie concealed in the dark background of your psyche. . . . The ideas that I have set forth in my lectures on the basis of this case have already been published, and I am not to blame if these are not more widely known!” Another reason for choosing these cases was that Jung had not been involved in them “in the least; otherwise, one would say again: ‘Well, of course, he simply influenced the patient’s mind!’ ” And again he stressed: “It is nothing other than an absolutely basic fact about the human soul; it is known all over the world, and, if we do not know it, then we are the morons!”

It is true that Jung interspersed his lectures with all kinds of anecdotes from his own practice, for example of the patient who “was so preoccupied with her psychological problems that she once sat down on a bench by the lake to dwell on them, although the thermometer showed minus six degrees Celsius. She sat there for two hours and was surprised that she had to pay for her folly with a severe cold, inflammation of the bladder, etc.” Or of the neurotic “girl who had enjoyed the best education, and led an extremely sheltered life,” but who when agitated would, “to the shock of her parents, . . . utter a flood of the most incredible expletives, on which even a wagoner could have prided himself.” But he used these anecdotes only to illustrate points, often in an amusing way, which he had already made with the help of another case that was not his.

With his strategy, Jung was able to kill two birds with one stone. First, he could present himself as an “objective” university professor, who gave a seemingly unbiased overview of the field, and a fair hearing to various different theories and systems of thought, thus fulfilling the exigencies of a university and of academic teaching. Second, at the same time he was able to set the background for his own views, and to firmly situate himself in a line of pre-eminent thinkers over the centuries. Hardly noticeable at first, but becoming ever more clear, this suggested that his theory was the culmination point, if only provisionally, of what so many great philosophers and psychologists—from Descartes through Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc. etc. up to Freud—had struggled with, while getting only glimpses of the big picture.

This account also provides a critical correction to Freudocentric accounts of the development of Jung’s work, which were already in circulation at this time. The detailed taxonomy of consciousness that he presented toward the end of these lectures is certainly a highlight. Curiously enough, and although he claimed that this diagram was “the result of much deliberation and comparison” and “the fruit of encounters with people from all walks of life, from many countries and continents,” it is not documented in any of his published works. The main question it addresses is: Where does the light of consciousness fall? In presenting it, Jung noted that the difficulties which he had encountered with his project for a psychological typology had led him to undertake this. Simply put, it is yet another attempt to explain the fact that people constantly do not understand, indeed misunderstand, one another. According to his typology, this is due, for instance, to one person being an introverted thinking type, and the other an extraverted feeling type. In this new classification, this would be because one person would live in III Right, and the other in IV Left, for example. And although changes of one’s position in this diagram may occur individually over the course of one’s lifetime, or historically with the advent of a new era, in general such viewpoints are “set in stone,” as Jung put it, and “it is extremely rare that someone is willing to abandon the present position of his consciousness. Once consciousness has claimed a certain resting point, it can barely be shifted from its localization.” Moreover, whereas others may see a potential in our position that we ourselves are unaware of, we are unable to understand their message: “An intuitive type, it is true, sees dozens of possibilities in other spheres, but he does not actually go there to experience them. For example, he sees a person living in Right IV as he appears to him from his vantage point in Left III. Consequently, the intuitive may see a great deal of which the man in Right IV is not aware, but what he says is unintelligible to the man himself because he does not know that Left III exists at all.”

We may wonder why Jung never published this “result of much deliberation,” all the more so in that this new “typology” would neither devalue nor exclude his former one, but would be, on the contrary, a perfect complement to it. As Jung also points out in these lectures, this new classification “refers exclusively to the shifts of consciousness, to its localization,” whereas the typology of intro- and extraverts and of the four functions shows us “the quality of the personality that is the bearer of this consciousness.”

Psychological Types (1921) had a long gestation time, of nearly a decade. In the wake of the original publication of Transformations (1911/1912), Jung tried to come to terms, not only with “the countless impressions and experiences of a psychiatrist,” his “personal dealings with friend and foe alike,” and the “critique of [his] own psychological peculiarity” (1921, p. xi), but also with the “dilemma” into which he was put by the differences between Freud’s, Adler’s, and his own theories. Now, again more than a decade later, he presented another classification, which can also be viewed as an attempt to answer precisely those questions.

We can only speculate about why Jung did not deem it necessary to present such a carefully thought-out classification in his published works. Did he think it was not important enough? Had he especially designed it for that specific audience, that is, for beginners, as something that might pave the way and prepare them for an understanding of his mature typology (to which he then indeed devoted two full semesters, the winter semester 1935/36 and the summer semester 1936)? Did he consider it a failure? Or did his interests at the time in general no longer focus on such classificatory attempts at all, and were already on to quite other things?

However that may be, here we encounter a Jung as we have not known him before. Not in his seminars, where admittance was strictly limited, participants had to seek personal permission from Jung to attend, and some basic familiarity with his concepts was taken for granted. Not in interviews given to popular newspapers or journals, and not in talks before various groups of laypersons, where he was much more limited in his time and possibilities. Here, however, before an audience of hundreds of people from all walks of life, in weekly meetings over several years, he could develop and lay out in detail, and in “popular” terms, the topics and concepts that were dear to him. I can only hope that the readers of this volume will enjoy this “unknown Jung” as much as I enjoyed preparing this text for publication.

49. In his preface to Toni Wolff’s Studies in Jungian Psychology, he credited her with introducing this designation (Jung, 1959, § 887).

50. “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe” (ibid.).

51. A list of references in Jung & Schmid (2013), pp. 15–16.

52. That is, the “root stock, the point where they meet on the ground level” (ibid.).

53. kat’ exochen, Greek, par excellence.

54. “Science [is] the handmaiden of psychology”: a play on the frequent criticism of philosophy as the “handmaiden of theology” (philosophia ancilla theologiae). Nietzsche had demanded “that psychology again be recognized as queen of the sciences, and that the rest of the sciences exist to serve and prepare for it” (1886 [2002], p. 24).

55. For a detailed study of the impact of the séances with Helene Preiswerk, “that served as an impetus for my future life,” as Jung recalled in 1925 (2012 [1925], p. 3), see Shamdasani (2015).