Jung: A Biography -
By
Deirdre Bair
In 1958, at the advanced age of 83, Jung published a book on UFOs. He
told an interviewer that having studied them for "about 12 years ... I
cannot even say whether they exist or not". He knew that even in
addressing the topic he was risking, as he said, "his hard-won
reputation for truthfulness, reliability and capacity for scientific
judgment". But there was, he thought, at least one "remarkable fact"
about UFOs worth the attention of someone of his profession: what were
modern people in need of in their quest for extraterrestrial life? And
yet when two close American friends went to Jung's home in Switzerland
they were amazed to find the "sage of
Zurich" telling them that flying
saucers were "factual", and that he was not "in the least interested in
psychological aspects ... or in factual information relating to the
investigation of flying saucer reports". Jung was often, as he himself
acknowledged, in at least two minds about things; and, as Deirdre Bair
notes in her new and useful biography, he "never hesitated to explode in
wrath when anyone crossed him". One of the things that seems to have
made him most cross was the extent to which he was at war with himself.
"Don't forget," he once said, in a memo rather more to himself than to
anyone else, "I am definitely no philosopher, and my concepts are
accordingly empirical and not speculative." It is an empirical fact that
Jung, to his credit, was always more speculative than he wanted to be.
Like everyone else, he hated being crossed because it exposed how at
odds with himself he really was.
Science
appealed to Jung because it seemed to offer some hope of a cure for the
dividedness of his self; science kept alive the possibility that
somewhere there was a consensus about what life was like, that somewhere
and somehow there could be agreement about things. That nature, at
least, could be an authority figure. Bair's story is a lengthy one,
partly because Jung lived a long time - he died in 1961 at the age of 86
- and partly because Jung, unlike Freud, was an extremely active man. It
is also an old-fashioned story, as Jung would have liked it to be: a
19th-century tale of the loss of religious belief and the quest for a
good life without the traditional sops and guidelines. Not exactly
Modern Man's Search of a Soul - one of Jung's characteristically
high-flying and far-flung titles - but modern man's search for something
to believe in to keep himself going.
Jung
ended up calling it individuation - the now familiar willingness to
become oneself, with the assumption that one has a self to become - but
it was called different things throughout his life: his number two
personality, his father (never his mother), Nietzsche, the unconscious,
Freud, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, alchemy, the collective
unconscious, the soul. Jung's life, which is remarkable if only for the
tenacity with which he struggled with himself, captures the imagination
of people for whom life is only valuable, or even bearable, if they can
find meaning in it.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Jung's hunger for meaning, which allowed him to
take religion rather more sympathetically then Freud did, was not always
compatible with his over-stressed wish to be a scientist of the soul.
Jung, in other words - and Bair's words are often instructive - is a
magnet for many of our contemporary preoccupations; above all, how we
have come to believe that we need to believe in something (or someone)
in order to have good-enough lives. And why it is that once we want to
believe, we are drawn to believe in the supernatural; in something that
by definition has to be so much more powerful than we are ourselves.
Jung seems to have suffered a life-long, catastrophic disillusionment
that he was only a person. His remarkable work was a quest, among other
things, to compensate for this.
The only son of two people who were both the 13th child in
their respective families, Jung seems to have been born with a sense of
ominous uniqueness. His mother, in Bair's vivid account, was an
extremely unhappy, lonely and haunted woman. His adored father was a
more or less failed Swiss pastor, a melancholic man of esoteric
interests. Like everyone else Jung sounds like an uncanny combination of
his parents: growing up with so much disappointment and superstition -
two things that often go together - he found at first philosophy (Kant,
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and then the newish science of psychiatry as
at once a refuge from, and a bulwark against, his family. As a man very
much of his time, with a fin-de-siècle appetite for the new that was
also a cover-up for an obsession with the past, Jung both found and
invented the then not so well-known Freud.
Inevitably Bair's biography is, like all the previous biographies of
Jung, a before and after life in which he struggles to find himself,
thinks he has found himself in Freud, and eventually becomes himself by
recovering from his troubled relationship with the man he hoped would be
his master. But Bair, rightly, sees that there was far more to Jung than
his life-changing (and inevitable) disappointment with Freud. If her
clichéd misgivings about Freud implicitly make Jung seem naive for
having been impressed by this sex-obsessed authoritarian bigot, her
one-sided approach at least has the merit of refusing to make Jung a
footnote to psychoanalysis. Just as there was more to Freud than
psychoanalysis, there was far more to Jung than his interest in Freud.
Jung did the thing that most of Freud's followers were unable to do, and
therefore never forgave him for doing: he made use of Freud's work
without becoming a Freudian. That the idolater became an idol himself
is, as ever, the sadder story. Jung himself ended up in need of more
disciples than was good for him.
Throughout his life Jung was fearful about being misunderstood. What
Bair refers to as the circularity in his writing - literally the way
Jung, by his own admission, kept going round in circles, apparently
uninterested in sequential argument - dismayed Jung himself. Each of his
writings was, he wrote, "the attempt to bring the unsayable of the
background into the objective world of science. All my works are
commissions from the inside, so to speak."
Jung was adept at making people feel that there were amazing things
inside them, things of cosmic significance. And unlike Freud, Jung knew
from his own experience what it was to be really mad. He was never quite
sure which of the two versions of himself he was most impressed by: the
inspired, tormented eccentric, or the respectable, assured, bourgeois
professional. What Bair intimates in her even-handed way is that we
should not be quite as fascinated as Jung was by his own depths. That we
might, for example, take seriously the fact that he married into one of
the richest families in Switzerland; that he was overly impressed by all
things English, especially the aristocracy; and that he had a passion
for glamorous cars. Jung's lifelong fear of being misunderstood was more
of an insistence that he be taken only on his own terms. When Freud
described Jung's book Psychological Types as "the work of a snob and a
mystic", he may have underestimated just how important snobs and mystics
were to Jung. Indeed Jung's work seems to suggest, often unwittingly,
that mysticism is itself a form of snobbery, that spirituality might be
the new elitism.
Below is an excerpt from an interview that
Jung gave to the NEW YORK HERALD- TRIBUNE which was published in its
issue for July 30, 1958. It was an A.P. (Associated Press) report
from Alamogordo, New Mexico, dated July 29…