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.
1958 interview with Dr. Jung
on UFOs
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…
Dr. Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, says in a report released
yesterday that unidentified flying objects are real, and show signs
of intelligent guidance by quasi-human pilots. "I can only say for
certain that these things are not a mere rumor. Something has been
seen. A purely psychological explanation is ruled out". Dr. Jung,
who had started his research on UFOs in 1944, issued his statement
through the UFO-Filter Centre of the Aerial Phenomena Research
Association (A.P.R.O.) here. He said:
"I have gathered a mass of observations of unidentified
flying objects since 1944. The disks do not behave in accordance
with physical laws, but as though without weight. If the
extraterrestrial origin of these phenomena should be confirmed,
this would prove the existence of an intelligent interplanetary
relationship. What such a fact might mean for humanity cannot be
predicted. But it would put us without doubt in the extremely
precarious position of similar primitive communities in conflict
with superior cultures."
"That the construction of these machines proves a scientific
technique immensely superior to ours cannot be disputed. The
United States Air Force has said that investigations of flying
saucer reports over the last ten years have produced no evidence
that such things exist. It said last November that
investigations of 5,700 reported sightings showed that the
mysterious objects were balloons, aircraft, astronomical
phenomena, birds, fireworks, or hoaxes - among other things".
From the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, July 30, 1958.
(Associated Press report from Alamogordo, N.M., July 29.)
Item: The Symbolism of UFOs and
Aliens - by John Fraim
One of the subtle mega-trends in American culture in the
second half of the twentieth century has been UFOs and alien
symbolism. Whether the early events centering around Roswell,
New Mexico and such groups as Project Blue Book are true or not,
what is a fact is that interest in aliens came onto the "radar
screen" of American culture around the late 40s.
Carl Jung was
one of the first to try and analyze these "blips" on the "radar
screen" in a symbolic way. As early as 1946 he started
collecting data on UFOs and reading every book on the subject.
In a 1951 letter to an American friend he wrote, "I'm puzzled to
death about these phenomena, because I haven't been able yet to
make out with sufficient certainty whether the whole thing is a
rumor with concomitant singular and mass hallucination, or a
downright fact."
An event in 1958 led Jung to conclude that it was more
desirable for people to believe UFOs exist than to believe they
don't exist. One of his final works, Flying Saucers, was an
attempt to answer why it was more desirable to believe in their
existence.
Jung came to the conclusion that UFOs were examples of the
phenomena of synchronicity where external events mirror internal
psychic states. As usual, he saw the UFO situation in a broader
perspective than most. For Jung the UFO images had much to do
with the ending of an era in history and the beginning of a new
one. In his introductory remarks to Flying Saucers he writes
about the UFO events:
" As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are
manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end
of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another.
Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic
dominants, of the archetypes, or 'gods' as they used to be
called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting
transformations of the collective psyche. The transformation
started in the historical era and left its traces first in the
passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of
Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of
Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be
expected when the spring point enters Aquarius."
In a similar manner that the medieval alchemists projected
their psyche into matter, Jung felt that modern man projected
his inner state into the heavens. In this sense, the UFOs became
modern symbols for the ancient gods which came to man's
assistance in time of need. The need perhaps was for wholeness
again out of the increasing fragmentation of the modern world.
In the early 50s and the beginning of the Cold War, when UFOs
began to infiltrate popular culture, there was a great
fragmentation in the world. Jung writes, "At a time when the
world is divided by an iron curtain...we might expect all sorts
of funny things, since when such a thing happens in an
individual it means a complete dissociation, which is instantly
compensated by symbols of wholeness and unity." It was very
relevant to Jung that the shape of the flying saucers was round,
the shape of the ancient Mandala, symbol of wholeness throughout
history.
The UFO events of the 50s which Jung turned his focus on have
certainly not gone away. In fact they seem to increasingly
dominate contemporary American popular culture. In the almost
half century along the way they have gone a long way towards
creating and boosting the literary/film/television genre of
science fiction, as well as creating a huge marketing empire and
a division in culture between the believers (contactees) and
non-believers.
In the process, UFOs and aliens have moved out of cults and
into the mainstream of popular culture, their symbolism
continually evolving. An important investigation into the
current symbolism of aliens and UFOs is political scientist
professor Jodi Dean's Aliens in America. Dean sees aliens as
repositories for the fears and phobias of our segmented,
cyberculture rather than merely another broad-based cult
phenomena.
These fears center around the inability to distinguish truth
from fiction and the fact that many contemporary political
matters are simply undiscipherable. The conspiracy theory which
fuels them offers a type of conflicting symbolic duality to that
of consensus reality. As Dean notes, "The claim to truth and its
challenges to our practices for establishing it are what enable
the alien to function as an icon of postmodern anxieties." She
notes that aliens are cultural icons in which the new conditions
of democratic politics at the millennium can be seen.
But in the end, aliens are really modern Americans and our
feelings of alienation. As Dean says, "We have too much data,
but not enough to make any decisions because we are uncertain
about the contexts and networks into which we might integrate
this information. Enabled by technology we become aliens,
connected outside the state." And, just as often, "we're
abducted by the same technology." In this strange new world,
Dean notes that our neighbors are aliens. "Assimilation has been
discredited as an ideal, and multiculturalism hasn't become much
more than a marketing strategy...Better to forget the neighbors,
go inside, and enjoy cyber-citizenship on the World Wide Web."
And alien abduction, notes Dean, "narrates the predominant
experience of the familiarity of strangeness in the
techno-global information age."
The symbolism of alien abduction is very different than the
old one of colonization dominating much of the nineteenth
century. "Unlike metaphors of colonization that presupposes
borders to be penetrated and resources to be exploited," Dean
notes, "abduction operates with an understanding of the world,
of reality, as amorphous and permeable." Dean adds that
colonization moreover brings with it the possibility of
struggle, of emancipation and independence. Abduction, however,
recognizes the futility of resistance even as it points to other
possible freedoms. Colonization implies an on-going process with
systematic limitations. Yet abduction involves the sense that
things are happening behind our backs. A great paradox is
perhaps at the end of this symbolism as Dean concludes her book
with the following: "To fight colonization, we take control. We
don't fight abduction; we simply try to recover our memories,
all the while aware that they could be false, that in our very
recovery we participate in an alien plan."
Copyright 1998 John Fraim.
Jung on Synchronicity
Extra-terrestrial
Transmissions
