For Róheim, politics was a kind of black magic, the political leader, far from being descended from the gods (as in traditional hierarchical theory) had risen from the depths of hell.
The politician was the modern descendant of the sorcerer, and political science, therefore, was most accurately treated as a branch of demonology. 2
The Hungarian Róheim, a central European contemporary of Jung, had like the latter no lack of observable evidence to support the most demonological theories of politics imaginable. Yet, though Jung came, after hesitation, to develop his own version of political deviltry at work in respect to the most egregious case of all, National Socialist Germany, his ultimate position was a bit different from the Freudian.
Freud was modern in his own selfconscious assumptions about science, religion, and society, even though he tortured modernity into directions unfamiliar to heirs of the Enlightenment. The channels had been cleared by romanticism, but to hear a medical doctor talking about dreams and the unconscious in 1900 and later fell as strangely on nineteenthcentury ears as the new century's new unmelodic music. Yet the radical modern agenda was still there for Freud: progress, materialism, health through secularization and science. Despite the Austrian Jew's wellearned skepticism about European civilization, one could still envision a scientific and perhaps socialist earthly paradise once humanity, in a mighty psychoanalytic spasm, sloughed off its repressions.
Jung was antimodern in a way Freud was not, for he substantially sought to understand and correct the modern from standpoints outside of itself, like a gnostic aware that the true history of an individual or a world began immense aeons above and before its present experience in time. Such a stance could of course have opened the door for
Page 40
endorsement of explicitly antimodern political movements, and we will look at controversies concerning the extent to which he did this. But Jung saw himelf chiefly as a doctor of the individual soul, and of civilization on a very deep level, who increasingly came to understand that in this world nothing is quite what it seems. For all experience has been projected through the distorting lenses of psyches whose real realm is not the outer world. This brings us to Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 3
The psychic autobiographical base of Jungianism is eminently evident in this late book, wherein he probed in himself, as the grandest case of all, what he had prospected in the subterranean mineshafts of so many other psyches. This strange and wonderful volume is assembled from autobiographical and other writings interwoven with leisurely reminiscing conversations recorded and substantially edited by Aniela Jaffé, his secretary. The end product is less photographic autobiography than painterly selfportrait, with the symbolic enhancement one might expect in such a work from the hand of a master of selfcreation. Peter Homans called it "a special genre of its own"—"automythology." 4 After so many years the details of dreams and fantasies may be smudged; what remains is the image of a life interpreting itself as fired to an extraordinary degree from out of the depths of its being. It is the vibrantly alive unconscious that drives the engines of this individual and is the real "hero" of this narrative; it is overwhelmingly powerful dreams which, like underground explosions, mark each stage in this career.
Few readers will soon forget Jung's terrifying nightmare allegedly at the age of only three or four years, when he came into an underground chamber and in the dim light saw there enthroned a gigantic phallus, a single luminous eye at its tip. Nor will they soon let sink into oblivion the pubescent fantasy in which God dropped a huge turd on the beautiful sparkling roof of the Basel cathedral, shattering the sacred structure. All this was against the backdrop of years in which Jung was in a complex relation with his parents, especially his father, a pastor who struggled with religious uncertainty.
Carl Jung thought it was partly because of these inappropriate doubts that the clerical Jung was often edgy. Not a few stormy scenes disrupted family life, though the son also remembered hours of love and of trying to understand one another. Yet as is often the case in such homes, especially when one is as obviously a congenital introvert
Page 41
as Carl Jung, the boy maintained a rich and secret inner life. Indeed, as he set off for college, Jung saw himself as twofold. ''No. 1" was "a rather disagreeable and moderately gifted young man with vaulting ambitions, an undisciplined temperament, and dubious manners . . . in his innermost essence a hermit and obscurantist."
"No. 2," on the other hand, "regarded No. 1 as a difficult and thankless moral task, a lesson that had to be got through somehow," but in his own nature this strange being "had no definable character at all," but was "born, dead, everything in one; a total vision of life," and that specter pursued the visible Jung like a shadow.
There was also something medieval about No. 2, in the sense that he seemed to belong to the occult world evoked by Goethe's Faust. At the time, characteristically guided by a dream, the young man believed he should follow the light of consciousness and leave the shadow to itself. He was haunted nonetheless to the end of his years by what he took to be No. 2's ultimate nature, the Void, which embraces all beginnings and endings, and which could hold its own against final darkness. 5
In college Jung took up the study of medicine. But he also took time to scan the German intellectual world of his time. He read not only Faust, but also Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra; though that philosopher probably influenced him more than any other writer outside of professional psychology, he later said he saw in Nietzsche an unbalanced genius who had made a dangerous mistake when he "fearlessly and unsuspectingly let his No. 2 loose upon a world that knew and understood nothing about such things." 6 The student Jung also absorbed with profit Schopenhauer, Kant, and Swedenborg. For a time he was intensely engaged in the study of spiritualism and psychical research, not only through reading, but also by attending seances, including those of a mediumistic cousin of his, Helene Prieswerk.
Those observations became the basis of his dissertation for the medical degree, "On the Psychology and Pathology of SoCalled Occult Phenomena." 7
For as his specialization Jung had selected psychiatry, partly because he believed it would allow him to combine his humanistic and philosophical interests with medicine. In December of 1900 he commenced his career by taking up a post as assistant at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich. That same year Freud's epochmaking The Interpretation of Dreams was published, introducing his intensely controversial theories of psychoanalysis to the profession and the general
Page 42
public. Jung read the book, recognized Freud's importance, and took up his cause. Jung later claimed that even then he did not accept the opinion of the father of psychoanalysis that sexual trauma was the origin of all repression, and had a higher view of religion and spiritual things than the older man. Nonetheless he became a partisan of Freud at a time when the Viennese doctor enjoyed little respectability in the psychiatric world, and such discipleship could offer few career benefits. Jung met Feud in 1906; for a time the two men were close, Freud not hesitating to anoint the younger as his chief docent and heir apparent.