This volume is a detailed reconstruction of the first semester in a series of public lectures that Jung delivered at the ETH in Zurich between 1933-1941. “Like a complex Jigsaw puzzle”(1i), the editors assembled different transcripts and notes taken by participants at Jung's lectures which, during many years' work, has been translated, compared and edited. While “no longer being able to ask Jung himself”, this long editing process took on the challenge to come “as close as possible to what he [Jung] actually said.” (xxxi) Apart from the venture to reach Jung's precise words, this volume provides the reader with the historical and political context of the lectures – the ETH context ; the building ; university courses that were given and their significance to Jung's career ; The history of the lectures' notes and publications; and the chronology of historical events between 1933-1941 – in order to give a sense of the space, to capture the zeitgeist, and to provide the feeling tone of the lectures with “Jung the orator” (xxix). This restoration that aspires to articulate the most accurate historical voice from a mosaic of different sources touches precisely on the question of history – and its relation to psychoanalysis – that Jung brings to the foreground in this volume.
In this seminar – given between 1933-34 and titled ‘History of Modern Psychology’ – Jung moves beyond the familiar understanding of history as a mere study of the past. Beginning with the Enlightenment, bringing into consciousness “profound doubt” (6), through the Kantian critique of knowledge, he sketches different theoretical movements in Germany, France and England – a long line of philosophers and scientists that have focused on the psyche as their research subject. Following the all-male register that has influenced the development of modern psychology,
he then adds another kind of experience, that has predominantly been outcast as irrelevant. “History as you know” he explains, “has always chronicled individual lives and psychologies, particularly of outstanding persons and ”great men“; … But there exist also other personalities besides such ”men of action“ – ”psychic“ people, people marked by their inner experience” (37). In this second part of the seminar he explores psychical mythical experiences, with a particular attention to the lives of two women – Friederike Hauffe and Catherine-Elise Müller (known as Hélène Smith) whose spiritual phenomena have been documented in the work of Justinus Kerner and Theodore Flournoy, respectively.
In this way of describing the history of modern psychology, Jung not only provides an answer to the dominant Freudo-centred picture of the historiography of psychoanalysis, locating his theory at the heart of modern philosophical thinking. He also sets the stage for a different account of the concept of history, that goes beyond the “objective” record of his-story. He gradually leads his audience into the realm of mythical experience, requesting that they “exercise patience with such phenomena”(67) and carefully listen to the knowledge that arises at the “back-world” of the psyche. As he explains, “our consciousness perceives the outer world; it is an organ of perception. But behind our consciousness there stands a perceiving subject, and this is not tabula rasa” (45). Dialectally shifting between a phenomenological approach and a scientific ethos, Jung presents a series of diagrams to illustrate the knowledge revealed from these psychic phenomena and elaborates on the different spheres of human consciousness.
As I was reading the book, I was preoccupied with the politics of Jung's relation to history. The book begins with two chronological chart columns illustrating the events that were happening in the world during these years between 1933-1941, alongside the events in Jung's career. It is apparent that during those years, while the world was falling into catastrophe and death, Jung was creatively absorbed in rebirth, developing some of his most impressive work about the inner world. Emphasising the transiency of external reality, he was highlighting the mythical realm of a predetermined collective unconscious. I was wondering in my reading —
and I guess even more so as a Jewish woman – about the ethical bearings of promoting such enterprise during the historical times the lectures were given. I began reading the content of the lectures with this obvious, even painful gap in mind, trying to listen to his understanding of history and historical events.
Transferring the “Archimedean point” (1) inwards, allowing the exploration of mythical phenomena of the unconscious reveals, according to Jung, the pre-existing archetypal sphere and another kind of history that he has referred to elsewhere as natural history:
By “history” we usually mean the history which we “make,” and we call this “objective history.” The truly creative fantasy activity of the brain has nothing to do with this kind of history, but solely with that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely, the history of the brain-structure. And this structure tells its own story, which is the story of mankind: the unending myth of death and rebirth, and of the multitudinous figures who weave in and out of this mystery.
Although recognising this “touches on a mode of existence that fails to coincide with empirically perceptible reality” (75), for Jung these experiences could teach us about our “true histories” leading to a dimension which is in many ways more “objective” than that of external history and reality. In 1933, the same year this seminar was given Jung has written elsewhere about his views of the concept of history:
When we look at human history, we see only what happens on the surface, and even this is distorted in the faded mirror of tradition. But what has really been happening eludes the inquiring eye of the historian, for the true historical event lies deeply buried, experienced by all and observed by none. It is the most private and most subjective of psychic experiences. Wars, dynasties, social upheavals, conquests, and religions are but the superficial
Page 72symptoms of a secret psychic attitude unknown even to the individual himself and transmitted by no historian; perhaps the founders of religions give us the most information in this regard. The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant.
Although prima facia it might seem that the events of history are almost inconsequential to him, reading this book reveals that Jung's focus on the inner world is in fact a response to the one-sided consciousness that, according to him, is at the heart of western violence. “Our contemporary consciousness is oriented one-sidedly” he explains, “it is as if we believed that only Europe existed” (137). In an extroverted society “we are accustomed to constantly directing our attention outward and only rarely do we turn to look inward” (57). Western thinking has adhered to conscious history emphasising objective and external facts but has failed to incorporate knowledge of the unconscious. “When consciousness grows too strong in proportion to the degree in which the background is walled off…An inflation of the subject occurs” (87). People lose “all knowledge pertaining to these matters” (79). They become “defensive in their attitude towards the background” (87) until the bridge of understanding is forcefully sealed and “anything different is just seen as bad” (137).
While reading the book, I heard a story about Jung that touches precisely on this question. Apparently, Jung was giving a lecture in Berlin, in 1937, on the same night that Hitler was meeting with Mussolini. As he was speaking, a tidal wave of the cheering mass grew stronger outside the lecture room until it was impossible for him to continue talking. His voice drowned out for many minutes, he was standing in silence, waiting patiently until the mayhem subsided and then asked his audience to return to the voices of the inner world saying: “I'm afraid we had to let world's history pass by” (Zeller, 1975: 128).
Jung's focus on the inner world is in fact his political reply to the mayhem of history, precisely because the forces of history are projections
of what is impossible to bear. Although western thinking is one-sidedly extrovert, the emergence of “modern psychology” is, according to him, a shift in a different direction. Psychoanalysis is a movement into a more introverted consciousness, in which an awareness has been growing of the “dark side” of the psyche, our shadow. Exploring mystical phenomena in these lectures Jung takes another step on that route, moving western thinking out of its comfort zone. He asks his audience not only to suspend its disbelief but to accompany him on the journey to this “uncharted territory” of history. If we want to encounter spheres of otherness in the psyche, he clarifies, “we must be able to abandon our point of view, make a sacrificium intellectus, and also a sacrifice of our morals, our notion of right and wrong, …[because] the other exists too.”(138)
I will not go into the ongoing debate about Jung's politics during these years nor will I explore Jung's ideas about race, nationality and difference but merely highlight a particular aspect of his relation to “history”.
I would like to thank Rabi Mordechai Zeller for telling me this story. The original version appears in “The Dream, The Vision of the Night” by his grandfather, Max Zeller.