Was Jung a Mystic?

Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings a new biography by Gary Lachman.  Tarcher/Penguin258 pp. $24.95.

This is my first biography of Jung, and I’m not at all sure this is the one to start with.  Years ago, when my first marriage ended and I was going through a personal crisis, a friend recommended I read Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, and I did.  I’ve re-read it a couple of times since.  I also at one time owned The Portable Jung, and had read through that, which collects famous and noteworthy essays from his whole career.  I remember hearing that Robertson Davies—who was never daunted by any reading task—read through Jung’s entire Collected Works (his novel The Manticore concerns a Jungian analysis).  And Jung was always a hero of the men’s groups I worked with, partly because James Hillman, a renegade Jungian, was part of that work, also because many of Jung’s ideas, like anima and animus, and working with the shadow, seemed important to us.

I picked up this book because my wife had it around, and I was interested to note that, not only had Lachman written books on Rudolf Steiner, P. D. Ouspensky, Madame Blavatsky, even Swendenborg, but he was also once a member of the rock group Blondie.  The man has been busy.  And while he might be just the person to answer the question posed by his book, he also seems to have a prejudice in one direction.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Probably anybody would.

My understanding is that Freud was obsessed with making his work scientific because what he was saying was radical and bound to offend people, and he wanted to have a scientific basis for it.  Those who followed him didn’t necessarily feel that way, Jung in particular, who began as a disciple of Freud but eventually drifted away.  The thing I hadn’t known about Jung, but which seems more than passingly important, was that he married a fabulously wealthy woman, so that he never had money worries, all his life.  I’m sure his profession was important to him, and his professional standing, but he had an independence that other men didn’t.

One way in which he was not professional in a modern sense was that he had affairs with his female patients.  That happened not just once, but several times.  It is also true—even a person with a casual acquaintance with Jung sees this—that many of his followers were women, including some of his most important and insightful interpreters, especially Marie Louise von Franz, who was just a teenager when they met.  His work appealed to women as perhaps Freud’s appealed to men.  He also worked with several female patients who became analysts themselves.  That makes sense to me in a way.  If the method has brought about a cure for you, maybe you can pass it on to someone else.

That doesn’t necessarily make you a scientist.

Jung’s ancestors were clergymen, his father a notably unhappy one, and Jung himself had the famous vision—recounted in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections—in which God dropped a massive turd on the Basel Cathedral, destroying forever Jung’s conventional religious beliefs.  But Jung was not, I would say, an irreligious man.  In a famous late interview on the television program Face to Face, he was asked if he believed in God, and he replied, “Believe?  Hard to say.  I know.”  He also wrote, in 1935, after his sister Trudi died—when he was sixty—“What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”  How he knew that I don’t know.

I would say that the task of Jung’s entire life was essentially religious (I think of the religious quest as facing the large questions of humankind).  He agreed with Freud on the importance of the unconscious, but did not agree that it was strictly personal; his concept of the collective unconscious, which in some ways resembles the Big Mind that Buddhists talk about, gives a spiritual depth to the whole idea.  His confrontation with his own unconscious, a period of five years when he gave up seeing patients and writing for publication, was remarkably courageous, and apparently led to all of his later work.  It was during that time that Jung created the famous Red Book, with its obscure writing and stunning artwork.  Jung himself denied being a mystic as he denied being an artist, but others might disagree.

Jung was profoundly an introvert (another concept he is credited with creating); in the tower which he built beside the lake on his property, he would spend hours and days by himself, and he admitted only a few people to its precincts.  The place didn’t have running water or cooking facilities, but Jung—who loved to cook, and loved to eat—liked the primitive life he led there.  Supposedly as he got older he would spend hours sitting in that tower doing nothing, not exactly practicing meditation, but something like that.  His practice of active imagination also resembled some forms of meditation.

The most interesting single incident in the book occurred in 1944, when Jung was 68.  He slipped on some ice and broke a bone in his leg, then ten days later suffered a myocardial infarct caused by embolisms from his leg, and had either a period of delirium or an out-of-the-body near-death experience.  The description of it is spectacular, and actually worth the price of the whole book.  He was transported to a place where present, past, and future all existed at once, and though a messenger came and told him he had to return to earth, he didn’t want to, and it took him several weeks to resign himself to being back.  Lachman says, “Jung was convinced that what he experienced wasn’t simply hallucinations cause by his illness, but that he had been granted a vision of reality.  It was ‘utterly real’ and had ‘a quality of absolute objectivity’”  Afterwards “Jung was humbled and felt an acceptance of things ‘as they are.’”

I must admit that, throughout this book, I wondered a bit about the author.  Lachman obviously has a predilection for a certain kind of spirituality—the word Theosophy comes to mind—and sometimes compared Jung to subjects of his earlier books like Rudolph Steiner and Gurdjieff.  This isn’t a long biography and it sometimes seemed mildly sensationalized, though it was certainly entertaining.  When I finished, however, I went through his afterward and notes carefully, and he did seem to have consulted authoritative sources.  If he emphasized the sensational aspects of Jung’s life, it created an entertaining book.  And I definitely learned some things I hadn’t known.

Jung was a big earthy man with a great love for food and drink; as a young man was known as the Barrel for the amount he drank.  His table manners were atrocious, annoying his family, but he never changed them.  He was just as happy to eat in the tower by himself, and often did.  He was extremely neat; even in that primitive tower, everything had its place, and had to be just right for him to work.

On July 6, 1961, after he had been ill for some time, he said to his friend Ruth Bailey, who was taking care of him, “Let’s have a really good red wine tonight.”  But later that afternoon he entered into a coma, and died soon after that.  Perhaps he returned to that place that he’d been in his near-death experience, an “orbiting Hindu temple, where all those people who whom he really belonged were waiting for him.”  He must have been happy to go.  He’d wanted to stay there in the first place.