The Wounded Jung: Effects of Jung's Relationships on His Life and Work (Psychosocial Issues)

Rating:
Summary: A brief but substantive, sympathetic C.G. Jung biography
Review: Carl Jung's character has taken quite a shellacking of late in new biographies by Richard Noll. In contrast, Smith's book is sympathetic both to Jung's cause--the healing journey toward wholeness he termed "individuation"--and to the deeply disturbed, dissociated psyche that relentlessly drove Jung, both personally and professionally, toward the fulfillment of his destiny: his "daimon." Smith focuses on Jung's relationships with his parents, arguing that it was mainly Jung's ambivalent feelings toward his mother--not his father, as most biographers believe--that most powerfully influenced his peculiar psychic development. Smith also emphasizes the famous Freud-Jung friendship, and its daimonic character, noting that both men had enormous stores of repressed anger or rage which both drove their prodigious creativity and caused serious interpersonal difficulties. Smith's brief biography, despite its limitations, perceptively illuminates in ways others have not the darker side of C.G. Jung--his repressed rage--and in so doing, deepens our understanding of and compassion for the daimonic Dr. Jung, and, hopefully, our own daimonic qualities.

Rating:
Summary: A brief but substantive, sympathetic C.G. Jung biography
Review: Carl Jung's character has taken quite a shellacking of late in new biographies by Richard Noll. In contrast, Smith's book is sympathetic both to Jung's cause--the healing journey toward wholeness he termed "individuation"--and to the deeply disturbed, dissociated psyche that relentlessly drove Jung, both personally and professionally, toward the fulfillment of his destiny: his "daimon." Smith focuses on Jung's relationships with his parents, arguing that it was mainly Jung's ambivalent feelings toward his mother--not his father, as most biographers believe--that most powerfully influenced his peculiar psychic development. Smith also emphasizes the famous Freud-Jung friendship, and its daimonic character, noting that both men had enormous stores of repressed anger or rage which both drove their prodigious creativity and caused serious interpersonal difficulties. Smith's brief biography, despite its limitations, perceptively illuminates in ways others have not the darker side of C.G. Jung--his repressed rage--and in so doing, deepens our understanding of and compassion for the daimonic Dr. Jung, and, hopefully, our own daimonic qualities.

Rating:
Summary: Intellectual fun fan
Review: THE WOUNDED JUNG by Robert C. Smith might be the book that the average reader of Jung's works wanted someone to write, simplifying the concepts that made it so difficult for the tormented Jung to write himself. "By the age of four he had incorporated into his psyche the sophisticated and frightening concept of the underground man-eater dream, closely associated in his case with the burial of the dead." (p. 21). The Notes for the entire book are on pages 179-181. These are so short, it might be ironic that Chapter 3, Note 2 is simply, "Although Jung had never met Miller, he took her fifteen-page report of dreams and visions, published in Geneva in 1906, and expanded it into a book of more than four hundred pages." (p. 180). The key to such authorship is clearly based on having a mind which has been caught in the same web, as is also true on the intellectual side of the picture. "Jung was interested in a variety of philosophers and religious mystics, and upon close examination, one can see that the experiences of these philosophers and mystics paralleled those of Jung. Swedenborg, the great Swedish mystic, clearly engrossed Jung for this reason." (p. 104). Anything which triggered "the divided parts of his own psyche" (p. 2) helped him appreciate "that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy" (p. 3).

A major emphasis on Jung's father is that he "had been unable to secure an academic position. Hence he became the minister to a series of small country parishes." (p. 13). In a world where most people seem condemned to be spectators, Pastor Jung faced those who worshipped each Sunday with his suggestions for staying out of trouble, and he told his son, "Be anything you like except a theologian." (pp. 14, 32, 33).

Jumping ahead in the book to the relationship between Jung and Freud, Smith mentioned a letter on page 34 about a traumatic incident in Jung's childhood, which "Jung kept the memory of the assault secret from all except Freud until old age." (p. 34). A lot more can be learned from the letter from Jung to Freud dated 28 October, 1907, in which Jung admitted that he would "rather not have said" how much he was in awe of Freud. "Actually--and I confess this to you with a struggle--I have a boundless admiration for you both as a man and as a researcher, and I bear you no conscious grudge. So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has something of the character of a `religious' crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped." Jung was astute in allowing himself to confess this to Freud as a confirmation of many of Freud's beliefs, as well as indicating Jung's trauma from a personal incident that might be generalized politically.

Chapter 2 of THE DESCENT OF MAN by Charles Darwin is called On The Manner of Development of Man from some Lower Form, in which a HISTORY OF GREENLAND by Cranz is quoted on the belief of the Esquimaux "that ingenuity and dexterity in seal-catching (their highest art and virtue) is hereditary; there is really something in it, for the son of a celebrated seal-catcher will distinguish himself, though he lost his father in childhood." Our devotion to intellectual, spiritual, and political leadership might follow genetically, if it is understood that modern people, largely reduced to being spectators, worship anyone who has kindled a spark to seek the ultimate prize. Frankly, Jung's trauma reminds me of "Ernst Roehm, Minister of the Reich, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, and Chief of Staff of the SA." (Max Gallo, THE NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES, p. 2). On December 31, 1933, Roehm had received a letter from Adolf Hitler thanking him for "the force which allowed me to wage the final battle for power," and as leader of the "SA to assure the victory of the National Socialist Revolution on the domestic front, . . . and the unity of our people." (Gallo, p. 7). Roehm was among those killed between Saturday, June 30, 1934, and Monday, July 2. A speech by Hitler on Friday, July 13, 1934 to the Reichstag meeting in the Opera House made Roehm a scapegoat for everything that Hitler had attempted to rid himself of. "The life the Chief of Staff and a certain number of other leaders had begun to lead was intolerable from the point of view of National Socialism. The question was no longer that he and his friends had violated every decency, but rather that the contagion was widespread, and was affecting even the most distant elements." (Gallo, p. 9). As much as this seems ruthless, Smith was able to see this trait as common. "Both Jung and his mother tended to personify aspects of the self. Frequently in his autobiography he refers to the ruthlessness of his mother's No. 2 Personality. But he too, as he acknowledges at the end of MEMORIES (356), could be utterly ruthless at times." (Smith, p. 27). The Retrospect which starts on page 355 of MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS by C. G. Jung pictures himself more as a spectator. "I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do." (Jung, p. 355). "People who see nothing have no certainties and can draw no conclusions--or do not trust them even if they do. I do not know what started me off perceiving the stream of life." (Jung, pp. 355-356). "I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made many enemies." (Jung, p. 357).