The Lost Prince (41 page)
Finally, in 1913, the tension between the two colleagues had turned to overt bitterness; the insults had gone too far. Jung resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and he wrote Freud the final letter, ending with the famous line, “The rest is silence.” And it was. The two great men would never speak again.
In dramatic fashion, as was his wont, Freud announced that his association with Jung was over and that his associates should have no more dealings with Jung and Zurich. As much as the split freed both men to go in their own directions and to define themselves and their beliefs more distinctly, Jung at least took the separation as rejection and grieved over it. He retreated to his lake home near Zurich and began spending large amounts of time there in isolation, losing himself in his own thoughts.
During her visit in the summer of 1913, the break all but finalized, Jung was beginning to explore his own unique path. After that his letters to Eleanor seemed to be one among his few anchors. This was a time of intense correspondence between the two. So it was in letters that they continued the discussions William James had begun in 1909, what Jung called “parapsychology and spirituality,” which departed starkly from what he was beginning to see as the rigid sexuality-based doctrines of his former colleague Freud.
“Although I greatly enjoyed his approval and was flattered to be thought somehow his worthy successor,” Jung wrote to Eleanor in the days just after the final parting, “I knew almost from the beginning that I could not endorse his ideas in their entirety, nor sacrifice my intellectual integrity to a set of dogmas in the way my father had. In time our differences became impossible to conceal. I could no longer pretend to accept, for one, that human motivation is exclusively sexual, and I could not accept, for another, that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual.
“These ideas seemed to me, as they seemed to William James, I am sure, reductionist and narrow. To me, the very notion of psychic energy,
libido
as Freud calls it, cannot be wholly sexual. To me, libido is a more generalized ‘life force,’ of which sexuality is but one part. For me, it became more and more evident over time that beneath the personal unconscious of Freud’s repressed wishes and traumatic memories lies a deeper and more important layer that I have come to call the
collective unconscious
. This collective unconscious, in my mind, contains the entire psychic heritage of mankind.”
Eleanor had traveled then with the girls to Zurich and followed the Seestrasse along the lake until they came to the Jung house, where they were welcomed with the warmth of Emma’s household. Emma was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who fell in love with both the young
man and his ideas. She was for his whole adult life his family stability and colleague, becoming herself a renowned therapist, even if, Eleanor knew, life with the great doctor was not always easy. The second night, after the girls and the Jung children had gone to bed, Jung had arranged that they dine alone together, just the two of them. She expressed her concern for his health, and Jung made light of her attentiveness, commenting that, as he said, “pain and growth come through the door at the same time.”
Back then, Jung was still in transition, “in the liminal space,” he described it, “on the threshold between two worlds.” Now, in 1918, Eleanor found her friend, his split with Sigmund Freud long past, very much estranged from his former world and the international psychological community and left to establish something of his own in Zurich. He found his new situation—she knew from his letters—at once exhilarating and terrifying.
He was now free to take things in his own direction but was also isolated and alone. However it was, it was clear that he found himself now in the grip of a burst of creative energy, the pages of his Red Book serving as proof. One of the most remarkable letters from this period arrived from the Swiss doctor between the time of Eleanor’s decision to travel to Vienna and her departure.
My dear Eleanor,
I feel as if I have climbed out of a deep dark hole. In reality, the break with Herr Dr. Freud had actually produced public and professional stability in a form of personal recognition and acclaim that I should have found deeply satisfying at my age and station in life. I had at that time the perfect wife, as my dear Emma was described by everyone who knows her; five healthy and beautiful children, all in awe of their father; a substantial house that attested to my professional success; and a practice that was growing faster than I could keep up with. Nonetheless, I found myself very much at sea, provoked by uncertainty, barraged by inner images, which rather than deny I accepted and examined gratefully. Everything in my life for a time seemed derived from those images, what had broken free of the unconscious, flooding me like a mysterious stream, and threatened to destroy me.
The outward classification, the scientific processing, and the integration of abstract ideas into the events of life was certainly rewarding.
On one hand they soothed and comforted me, one who at that time needed a mantra of the facts of my life to keep myself rooted to reality. I was after all a medical doctor who was absolutely certain of little other than that I lived at such and such a place, was married to a certain woman, and had fathered a specific number of children. I recognized even as I was living in these years that they were the numinous beginning that contained everything. Painful and as disorienting as it was, I had a premonition that there was enough raw material in those years to engage if not consume me for the rest of my life. The problem became how to integrate into some manner of normal life all this amorphous material.
I had withdrawn from the world, and that was not unwholesome. Determined as I was to stay alert and to work my way through the morass of what I was feeling, I began very consciously and deliberately setting aside time each day for child’s play. Remembering how much I liked building blocks when I was a child of ten, I tried to re-create the activity, this time with sticks, stones, and other materials that washed up on the lakeshore in front of our house. I realize now that I may have been in the grip of a psychosis, but I was cognizant enough to confine my play into a fixed schedule, an organized daily routine, every day after lunch. Deep immersion in this practice, as bizarre as it may have seemed to those around me, unquestionably saved my life.
The war that raged for those years in the countries neighboring Switzerland was matched by one that raged inside me. Now that the end is in sight, the armistice achieved in Europe, I find myself at a remove from the dark battle, having fought for my own salvation, and ready to begin again my relationship with the external world.
I look forward to your visit more than you can know, and I find that there is much that we need to discuss and clarify.
Yours as ever,
Jung
He had taken to spending long hours by himself by the lakeshore, delving into his own unconscious in what might have looked to others as a state of depression. It was a time when he needed a friend and he could have used the perspective of a wise old mentor such as William James,
someone who shared his more Eastern and mythological view of the unconscious and the future of psychology, what the traditionalists such as Freud had come to think of as parapsychology, mental phenomena outside the realm of scientific principle. Eleanor knew well the connection the Swiss doctor made between her and William James, how he did in fact expect her to speak for the great American philosopher, and she accepted any pressures that came with that association as a small price to pay for a friendship that had become both intense and dear to her.
The reception at the Jungs’ Seestrasse house was the warm one that she had expected. The Jungs’ children, the oldest fourteen and the youngest, Helene, just Standish’s age, had been prepared by their mother for the visit and whisked Standish off from almost the moment of his arrival. Emma Jung met them at the door and offered her spirited greeting. Emma was warm, outgoing, and engaging, a well-organized mother and an intelligent thinker who would become an analyst herself. “We are truly glad to see you,” she said to Eleanor. “Carl has much to share with you, and the children have been buzzing about Standish’s arrival all week. They have been calling him their American cousin.”
“I too have been greatly looking forward to this visit,” Eleanor said, her smile carrying the warmth she felt from the greeting and the thought that in this household she would be able to share much of what she had been carrying secretly inside.
“I HAVE EDUCATED MYSELF”
I
t was not until the late afternoon, after she and Standish were settled in their room and he off playing with the children and Eleanor and Jung were sitting alone in his study, that Toni Wolff entered.
“I do not believe that you have met Fräulein Wolff,” Jung said very formally.
The woman approached Eleanor and the two shook hands. Toni Wolff was tall and thin and severe, a strikingly attractive woman in her own way, but markedly different from Emma, who was soft, gentle, and maternal. Barely smiling, the two women greeted each other.
“I have heard much about you,” Eleanor said.
“And I you. Carl has been looking forward to your visit.”
Toni Wolff was thirty. She and Jung had met when she became his patient in 1910, and soon it became clear that she intended to be more: first a disciple, then a therapist on her own, and then an intimate. Jung was quite open about his relationship with her in his letters to Eleanor, and what he did not state outright, Eleanor could infer. She knew that the Zurich Psychology Society had become accustomed to Jung entering its meetings with the two women, and everyone knew that for some time now Emma had found herself accepting the intimate connection between her husband and this other woman and accepted it, all at least superficially, with grace. But no one ever saw the two women in any form of affectionate exchange. When Jung would retreat to the lakeshore in his afternoons of active imagination and imaginary construction, it was Toni
Wolff who accompanied him, sitting quietly nearby, smoking and reading.
Eleanor had heard that Toni’s sharp, penetrating mind had contributed to Jung’s thinking more than any other and that he shared more ideas with her than he did with Emma. Years later, she would hear that Jung described the two relationships a man needs from a woman: On the one hand, he needs a wife to create his home, and to bear and rear his children; on the other, a
femme inspiratrice,
a spiritual companion, to share his fantasies and inspire his greatest works. Jung found those two roles to be played by two separate women in his life, and he expected them and the world to understand. Eleanor immediately thought of William James and Pauline Goldmark, and what conditions James’s wife, Alice, and Jung’s wife, Emma, had to accept in order to preserve their marriages.
On this visit, Eleanor was not certain what form Jung’s relationship with Toni Wolff had taken, but she, no stranger to complexity herself, had anticipated encountering this complex relationship, so different from the staid convention of Boston society, with an openness worthy of the trust her Swiss friend had placed in her. “I hope we shall have time to talk,” she said to Toni Wolff with a smile.
“I would enjoy that very much,” Toni Wolff said, picking up on Eleanor’s intention. There was a kind of intensity in her eyes that even Eleanor found compelling.
Later, that evening, when they were alone, Jung repeated to Eleanor his interest in someday meeting this Will Honeycutt, the man who had conversed with the ancient Democritus. “I have told his story often,” Jung said.
“You both have much in common,” Eleanor said, “your descent, some call it.”
“There was a certain descent,” Jung said. “I will admit that, but I have passed through it, I can say with confidence. The war is over.”
“An armistice,” she said, “a blessed relief.”
“There is never an armistice with the self. But yes, I have staked out a sort of peace.”
They continued on in this abstract manner before they arrived at family. “And Toni Wolff is part of that peace?” Eleanor said.
Jung looked at Eleanor for a long moment, surprised by her new addition to the discussion. “Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Toni has become a vital part of the equation. One that requires understanding. She provides invaluable insight and inspiration.” There was only the slightest hint of apology in his voice.
“I think I understand, but I do not hold a place within your inner circle.” Circumstance had certainly given Eleanor an appreciation for the unconventional in marriage, but still she expressed concern. “Were I in that circle, I would find cause for concern. I wonder how it affects Emma and your children.”
“My family accept me as I am. And they have for a long time.”
“That is asking a lot, or at least from my perspective it is. If I were Emma I would have a difficult time with such attentions to another woman.”