A Significant Insight into Jung's Life, Thought and Work

Review

Gary Lachman Jung The Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings, New York: Penguin, 2013.

This short book, which reads with the pace of a good novel, is an excellent introduction to Carl Jung's life and indeed to his writings.  Having read a good number of books by and on Jung over the years, this is by far the most gripping read yet.  For anyone, who might be a neophyte with respect to Jungian studies, the purchase of this short and accessible book would make both a wise and effective introduction to the amorphous mass of writings that Herr Professor Dr. Jung crafted over the years.  That Jung is no easy writer to read in his primary texts is admitted by many scholars including Lachman.  Moreover, that we in the Anglophone world depend on translations from the original German further complicates the clarity of his oeuvre for us.  That's why we owe no little gratitude to the explanations and elucidations of his work offered by many scholars over the years.  Mr Lachman credits Dr Anthony Storr with being one of Jung's greatest elucidators in the Anglophone world.

Carl Gustav Jung in his later years

Lachman writes with an ease of style, undoubtedly helped greatly by his prodigious knowledge of his subject.  In short, his knowledge and clarity make this a wonderful introductory read to Jungian studies.  Mr. Lachman is one of today's most widely read and respected writers on esoteric and occult themes and many of his books have been published to singular acclaim in both America (where he was born and reared) and in Europe (He now resides in England.) He is also a rock musician of some note and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

The Front Cover of my copy of this book

This seminal biography fills a gap in our appreciation of Jung by evaluating the role of the occult and the more mystical aspects in our subject's life and thought.  While Jung has been acclaimed in some quarters as tantamount to the "founding father of the New Age," Lachman is quick to inform us that the legendary Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytical Psychology or Analytical Therapy took pains to avoid any explicit association with mysticism or the occult.

While Jung may have gone to no little trouble to distance himself from the charge of being a mystic, Lachman adduces much evidence for Herr Professor's preoccupation with the occult (his Doctoral thesis was on paranormal occurrences in séances), his abiding interest in spiritualism, religions and mythology as well as alchemy.  Jung, like Freud sought to portray himself as a scientist rather than a spiritualist healer. We have to admit that such was a reasonable stance, given that they were both professional psychiatrists and clinicians and that psychiatry and psychotherapy were fledgling professions. What was (and is) at fault here is obviously a precise definition of what science was (and is) in the first place.  At the time, there would not then have been the clear division that now obtains between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  That psychology and psychiatry are human sciences is without doubt, and that the latter uses a biological and/or psychopharmacological approach to the treatment of serious mental illness means that evidence can be adduced for its scientific/clinical approach. Notwithstanding the overuse of drugs in the treatment of some mental illnesses, there can be no doubt about the effectiveness of many pharmacological products in assuaging serious mental conditions.  There are also many clinical experiments and trials as to the effectiveness of such drugs.  That Jung sought to add analytical psychology/therapy, with its method of Active Imagination as well as the insights from mythology, alchemy, and dream analysis into the mix in treating the mentally ill, along with the more orthodox methods of treatment is a testament to his holistic vision of the psychiatric/therapeutic enterprise.  Much of his practical work was done in a clinical setting, and insofar as clinical meant scientific to some extent, the whole approach implied taking the best from both "science" in its widest understanding and from the world of the Arts in its more healing and therapeutic sense.  In short, Jung was walking a narrow ledge in this regard as he was also to walk in the case of Nazism and its desire to corrupt modern psychology and psychotherapy for its own ideological and evil ends.

The back cover of my copy of the book

Gary Lachman's book is a rich source of information and distilled knowledge or wisdom on Jungian thought and therapy as well as being a good honest biography.  Jung's background is painted with deft strokes and we are fully apprised of the history of his family on both his father's and mother's sides.  Jung's early struggles with identity as an adolescent are clearly delineated as are his later struggles with adult individuation.  This short biographical book is far from being hagiography as the author outlines in detail the famous Herr Professor's weaknesses like his having sexual relations with a number of his women patients and his living openly with both his wife and mistress Tony Wolff for a good number of years.

Lachman is especially good on Jung's early methods of therapy - (i) Hit the patient with a good dose of reality and (ii) Active Imagination where the client actively dialogues with symbols in his/her dreams.  He also gives a wonderfully lucid account of Jung's reading in all his areas of interest - from Schopenhauer to Kant and further afield to alchemy and mythology.  His accounts of the influence of Schopenhauer and Kant are especially clear.  That Jung was a mystic is beyond doubt for the present reviewer. Jung sought methods so that any patient, indeed any person, could get to know their true or real Self, a term he invariably capitalised.  The term the learned Herr Dr Professor used here was that of individuation where the person becomes wholly his or her Self, one and undivided, that is individual.  This concept and others like those of the collective unconscious, the resolution/reconciliation of opposites and synchronicity, and so on are all clearly outlined. All of these terms describe the journey to Self-integration from various different angles.  Self-integration or individuation are of their nature mystical acts, if one understands by mysticism the integration of the many diverse aspects of the psyche with its source in the Self (mirroring the traditional definition of mysticism as the union of the individual soul with its source in the Godhead) then Jung was the quintessential mystic.

Jung's professional and personal relationship with Freud, which has been written on widely indeed elsewhere, is especially well recounted here.  One of the areas where these two great geniuses disagreed was in the significance and meaning of dreams.  Dreams did not conceal truths (as Freud would have it), Jung believed, rather they revealed knowledge previously unknown or unrecognised by the conscious ego.  They were, he believed, "a symbolic language that was not the sexual semiotics Freud insisted upon." (p. 88) Mythologies, for Jung, were the earliest dreams of mankind and so deserved to be studied in depth for what they reveal about the true nature of primordial, and indeed, present-day, man.  Jung saw dreams, as he viewed the unconscious whence they came, as a "reservoir of vital energy," "a source of meaning and power," while for Freud "dreams were a burden" that we were "forced to repress." (p. 90)

Lachman gives what he considers Jung's clearest descriptive definition of the collective unconscious as: "There are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life." (Quoted p. 114)  This is an example of what Jung described as the "objective psyche," an earlier term he used for the "collective unconscious." (Also p. 114).

One of the more interesting sections in this overall interesting little classic of a book is Lachman's account of Jung's stance towards Nazism which is not at all as black as some critics would like it painted.  Jung was never an anti-Semite nor was he ever a Nazi sympathiser.  Lachman goes into the history of his encounter with National Socialism in considerable detail.  As early as 1918, in an important essay Jung presciently warned about the "blond beast," - the new repressed Germany - that he vividly described as "prowling about its underground prison, ready to burst out with devastating consequences." (Quoted p. 159) Jung, according to Lachman, attempted insofar as he could as Vice-President, to counter the open Nazism of Matthias Heinrich Göring, the President of The International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.  Jung found that his name was put, against his will, to certain anti-Semitic documents in the journal of the society of which he was editor.  This journal was published and printed in Germany and this particular psychiatrist Göring - a cousin of Herman, Hitler’s second in command - had control over it, not Jung, though he did manage to continue to publish work by Jewish psychiatrists against Göring's wishes until he (Jung) resigned in 1939 at the outbreak of war. Also, it is important to point out that Jung's books were put on the Nazi Black List.

Further - and few critics have adverted to this relevant fact at all - Jung did speak out versus Hitler (see p. 166).  In 1936 he had condemned the Führer as a "raving berserker," and a man "possessed" who had set Germany on its "course toward perdition." (Quoted, p. 167).  However, as Lachman points out, the Nazis used Jung and twisted his comments to suit their purposes.  Our author significantly and rightly takes the Jungian biographer, Ronald Hayman, to task for selectively quoting from Jung's replies to an interview on state radio in 1933 at the cusp of Nazi power in Germany.  Lachman quotes very significant, if somewhat indirect, anti-Nazi statements from a very balanced interview, viz., "mass movements have a peculiarity of overpowering the individual by mass suggestion and making him unconscious.  The political or social movement gains nothing when it has swarms of hypnotised camp followers." (Quoted, p. 169-170) Jung went on in that interview to underline the goal of psychology as individuation, and the consequent importance of the self-development of the individual to the modern state.  Now, any Fascist regime has no use for individuals and their self-development as such would undermine the totalitarian nature of such a state in the first place.  Lachman is correct, therefore, in his assessment that Jung's interview, when listened to in its entirety is nothing short of "an outright attack on Nazism." (p. 171)

Further, our author adduces evidence for Jung's part in several plots against Hitler and the Nazi State and how he was a secret member of the OSS (The Office of Strategic Services, a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II) and had a distinct appellation within its ranks as "Agent 488." (See p. 179 ff).  The OSS agent, Allen W. Dulles remarked in a later interview when an old man: "Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war ... any details are highly classified information." (p. 179)

A wonderful cast of actors walk on and off the Jungian stage during the course of this short biography, and all the major ones are there as well as those lesser ones who filled out a scene or two in Jung's long and eventful life.  The pace of this book is brisk and takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through one of the most interesting lives and minds of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  In short, for anyone interested in such great lives and minds, this is surely a book to have on your shelves.