 Sigmund Freud. I embarked on the adventure of my intellectual development by becoming a psychiatrist. As early as 1900, I had read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. I had laid the book aside at the time, because I did not yet grasp it. At the age of 25, I lacked the experience to appreciate Freud's theories. Such experience did not come until later. In 1903, I once more took up The Interpretation of Dreams and discovered how it all linked up with my own ideas. What chiefly interested me was the application to dreams of the concept of the repression mechanism, which was derived from the psychology of neuroses. This was important to me, because I had frequently encountered repressions in my experiments with word association. In response to certain stimulus words, the patient either had no associative answer, or was unduly slow in his reaction time. As was later discovered, such a disturbance occurred each time the stimulus word had touched upon a psychic lesion or conflict. In most cases, the patient was unconscious of this. When questioned about the cause of the disturbance, he would often answer in a peculiarly artificial manner. My reading of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams showed me that the repression mechanism was at work here, and that the facts I had observed were consonant with his theory. Thus, I was able to corroborate Freud's line of argument. The situation was different when it came to the content of the repression. Here, I could not agree with Freud. He considered the cause of the repression to be a sexual trauma. From my practice, however, I was familiar with numerous cases of neurosis in which the question of sexuality played a subordinate part, other factors standing in the foreground. For example, the problem of social adaptation, of oppression by tragic circumstances of life, prestige, considerations, and so on. Later, I presented such cases to Freud, but he would not grant that factors other than sexuality could be the cause. That was highly unsatisfactory to me. At the beginning, it was not easy for me to assign Freud the proper place in my life or to take the right attitude toward him. When I became acquainted with his work, I was planning an academic career and was about to complete a paper that was intended to advance me at the university. But Freud was definitely persona known grata in the academic world at the time, and any connection with him would have been damaging in scientific circles. Important people, at most, mentioned him surreptitiously, and at congresses he was discussed only in the corridors, never on the floor. Therefore, the discovery that my association experiments were in agreement with Freud's theories was far from pleasant to me. Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these questions, the devil whispered to me that I would be justified in publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions without mentioning Freud. But then I heard the voice of my second personality. You cannot build your life upon a lie? With that, the question was settled. From then on, I became an open partisan of Freud's and fought for him. I first took up the cudgels for Freud at a congress in Munich, where a lecturer discussed obsessional neuroses but studiously forebored to mention the name of Freud. In 1906, in connection with this incident, I wrote a paper on Freud's theory of the neurosis, which had contributed a great deal to the understanding of obsessional neuroses. In response to this article, two German professors wrote to me, warning that if I remained on Freud's side and continued to defend him, I would be endangering my academic career. I replied, if what Freud says is the truth, I am with him. I don't give a damn for a career if it has to be based on the premise of restricting research and concealing truth. And I went on defending Freud and his ideas. But on the basis of my own findings, I was still unable to feel that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression or sexual trauma. In certain cases, that was so, but not in others. Nevertheless, Freud had opened up a new path of investigation, and the shocked outcries against him at the time seemed to me absurd. I had not met with much sympathy for the ideas expressed in the psychology of dementia precox. In fact, my colleagues laughed at me. But through this book, I came to know Freud. He invited me to visit him, and our first meeting took place in Vienna in March 1907. We met at one o'clock in the afternoon and talked virtually without a pause for 13 hours. Freud was the first man of real importance I had encountered. In my experience up to that time, no one else could compare with him. There was nothing the least trivial in his attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable. And yet my first impressions of him remained somewhat tangled. I could not make him out. Above all, Freud's attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality came to light, he suspected it and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality, he referred to as psychosexuality. I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality. Yes, he assented, so it is. And that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend. I was by no means disposed to agree or to let it go at that, but still I did not feel competent to argue it out with him. I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, my dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark. He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, and promise me this one thing, my dear son, that you will go to church every Sunday. In some astonishment I asked him, a bulwark against what? To which he replied, against the black tide of mud. And here he hesitated a moment, then added, of occultism. First of all, it was the words bulwark and dogma that alarm me. For a dogma, that is to say, an undisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment, only with a personal power drive. This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. I knew I would never be able to accept such an attitude. Although I did not properly understand it then, I had observed in Freud the eruption of unconscious religious factors. Evidently, he wanted my aid in erecting a barrier against these threatening unconscious contents. I was bewildered and embarrassed. I had the feeling that I had caught a glimpse of a new, unknown country from which swarms of new ideas flew to meet me. One thing was clear. Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had now constructed a dogma, or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and morally ambivalent than the original one. Just as the psychically stronger agency is given divine or demonic attributes, so the sexual libido took over the role of a hidden or concealed God. The advantage of this transformation for Freud was, apparently, that he was able to regard the new, numinous principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious hate. At bottom, however, the numinosity, that is, the psychological qualities of the two rationally incommensurable opposites, Yahweh and sexuality, remain the same. The name alone had changed, and with it, of course, the point of view. The lost God had now to be sought below, not above. Like flames suddenly flaring up, these thoughts darted through my mind. Much later, when I reflected upon Freud's character, they revealed their significance. There was one characteristic of his that preoccupied me above all, his bitterness. Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually of sex, why this idea had taken such possession of him. He remained unaware that his monotony of interpretation expressed a flight from himself, or from that other side of him which might perhaps be called mystical. So long as he refused to acknowledge that side, he could never be reconciled with himself. He was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of the unconscious has a top and a bottom, an inside and an outside. When we speak of the outside, and that is what Freud did, we are considering only half of the whole, with the result that a counter-effect arises out of the unconscious. There was nothing to be done about this one-sightedness of Freud's. Perhaps some inner experience of his own might have opened his eyes. But then his intellect would have reduced such experience to mere sexuality, or psychosexuality. He remained the victim of the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure. For he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his diamond. The year 1909 proved decisive for our relationship. I've been invited to lecture on the association experiment at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Independently, Freud had also received an invitation, and we decided to travel together. We met in Bremen, where Ferenci joined us. In Bremen, the much discussed incident of Freud's fainting fit occurred. It was provoked indirectly by my interest in the peat bog corpses. I knew that in certain districts of northern Germany these so-called bog corpses were to be found. They are the bodies of prehistoric men who either drowned in the marshes or were buried there. The bog water in which the bodies lie contains humic acid, which consumes the bones and simultaneously tans the skin, so that it and the hair are perfectly preserved. In essence, this is the process of natural mummification. This interest of mine got on Freud's nerves. Why are you so concerned with these corpses, he asked me several times. He was inordinately vexed by the whole thing, and during one such conversation, while we were having dinner together, he suddenly fainted. Afterward, he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant I had death wishes toward him. I was more than surprised by this interpretation. I was alarmed by the intensity of his fantasies, so strong that obviously they could cause him to faint. In a similar connection, Freud once more suffered a fainting fit in my presence. This was during the psychoanalytic congress in Munich in 1912. Someone had turned the conversation to the Egyptian king, Iknottin. The point was made that as a result of his negative attitude toward his father, he had destroyed his father's cartouches on the stales, and that at the back of his great creation of monotheistic religion, there looked a father complex. At that moment, Freud slid off his chair in a faint. Everyone clustered helplessly around him. I picked him up, carried him into the next room, and laid him on a sofa. As I was carrying him, he half came too, and I shall never forget the look he casted me. In his weakness, he looked at me as if I were his father. Whatever other causes may have contributed to this faint, the atmosphere was very tense, the fantasy of father murder. At the time, Freud frequently made illusions indicating that he regarded me as his successor. These hints were embarrassing to me. In the first place, that sort of thing was not in my nature. In the second place, I could not sacrifice my intellectual independence, and in the third place, such lustre was highly unwelcome to me since it would only deflect from my real aims. I was concerned with investigating truth, not with questions of personal prestige. The trip to the United States, which began in Bremen in 1909, lasted for seven weeks. We were together every day and analyzed each other's dreams. I regarded Freud as an older, more mature, and experienced personality, and felt like a son in that respect. But then something happened which proved to be a severe blow to the whole relationship. Freud had a dream. I would not think it right to air the problem it involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal more could be said about it if he would supply me with some additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these words was a curious look, a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he said, but I cannot risk my authority. At that moment he lost it all together. That sentence burned itself into my memory, and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority over truth. Freud was able to interpret the dreams I was then having only incompletely or not at all. One in particular was important to me, for it led me for the first time to the concept of the collective unconscious, and thus formed a kind of prelude to my book Symbols of Transformation. This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories. It was my house. I found myself in the upper story where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style. Descending the stairs I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the 15th or 16th century. The furnishings were medieval. I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar. Descending again I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room, which looked exceedingly ancient. I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it the stone slab lifted and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths. These two I descended and entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke. What chiefly interested Freud in this dream were the two skulls. He returned to them repeatedly and urged me to find a wish in connection with them. What did I think about these skulls and whose were they? I knew perfectly well of course what he was driving at that secret death wishes were concealed in the dream. But what does he really expect of me, I thought to myself, toward whom would I have death wishes? I felt violent resistance to any such interpretation. I also had some intimation of what the dream might really mean. But I did not then trust my own judgment and wanted to hear Freud's opinion. I wanted to learn from him. Therefore I submitted to his intention and said, my wife and sister-in-law, and so I told him a lie. It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of a psyche. That is to say of my then state of consciousness with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the cell. It had an inhabited atmosphere in spite of its antiquated style. The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is the world of the primitive man within myself. A world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them. Certain questions have been much on my mind during the days preceding this dream. What premises is Freudian psychology founded? To what category of human thought does it belong? What is the relationship of its almost exclusive personalism to general historical assumptions? My dream was giving me the answer. It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history, a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche. It postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. It clicked as the English have it and the dream became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect. It was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This I first took to be the traces of earlier modes of functioning. Later with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable knowledge I recognize them as forms of instinct that is as archetypes. The dream of the house had a curious effect upon me. It revived my old interest in archaeology. I read like mad and worked with feverish interest through a mountain of mythological material then through the Gnostic writers and ended in total confusion. It was as if I were in an imaginary madhouse and were beginning to treat and analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods and goddesses as though they were my patients. While thus occupied I could not help but discover the close relationship between ancient mythology and the psychology of primitive people and this led me to an intensive study of the latter. Under the impress of Freud's personality I had as far as possible cast aside my own judgments and repressed my criticisms. That was the prerequisite for collaborating with him but to me was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the probing mind had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in the depths of the psyche than the all too familiar and all too human limitations. I had grown up in the country among peasants and what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out from the Rabbalasian wit and untrammeled fantasies of our peasant folklore. Incest and perversions were not remarkable novelties to me and did not call for any special explanation. Along with criminality they formed part of the black leaves that spoiled the taste of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and meaninglessness of human existence. That cabbage's thrive in dung was something I had always taken for granted. In all honesty I could discover no helpful insight in such knowledge. It's just that all of those people are city folks who know nothing about nature and the human stable I thought sick and tired of these ugly matters. One form of life cannot simply be a abandoned unless it is exchanged for another. As for a totally rational approach to life that is as experience shows impossible especially when a person is by nature as unreasonable as a neurotic. I now realized why Freud's personal psychology was of such burning interest to me. I was eager to know the truth about his reasonable solution and I was prepared to sacrifice a good deal in order to obtain the answer. Now I felt that I was on the track of it. Freud himself had a neurosis no doubt diagnosable and one with highly troublesome symptoms as I discovered on our voyage to America. Of course he had taught me that everybody is somewhat neurotic and that we must practice tolerance but I was not at all inclined to content myself with that rather I wanted to know how one could escape having a neurosis. Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis. When therefore Freud announced his intention of identifying theory and method and making them into some kind of dogma I could no longer collaborate with him. There remain no choice for me but to withdraw. When I was working on my book about the libido and approaching the end of the chapter the sacrifice I knew in advance that its publication would cost me my friendship with Freud for I plan to sit down in it my own conception of incest the decisive transformation of the concept of libido and various other ideas in which I differed from Freud. To me incest signified a personal complication only in the rarest cases usually incest has a highly religious aspect for which reason the incest theme plays a decisive part in almost all cosmogonies and in numerous myths but Freud clung to the literal interpretation of it and could not grasp this spiritual significance of incest as a symbol I knew that he would never be able to accept any of my ideas on this subject should I keep my thoughts to myself or should I risk the loss of so important a friendship at last I resolved to go ahead with the writing and it did indeed cost me Freud's friendship after the break with Freud all my friends and acquaintances dropped away my book was declared to be rubbish I was a mystic and that settled the matter but I had foreseen my isolation and harbored no illusion about the reaction of my so-called friends that was a point I had thoroughly considered beforehand I had known that everything was at stake that I had to take a stand for my convictions I realized the chapter the sacrifice meant my own sacrifice having reached this insight I was able to write again even though I knew that my ideas would go uncomprehended in retrospect I can say that I alone logically pursue two problems which most interested Freud the problem of archaic vestiges and that of sexuality it is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality on the contrary it plays a large part in my psychology as an essential though not the soul expression of psychic wholeness but my main concern had been to investigate over and above its personal significance and biological function its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning and thus to explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp sexuality is of the greatest importance as the expression of the thonic spirit that spirit is the other face of God the dark side of the God image the question of the thonic spirit has occupied me ever since I began to delve into the world of alchemy basically this interest was awakened by that early conversation with Freud when mystified I felt how deeply stirred he was by the phenomenon of sexuality Freud's greatest achievement probably consisted in taking neurotic patients seriously and entering into their peculiar individual psychology he had the courage to let the case material speak for itself and in this way was able to penetrate into the real psychology of his patients he saw with the patient's eyes so to speak and so reached a deeper understanding of mental illness than had hitherto been possible in this respect he was free of bias and courageous and succeeded in overcoming a host of prejudices like an old testament prophet he undertook to overthrow false gods to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonestism and hypocrisies mercilessly exposing the rottenness of the contemporary psyche he did not falter in the face of the unpopularity such an enterprise entailed the impetus which he gave our civilization sprang from his discovery of an avenue to the unconscious by evaluating dreams as the most important source of information concerning the unconscious processes he gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost he demonstrated empirically the presence of an unconscious psyche which had hitherto existed only as a philosophical postulate