I discussed the concept of Weltanschauung in considerable detail in my post Weltanschauung & World View, taking as a starting point the lecture Freud gave in the early 1930s, which I use here to structure an analysis of Jung’s shadow. It is advisable to read that post first; here is what matters for what follows.
In Lecture XXXV of the New Introductory Lectures, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” Freud insisted that psychoanalysis, as a specific branch of science, cannot and should not produce a total worldview of its own. It has to submit to the general scientific outlook, which is honestly incomplete: it “does not take everything into its scope, it is incomplete, and it makes no claim to being comprehensive or to constituting a system.” Against that disciplined, self-limiting science, Freud set two rivals: philosophy and religion, which he called science’s only really serious enemy, “of the three forces which can dispute the position of science, religion alone is a really serious enemy,” precisely because it fuses explanation, consolation and moral authority into a single promise: a total answer to human suffering that science, by definition, can never give. A Weltanschauung, in Freud’s sense, is an intellectual construction that ties together, in one system, four pieces that usually stay loose:
- a claim about what is real,
- a norm for what counts as knowledge,
- a commitment about what ought to be done, and
- an assumption about what a human being is.
Philosophy Freud treats more gently than religion, but not by much. It is not opposed to science; it behaves like one and partly uses the same methods. It parts company with science by clinging to the illusion that it can offer a picture of the universe without gaps, a picture that must fall apart with every new advance in knowledge. It goes wrong by overrating the power of reason, and sometimes by trusting intuition as a source of knowledge. And it matters only to a small circle; it has no hold on the great mass of people. To sum it up, Freud reaches for Heinrich Heine, who mocked the German professor who “with his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.” Freud had used the same lines decades earlier, in The Interpretation of Dreams, to describe what the mind does to a dream on waking: it smooths over the gaps and contradictions and forces the chaos into a coherent story.
Heine’s professor has a real model, most likely Hegel. His ambition was a system in which nothing is left over: “the true is the whole,” he wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in the Philosophy of Right, “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.” History, nature, art, religion and the state were all moments of one Spirit coming to know itself, and the system was meant to end in absolute knowledge. Nothing in the world could fall outside it, because anything that seemed to was just a moment the system had not yet absorbed.
Freud saw the psychological side of that ambition. The mind cannot bear gaps, so it fills them: the waking mind with a dream, the philosopher with a system, the paranoiac with a delusion. Hence his remark in Totem and Taboo that a paranoiac delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system: the same need for total coherence, without the brakes.
Science does not simply live with the gaps, though. It is driven by them, and it works on the conviction that an explanation exists to be found. The difference is that it does not declare the work finished. It fills a gap with a hypothesis, tests it, and stands ready to tear it out when the evidence turns against it. Hegel closed the system; science keeps it open on purpose. That, for Freud, was the whole point: a worldview that admits it is incomplete is not a failed Weltanschauung, but the only honest one.
My earlier post then moved to different terrain, the erosion of objective truth in post-truth culture, from Orwell to Colbert’s truthiness, and how the internet and AI accelerate the shift of authority from the printed page to the real-time feed. But it is this first part, the discipline Freud imposed on his own discipline, that serves as the measuring stick for what follows.
It is exactly that discipline Jung refused.
Jung built precisely the total system Freud said science cannot and should not offer. The unconscious and the archetypes became a metaphysical claim — objective psychic reality, not a provisional hypothesis. Individuation and active imagination became his rule for what counts as knowledge: you know the psyche by going through it, not by testing it from outside.— For Jung, a dream could reveal the truth; for Freud, it was something to be decoded, and the decoding had to be tested. Facing and accepting one’s own dark side, what Jung called integrating the shadow, became his answer to how one ought to live. And the Self, with a capital S, a kind of inner god at the center of the psyche, became his answer to what a human being is. Where Freud asked for discipline and admitted incompleteness, Jung built exactly the total thing Freud said science must not offer — and he built it on the very ground Freud saw as religion’s: the promise of a complete answer that explains, consoles and tells us how to live, all at once.
By “objective psychic reality,” Jung meant three things at once. Objective, because the deepest layer of the mind, the collective unconscious, is not made by the individual: its archetypes arrive already formed, like instincts, and turn up in the dreams of people who never read the myths they repeat. Objective, too, because these figures act on their own, as Philemon did in the Red Book, confronting the ego like another person. And real, because whatever shapes a life is real in its effects, his esse in anima. The trouble is the word itself: in science, objective means verifiable by others; in Jung, it means independent of the ego but visible only through his own experience and confirmed by his own interpretation.
It was at the very moment he was pulling his life and work together, at the end, that Jung left his own shadow out of the picture. The opportunity was there: his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, dictated to and assembled by Aniela Jaffé between 1957 and 1961, is a masterclass in hiding his shadow without appearing to hide anything. The original interview protocols — now being published by the Philemon Foundation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, after decades under restricted access — show a Jung speaking associatively and openly about his own “personal cosmology,” the same one that surfaces in the Red Book. The published book, instead, was reassembled into a linear, well-behaved narrative, built to stress his outer personality.
What was left out, as far as this editorial history has already been documented: fuller accounts of visionary experiences, toned down so as not to challenge Jung’s scientific credibility; the real extent of his relationship with Toni Wolff, tolerated for decades by Emma as something close to a second marriage; an entire chapter, “America,” sharply critical of American superficiality and materialism, cut because the family found it too harsh; and passages on his more heterodox views of religion, rewritten by Jaffé herself because she judged them too controversial.
The reasons given publicly — family privacy, printing costs, protecting his scientific reputation — are excuses that never touch the real nerve. The real nerve is this: a book that should have been the frankest possible account of a life spent mapping the unconscious became, in practice, the most carefully pruned document of his career. At the very least, there should have been a note in the preface saying that this same edition is the obvious starting point for examining Jung’s own shadow — a note his followers, to this day, avoid writing.
Let’s trace what seems to me to be the shadow of Jung under the four áreas Freud listed as
- Weltauschuung: a claim about what is real,
- A norm for what counts as knowledge,
- A commitment about what ought to be done, and
- An assumption about what a human being is
What is real for C.G. Jung, as can be concluded from his writings?
Andrey Miroshnichenko’s extension of McLuhan, Media Environments and Our Sensorium, where I discussed the perception of reality, gives a useful three-layer map of how reality reaches us: the given (direct sensory contact with the physical world), the represented (the symbolic, mental world built by language and writing — “the represented (the mental world built by language and writing); as the Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria put it, the word “doubles the world,” so that we can think about things and handle them in our minds even when they are not in front of us and the induced (a fully artificial, technologically manufactured environment, immersive enough to feel as real as the given). His argument is that we are now migrating, stage by stage, into the induced layer: physical orientation gives way to social orientation, gravity gives way to closeness with influential people and trending topics, and a new sixth sense — a feel for social gravitational fields — replaces the old feel for a crowded or empty room. He calls this not speculation but inevitable evolution: the sensorium itself, not just its content, being reshaped by the medium.
Whether or not that inevitability holds, the mechanism he describes — a manufactured environment coming to feel as immediately real as the physical world it displaces — is not a new invention of the digital age. Jung is a textbook case of it happening a century earlier, on a different medium.
His intellectual matrix was not clinical psychiatry disciplining itself into caution, the way Freud tried to discipline psychoanalysis into staying inside the scientific worldview. Sonu Shamdasani’s intellectual history of Jung places its origin somewhere else entirely: in the vitalist Naturphilosophie of the German Romantics, and in the psychical research and spiritism that, at the end of the nineteenth century, were still taken seriously at universities as legitimate objects of study, not as circus sideshow. (I had already pointed to this material in: C G Jung’s Intellectual Matrix, without yet drawing out what it implied, what I do now.) Jung’s own family supplied the raw material directly — his mother’s side had practicing mediums — and his 1902 doctoral dissertation was a case study of his own cousin, Helene Preiswerk, and the trance personalities she produced in séances he attended and recorded himself. Before he ever wrote about archetypes, Jung’s given reality already included a world in which the boundary between a person’s ordinary self and something speaking through them was thin, permeable, and worth a medical degree to investigate. Jung’s dissertation of 1902 was a study of his cousin Helly Preiswerk and the spirit voices she produced in séances he attended and recorded himself. His conclusion then was firmly psychological: the ‘spirits’ were split-off parts of her own unconscious. But the conclusion did not hold. In 1948 he added a note to a lecture on belief in spirits, admitting he was no longer sure that psychology alone could explain such phenomena. He never said the dead speak; he simply stopped saying they don’t. For those who believe in communication with the dead, that was enough: Jung had, in their eyes, confirmed it. The young doctor who explained the séance had become, by the end, the authority the séance invoked.
That is the induced environment Jung’s own sensorium was built inside — not screens and immersive feedback loops, but séances, vitalist philosophy, and a Gnostic vocabulary he adopted later to describe what he thought he was finding. And exactly as Miroshnichenko describes for us now, the induced can stop feeling induced. What started as one intellectual current among several — Naturphilosophie, psychical research, Gnosticism, all live options in his particular time and place — hardened, in Jung’s hands, into the given: not a hypothesis about the psyche shaped by the milieu he grew up in, but objective psychic reality, a metaphysical claim presented as observation. The same move Miroshnichenko says is happening to all of us with digital media — mistaking a manufactured environment for unmediated reality — is the move at the foundation of Jung’s entire system. He did not escape the mechanism he might have been the first to diagnose in someone else. He lived inside it, called it the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, psychological complexes, introversion and extraversion, and never quite noticed the induction. The last two found a place in scientific psychology; the first three became the perfect vocabulary of the New Age’s wishful thinking, which is no accident, since the New Age took from Jung exactly what he had never subjected to any test.
Much like Freud’s Ego, Superego, and Id, these concepts — when viewed through the paradigm of the natural sciences and contemporary experimental psychology — are not considered “scientifically demonstrable” or empirically verifiable in the same way as natural laws. This doesn’t invalidate the points Freud was discussing, namely the criteria for a Weltanschauung and why neither psychoanalysis, in his formulation, nor science could fit the bill. In this regard Freud was extremely sharp, in my view. Jung, by contrast, was extremely confusing, and behind the confusion, whether by design or not, lay an agenda: not only a cult of his own personality, but the hope of being recognized as the prophet of something close to a new religion, a religion without a church, with the Self in the place of God. Philip Rieff gave it the best name I know: psychology as a language of faith.
The first and perhaps most obvious aspect of his shadow is that Jung takes all his concepts for granted, i.e., they exist and are real.
What counts, for C.G. Jung, as knowledge?
His answer was broader than laboratory science: knowledge of psychic experience as it shows up in consciousness, dreams, fantasies, symbols, myths, and behavior. He called his method empirical, but stretched the word to cover careful attention to lived psychological phenomena, not only measurement. A dream, a fantasy, a religious image did not need to be factually true as an external event to count as real — it was psychologically real if it shaped a life. The unconscious itself was never observed directly, only inferred from its manifestations, and a symbol, for Jung, could never be reduced to a single concept — it pointed beyond any one interpretation, which kept knowledge provisional and open-ended by design. The nearest thing he had to a validation test was pragmatic: an interpretation earned credibility in the clinic when it produced more integration, more self-understanding, a more workable relation to conflict — a result, not a laboratory proof.
None of this makes him a relativist. He never claimed every interpretation was as good as any other; he judged them by coherence, by how well they accounted for the material, by their consistency across cases. But that judgment always had to be made by someone. In 1959, on the BBC’s Face to Face, when asked whether he believed in God, Jung answered: “I don’t need to believe, I know.” He later regretted the line, but by his own account he regretted how simple it sounded to the public, not the structure behind it. In letters written after the broadcast, he explained that he had meant only that he knew from experience a factor in the psyche he called God, not that he knew God existed. Yet four years earlier he had already said, “I only believe in what I know, and that eliminates believing.” What he knew rested on his own clinical practice and his own reading of myth, evidence he alone produced, interpreted, and validated.
Read today, the line sounds less like a slip than like an inadvertent confession. A scientist says “I suppose” and waits for the test. A believer says “I believe” and accepts that he may be wrong. Only one kind of man says “I don’t need to believe, I know”: the one who claims to have seen for himself what others can only take on faith. That is not the language of the psychologist. It is the language of the prophet. And the retreat that followed, from God to “a factor in the psyche,” was the same slide we have already seen, from psychic reality to reality and back, whenever someone asked him to hold still.
That is the real problem underneath the epistemology: Jung decided what counted as knowledge, and there was no one positioned outside that circle to correct him when he got it wrong. A brief summary of what a few earlier posts of mine document in more detail, for readers who won’t click through: in Wotan (1936), Jung alone decided that Nazism was “an enormous eruption of the collective unconscious,” the German psyche’s suppressed Wotan archetype resurfacing — a diagnosis no one outside his own theory could check, applied to a real political movement with real consequences. His 1934 essay “The State of Psychotherapy Today,” with its description of the Jew as “a relative nomad” needing a “host people” for culture, caused what his own Jewish followers in Palestine called bewilderment, and the price shows up concretely in how Jung was received in the United States: once received better than Freud himself, his reputation collapsed after the 1930s statements; he went largely untaught in American academic psychiatry, and by his own account, “presenting Jung is still an uphill battle” today. His fraught relationship with James Joyce makes the same mechanism visible on different ground: Jung read Ulysses and pronounced it “thoroughly hopeless emptiness” — a judgment delivered with the same confidence he brought to diagnosing archetypes — and Joyce never forgave him for it, mocking him ever after as the “Swiss Tweedledum” and folding the grudge into Finnegans Wake as “psoakoonaloose.” Yet in 1934, estranged as they were, Joyce still entrusted his daughter Lucia to Jung’s care at the Küsnacht sanatorium — the same critical judgment he had spent over a decade ridiculing was, in the end, the authority he turned to for his own family. And Richard Noll’s account of “the Jung cult” — read with the same caution already noted about Noll’s contested use of the 1925 seminar material — describes Jung teaching disciples to seek their own experience of self-deification, planning to expand his Psychological Club into an “endless number of small groups” worldwide under his own leadership, its symbol a rose-wound cross borrowed from the Rosicrucian tradition. Four different troubles, one shared root: a system in which Jung was never answerable to a criterion he did not also get to define.
What, for C.G. Jung, ought a person to do?
He recommended confronting the shadow rather than repressing it, integrating unconscious material, pursuing individuation, resisting collective conformity. All of that assumes psychic wholeness is worth having — an assumption, not a proof — and once granted, it runs into trouble fast.
Integration is not automatically moral. A man can become fully conscious of his own aggression, narcissism, or appetite for control without becoming a better person for it — self-knowledge just as easily produces a more articulate, more self-justified version of the same impulse as it produces restraint. Individuation can conflict with social responsibility, because “become who you truly are, resist the collective” frees a person from real oppression in one case and excuses abandoning a marriage, a family, an obligation in another — the same words cover both, with nothing inside the theory to say which one is happening. The Self can become an authority no one can verify: Jung treated dreams and intuitions as carrying guidance “from the Self,” but there is no test for telling that apart from ordinary wish fulfillment dressed in dignified language. Symbolic interpretation can legitimate almost any course of action, because archetypal vocabulary is elastic enough to redescribe nearly any impulse as a hero’s journey or a necessary sacrifice, which conceals the ethical question rather than answering it. And underneath all four sits Hume’s old point: Jung’s psychology is very good at explaining why someone feels pulled toward a course of action, and explaining a pull is not the same as showing that following it is right. His system produces plenty of “is” and never quite earns the “ought” that his own case-by-case pronouncements assumed.
The elephant in the room is that Jungian analysis has no real equivalent to Freud’s superego. Freud’s version could be oppressive and culturally contingent, but it still stood as an internalized norm the ego had to answer to. Jung replaced it with the Self — therapeutically freeing where the superego was pathological shame, but with nobody left to ask whether a claimed message from the Self was genuine or just desire in a mythic costume. The gap was serious enough that Erich Neumann, Jung’s own most loyal and orthodox student, wrote an entire book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), trying to build the floor Jung’s psychology never laid — and never fully closed it even so.
Jung did not just theorize that gap. He lived inside it — with Emma, with Toni Wolff, and with Sabina Spielrein, his patient before she was anything else, where consent, dependency, and interpretive authority were never cleanly separable. His own vocabulary could redescribe any of it as an encounter with the anima, a necessary confrontation with convention, a demand of individuation — symbolic significance that settles nothing about consent, fidelity, or harm. And the same gap shows up in miniature in how the tradition remembers Wolff herself: her one clearly documented, undisputed contribution — the structural forms of the feminine psyche — gets less attention than the far shakier claim that she helped shape his typology, because crediting the mistress with quietly co-authoring the master’s system was always going to be more interesting than crediting her with a system of her own.
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What is for C.G. Jung an assumption about what a human being is?
Underneath the first three requirements sits a fourth, and it’s the one that makes the other three cohere into a single anthropology rather than three separate complaints. What does Jung think a human being actually is? Not divided in the ordinary sense of having conflicting desires — every psychology grants that — but divided as a structural, permanent condition: a conscious ego that is only ever a fragment of a larger psychic totality, mostly unconscious, partly inherited rather than personally acquired, expressing itself in symbols before it expresses itself in argument, and capable, over a lifetime, of becoming more conscious of that division without ever fully resolving it. That is a real anthropology, not a throwaway assumption, and it is more interesting than either the tabula rasa of the behaviorists or the rational agent of classical philosophy.
The trouble is what happens next, quietly, without ever being argued for: that anthropology becomes a ranking. The more individuated person, the one who has confronted the shadow, integrated the unconscious material, and become symbolically self-aware, is treated as the more adequate human being — a better instance of what a person is for. But Jung never establishes why psychic integration should be the standard against which a human life gets measured, rather than one standard among several competing ones: justice, consent, fidelity, the prevention of harm to others. A perfectly individuated person and a perfectly just one are not guaranteed to be the same person, and Jung’s framework has no mechanism for telling you which to prioritize when they come apart. It simply assumes, by writing as though “more conscious” and “more whole” were self-evidently better, that the ranking has already been settled.
You don’t have to look far to see where that assumption did real damage. The same anthropology that names the ego a fragment of something larger also supplied Jung with a category — the anima — into which an actual, independent woman could be filed as a psychic function of his own development rather than treated as a full subject in her own right. Spielrein, Wolff, even Emma, could each be read, in his own vocabulary, as manifestations of his unconscious doing its necessary work, which is a strange and convenient thing for an anthropology to make possible: the theory of what a human being is turns out to have a built-in exception for how one particular human being was allowed to treat the human beings closest to him.
The fourth and final aspect of his shadow, then, is this: Jung’s picture of the human being is genuinely original and, on its own terms, psychologically rich — but it smuggled in a ranking of what counts as a fuller human life without ever arguing for it, and that unearned ranking is exactly the gap his own life walked through.
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My take, how it happened and how it evolved to come up to what is here
To be fair to Jung, I owe him a great deal. When I came to know some aspects of his shadow that were very hard to swallow, I felt frustrated and disappointed, and it took me a while to balance that against his brilliant points. When I sat down to write this post, I intended at least to be dialectical with him about how it has happened to me; I mean, my analysis under his tenets, and in my case, two aspects that apparently have nothing to do with the subject must be examined in detail.
The first is the writing I did in many forms, from a piece of paper at the side of my bed for marking down dreams to uploading it all to the cloud.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as the Swiss railway magazine recalled, Jung said that words and paper had stopped being real enough for him, and that he had to carve his innermost thoughts into stone. He also insisted that whatever arises in a dream or in active imagination must be recorded, written, drawn, fixed somewhere outside the head, or it dissolves. His Red Book was that record, lettered by hand like a medieval manuscript. Mine was made of HTML. Without a keyboard to write down dreams the moment I woke, and without Dreamweaver to give that material a structure, a horizon, a floor to stand on, I doubt I could have reached the point of saying anything well referenced about Jung at all. The tools were not a side story. They were how an appreciation of Jung became something I could actually operate.
The cloud became for me what stone was for Jung.
The second is nerve. It takes a lot of it to claim an idea encompassing Jung’s thought, and on top of that to offer an analysis of his shadow. It began when I read The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, and continued when I did my homework for Shadowy Perception. Finally, I bought and read Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography and fully agreed with the New York Times reviewer when he wrote: “Bair’s stated goal is to rise above the fray and answer the questions most often posed about Jung: Was he an anti-Semite? Was he a womanizer? Was his psychological theory a form of religion? She largely succeeds. Painstakingly fair, she digs up and scrutinizes sources with an admirable, if sometimes exhausting, thoroughness.” From there on, I used her research and her positioning to secure mine.
From 1983 to 1996
My involvement with analysis — which ultimately favored a blend of Freud and Jung — began in May 1983 (with a couple of pre-analysis introductory sessions with a couple of psychiatrists), and I returned to Brazil for good at the end of that year. In the six months following my decision to undergo analysis, I arranged, through referrals, interviews with psychiatrists holding PhDs and with highly respected analysts, since I knew nothing about how analysis actually worked and needed to understand the process first. Psychoanalysis quickly stood out as my best option — it also happened to be the dominant system in the United States at the time. I had a particular aversion to Skinner, especially to what he argued in Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Cognitivism, from what the people I spoke with described, was strong on the experimental side but still in its infancy as a basis for clinical analysis. What I came to know about Chomsky reinforced that impression: something in his work struck me as still Skinnerian underneath, as though he had taken Skinner’s framework and dressed it up as something new. Whether because of that impression, or simply my own antipathy toward Chomsky, I committed to psychoanalysis as my working tool and set the rest aside.
About a year and a half passed between deciding to find someone to analyze me and actually starting, from mid 1982, while I was still in the United States, until I returned to Brazil at the end of 83. The first sessions were just orientation — figuring out what it was all about and which method drew me more.
It really started after the interview with Father Conrad, discussing how to fix our boys’ first communion and my declared non-Catholic orientation. Basically me made me understand that I didn’t know myself and had to to analysis to see and understand myself.
Freud was the way in, because he’s a fantastic writer and a pleasure to read. Jung came later: he demands prerequisites I picked up along the way, reading Freud and talking with the people guiding me, until Campbell’s book opened the door — “The Portable Jung” (1971, Penguin), the collection Joseph Campbell put together from the Princeton Collected Works, years before he became famous with “The Power of Myth.” His achievement was arranging the texts in a sequence that builds perspective, instead of dropping the reader straight into the chronological tangle of the complete works. I translated the main parts in a separate post (JUNG1); the two pieces that hit me hardest were “The Stages of Life” and “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship.”, which can be read there.
The practical difference between the two schools comes down fast: Freud on the couch, facing away, free association, tracing the symptom back to the original trauma — a method that looks backward. Jung, face to face, in armchairs, amplification instead of association — instead of letting the patient drift away from the symbol, he enriched it with parallels from myth, fairy tales, religion, alchemy, asking what it means now, not where it came from. A dream, for Freud, is a disguise to decode; for Jung, it’s a direct revelation in the language of image, and from that comes active imagination — dialoguing awake with the dream figure, letting it act without directing the scene, and recording what happened (writing, drawing, whatever it takes) so it doesn’t stay only in your head.
The good news is both can be done alone, in self-analysis, mainly through dream interpretation. A notebook by the bed, writing it down the moment you wake, and learning to tell apart the dream that means nothing from the one carrying real information. That’s the process I adopted, with help from my wife, who turned out to be a wonderful dream interpreter.
In Brazil, Jung was simply unknown, apart from a few enthusiastic groups who tried to set up something modeled on the Eranos circle. It was frustrating: the participants’ lack of grounding ended up attracting an esoteric crowd — astrology, tarot, alchemy, crystal cults, all the things Jung, by validating them as a legitimate manifestation of the collective unconscious, draws like a magnet. It was exactly what I was running from, and exactly what fascinated my mother — she thought I was her spiritual heir, that I was channeling all of it into her spiritism. In analysis I discovered that, however much I rationally displayed coolness and disinterest, in the unconscious I was keeping in the closet the same nature I had drunk in with her milk — hence my lasting suspicion that anything invoking metaphysical force, religion included, is manipulation.
The official Portuguese translation of Jung’s works also stalled and was poorly done — I compared the initial volumes they released with the English editions, and it was obvious the translators were out of their depth, even on basic concepts like animus and anima. I wrote to the editors and suggested corrections, and a side project like translating the Portable Jung as a separate project, because with their approach, it would take years to get to what Campbell achieved with his Portable Jung. No reply. I gave up on the Portuguese-translated Jung’s writings once I understood his agenda — explicit or not — of turning into a prophet and inducing a personality cult in his readers, and the dangers of his assumptions, which came together with its benefits, as I outlined here in this post.
I donated my entire collection to a Jungian association in Paraná (a state of Brazil): I concluded it was too dangerous a path to let my children and grandchildren walk into, the same one I walked into and managed to walk back out of, but that plenty of people walk into and never find their way out.
The episode that settled the matter happened on a Christmas trip at the end of 82, returning from the United States, a semester or so before I finished my assignment. Anxious about how to continue the analysis. I went to a meeting in São Paulo meant to follow the Eranos model and found the exact opposite of what I was looking for: A New Age Movement Jamboree. Back in Campinas, where I live, I used to walk aimlessly to calm down, stopped in front of the Cambuí Tennis Club, and saw an analysis clinic in the house next door. I went in, asked if they did psychoanalysis, paid for the session up front (about 100 dollars) without saying who I was or that I was just passing through, and talked for the full 50 minutes to a man who stayed sphinx-like from start to finish.
I got home, and the phone rang: it was him, suddenly talkative, asking whether I’d paid for the session. I went back furious, and the secretary — attractive, self-possessed — said I had “forgotten” to pay, smiling the whole time. I told her I had friends on the police force and she’d better return what she’d stolen before the event turned into an interrogation in a precint of a police station. She erupted in shouting; the analyst stood there with no idea how to make it all disappear and said he wouldn’t charge me at all. I left, and when I got home, the phone rang again: it was him, talkative, pleased, thanking me for having “clarified” a suspicion he already had about the young woman.
That hit me like a bolt of lightning: how could a man like that analyze anyone? Shaken enough to look like easy prey for a scam, I still had the presence of mind to defend myself without drama, two or three days before leaving Brazil. It was the final straw. I decided to work it out on my own, dig deeper into my dreams and decode my own unconscious — I felt a relief close to abreaction, even without knowing the word for it yet, and I think God had His fun at my expense until I stopped being a fool. From then on, intensely at first and for years afterward, dream interpretation was what let me see myself clearly, understand how I function and live at peace tending to work and family.
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In December 1996, when I was already at peace with myself, I put together a summary that gives an idea of how the analysis I had begun in 1993 concluded for me. I would say that I gained self-awareness and identified my “complexes” (in the Jungian sense, not the modern understanding) and the “hang-ups” they had caused me; I felt that—even if I hadn’t achieved total self-insight—I had greatly broadened my horizons since that interview with Friar Conrad, who had authorized my children’s first communion. The text—an abridged version—is as follows:
C. G. Jung
Presentation (Dec/96)
John Main, Prior of the Benedictine Priory of Montreal, opens one of his talks by saying that impersonal theory, however correct, always seems to float in the stratosphere; to come down to earth it needs a personal context, and only then does it become not just correct, but true. I tried to build this collection along those lines: partly a narrative of how I found my way into Jung’s ideas, partly an attempt to make that path agreeable, or at least walkable, for anyone who wants to follow it.
Simply listing Jung’s works is a formidable task on its own. He wrote mostly in German between 1900 and 1961, and the English editions of his lectures and books came out haphazardly starting in the 1930s, mostly after 1950. Researching this in the early 1980s in the US, using the Library of Congress’ Books in Print catalog, I found an enormous number of titles by and about him. The one that mattered was the Collected Works itself: twenty volumes, Bollingen Series XX, translated over roughly two decades by R.F.C. Hull under the editorial direction of Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation. Eighteen volumes plus assorted lecture collections, with no obvious place to start, was both discouraging and expensive.
Freud, by contrast, already had an excellent one-volume entry point: the Modern Library’s Basic Writings, translated and introduced by A.A. Brill. Modern Library tried the same for Jung in 1959, with Violet Laszlo’s compilation of “basic writings,” and Mentor Books tried again with a “primer” — the way Calvin Hall’s Freud primer had worked so well that I translated it into Portuguese myself, since no version existed. Neither Jung attempts worked for me: I couldn’t get past the first pages of Laszlo’s collection, and the Mentor primer was simply incomprehensible.
I was ready to give up when The Portable Jung reached my hands: Joseph Campbell’s 1971 selection from the Collected Works, published by Penguin, years before Campbell became famous in his own right with The Power of Myth. It was like a window opening in a closed room. Campbell’s achievement was to arrange Jung’s own texts — pulled from across four decades of his career, not in the order he wrote them, but in the sequence that teaches rather than the one that happened — into a path that builds perspective and prepares the reader to take on the full body of work in an organized way. Laszlo’s collection, however sympathetic, never manages that.
In 1983 I wrote to the Brazilian publisher then translating the Collected Works into Portuguese (Editora Vozes, Petrópolis), suggesting they base the Portuguese edition on Campbell’s structure, or at least on Laszlo’s. I got no reply; the translation went ahead on whatever criterion it followed, and by the 1990s I had lost interest in owning the Portuguese editions at all.
I still consider Campbell’s Portable format the most valid way in, and his introduction a small masterclass in how to solve this particular problem of approach. Good luck, patience, and perseverance to anyone who takes it on.
A Man, Two Houses, Two Lakes
On C.G. Jung’s traces around the Zurich region — from a piece by Walo von Fellenberg, photos by Roland Stucki and Pia Zanetti, published in “Via,” the magazine of the Swiss federal railways (CFF)
I picked this article up during a work trip years ago, in the early ’90s, on a train ride, when my fascination with Jung made me trade a few planned days in Geneva, where work had led me, for a detour to Zurich instead. What I found there matched what I already suspected going in: the Jung Institute offered nothing but training in Jungian analysis itself — no outside vantage point, no critical distance, just the method teaching itself to itself, which I already knew was all it would be. Thirty-some years after his death, the hero of the hour was plainly the object of a personality cult of his own making, tended carefully by his own institute. And one educated, culturally serious Swiss I ran into on that same trip made no secret of what they thought of the whole apparatus — they turned up their noses at Jung, without much patience for the reverence built up around him.
The magazine piece I brought home takes exactly that reverent tone, but it’s a good record of the places all the same. Jung was a man of lakes. He lived with his family in Küsnacht, on the shore of Lake Zurich, in a house at Seestrasse 228 with a Latin inscription over the door: “Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit” — called or not, God will be present. Visitors ranged from Hermann Hesse to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. But his real refuge was Bollingen, a remote plot on what was once called “Gotteshausland” — God’s-house land, once monastery property — bought in 1922, where he built, without electricity or running water, a stone tower in phases he said tracked his own inner maturation. He explained the need for it this way: science had let him progressively drive off his own inner ghosts, but words and paper had stopped being fully real to him — he needed, in his own words, to carve his innermost thoughts into stone.
Two stories from that place stayed with me. In a dream, Jung heard young men coming down the mountains around the tower with laughter, singing, accordions — which he connected to the medieval Swiss mercenaries who once marched along that same lake toward Milan to enlist in foreign armies. Less mysteriously: when he began building the tower in 1923, his eldest daughter warned him the ground was “full of corpses.” Four years later he found the bones of a French soldier, apparently drowned in the Linth River during a 1799 battle and washed down to Bollingen. Jung gave the unknown soldier a proper burial, firing a three-gun salute over the grave.
Emma Jung paid a price for all this that the article can’t quite bring itself to dwell on. In a 1911 letter to Freud she confessed that everyone who visited them really came to see Carl, that women fell hopelessly in love with him, and that she had to deliberately play a bit foolish in company just so she wouldn’t have to compete with him or simply be left out.
By the end of his life Jung offered his own summary: that his writings were, at bottom, dictated from somewhere inside him, born of what he called a fatal inner pressure. He knew some people would react badly to it, since it’s hard to accept an equal counterpart to the conscious world — but the success he did have, he said, was more than he could ever have expected.
On the positive side, from the greate man/cientist Jung was, the three outstanding articles Jung wrote, which impressed me, I summarized them here:
The Stages of Life (Collected Works, Vol. 8)
Jung narrows his target from the start: not the whole of psychic life from cradle to grave, but “problems” specifically — things that are difficult, ambiguous, open to more than one answer. Problems, in his account, are the price of consciousness. An animal, submerged in instinct, has no problems; only when a person opposes instinct does consciousness — and with it doubt, hesitation, the need to choose — come into being. This is, psychologically, the meaning of the Fall: the dawn of consciousness experienced as a curse, and yet the only door open once we’re through it.
He traces three stages: a first, chaotic stage of mere recognition; a second, “monarchic” stage once the ego-complex has formed; and a third — arriving around puberty — where the person becomes aware of an inner division, a second center of energy contesting the ego’s leadership. This dualistic awareness is where his real subject begins. The problems of youth (roughly puberty to the mid-thirties) are mostly a fixation on the narrower, more self-centered consciousness of the earlier stage — a resistance to admitting anything foreign as part of one’s own life.
The essay’s center of gravity is the shift he places between 35 and 40: convictions and moral principles, he observes, tend to harden rather than mellow with age, reaching an intolerant, almost fanatical peak around 50 — as if principles under threat needed defending all the more loudly. He illustrates this with a deeply religious sexton who grew steadily more moralistic and gloomy through his forties, until one night at 55 he sat up in bed and told his wife, “Now I finally know — I’m nothing but a scoundrel,” and spent the rest of his life and fortune on dissipation. His point: the neuroses of later adulthood mostly share one feature, an attempt to drag the psychology proper to youth past “the years of discretion.”
His central image is the sun: rising in the morning toward an unknown zenith, then reversing everything it stood for on the way down. Nobody, he notes, is schooled for the afternoon of life the way schools exist for the young — except that religions used to serve exactly that function, however few people still experience them that way. Without some equivalent, people fill the vacuum with hypochondria, bitterness, nostalgia, or perpetual adolescence.
Jung is explicit that science can say nothing, one way or the other, about immortality or a life beyond death — we know as little about it as about whether Mars is inhabited. But as a physician he states plainly that patients oriented toward some transcendent purpose fare better than those who aren’t, and that treating the old symbolic images of an afterlife with genuine respect is, in his words, “hygienic” — the psyche needs them the way the body needs salt, whether or not we can explain the chemistry.
He closes with the same solar image split into quarters: childhood and old age share one thing in spite of their obvious differences — both are submerged in the unconscious, without the conscious “problems” that fill only the two middle quarters of the arc. This is also his justification for leaving both of them out of the essay altogether.
Marriage as a Psychological Relationship (Collected Works, Vol. 17)
Jung’s starting premise: there’s no such thing as a psychological relationship between two people to the extent that either remains unconscious of themselves. A young person at marrying age is, almost by definition, still largely unconscious — which means the choice of spouse is driven far more by unconscious motive than by free will, however convinced the person is, in the moment of falling in love, that they know exactly what they’re doing.
The chief unconscious motive, in his account, is the parental complex: how a man relates to his mother, or a woman to her father, shapes and often distorts the choice of partner, positively or negatively. Whatever a parent failed to live gets handed down to the child to compensate — an overly moralistic parent produces an “immoral” child, and so on down a long list of examples, the worst outcomes coming from parents who stayed deliberately unconscious of their own dissatisfaction. His example: a mother who unconsciously ties her son to herself as a substitute husband, pushing him either toward homosexuality or toward a wife either clearly inferior to her, or tyrannical enough to pry him loose.
Where the choice is left to instinct, it may serve the species well, but the resulting bond, Jung argues, stays at the level of “identity” rather than genuine relationship: the fusion moment (“one heart and one soul”) is real, even a kind of authentic religious experience, but it strips both partners of their individual will, remaking the woman into Mother and the man into Father — both instruments of life’s own purpose rather than distinct people.
The real psychological work of marriage, in his account, begins at midlife, through what he calls the dynamic of the “container” and the “contained.” One partner — usually the simpler, more unified personality — lives entirely within the marriage, complete and undivided there. The other — more complex, prone to inner division — contains the first without being contained in turn, and increasingly feels, without fully admitting it, that something in them still lives outside the relationship. This asymmetry is what produces the marital crises of middle age, often through projection: every man, in Jung’s account, carries an inherited image of Woman (the “anima”), every woman an inherited image of Man (the “animus”), and certain people — the classic “sphinx” type he mentions, citing Rider Haggard’s She as an illustration — seem built to attract exactly that projection from someone else’s marriage.
Where the crisis is worked through rather than escaped by separation, Jung’s claim is that dissociation is cured not by separation but by a fuller inner integration: the person who spent the marriage looking outside themselves for completion discovers, if they survive the disillusionment, that what they sought was to be found within. That shift — from instinct to spirit, from nature to culture — is, for Jung, the real content of a psychological marriage. He’s careful to add that it can’t be forced by an act of moral will: suppressing instinct in the name of spirituality produces something as false and repugnant as raw sensuality itself.
What I cannot accept in Jung
Jung, in fact, placed “meaning” at the center of psychic suffering. In a 1932 lecture on the relationship between psychotherapy and the care of souls, he wrote that neurosis should ultimately be understood as the suffering of a soul that has not found its meaning. Yet, he offered no criteria to distinguish a meaning that heals from one that harms others. His own life illustrates this problem: for decades, he maintained a parallel relationship with Toni Wolff—one that was open and tolerated within his family—which he could interpret as part of his own process of individuation. Freud, through the concept of the superego, provided at least an external point of reference against which an individual’s desires could be measured. By replacing this with the “Self”—which only the individual can consult—Jung was left without such a check. Worst, his method could lead a person to the same condition.
Psychotherapists or the Clergy (Collected Works, Vol. 11 — 1932)
Jung starts from an institutional gap: nineteenth-century medicine built itself as a natural science around material causation, and had no room for the psyche in its own right. Yet clinical experience kept forcing the issue — neuroses turned out to have psychic causes, curable only by psychic means, no matter how hard medicine tried to reduce them to glands and drives. Freud’s sexual theory and Adler’s will-to-power theory, in Jung’s account, both got closer to the root of neurosis than anything medicine had offered before, but both remain one-sided: a psychology without a psyche, aimed at patients who supposedly have no spiritual needs — which is, in Jung’s view, simply not true of anyone.
What a suffering patient wants, whether or not they’d put it this way, is what Jung calls the four gifts of grace: faith, hope, love, and understanding. None of these can be taught, manufactured, or argued into existence — they come only through experience, and experience can’t be engineered, only approached. This leaves the doctor in an odd position: sent to him because he’s assumed to be physically ill, he ends up being asked, in effect, to do a priest’s job with none of a priest’s training or authority.
Jung reports a small survey he ran among educated Swiss, German and French Protestants and Catholics, asking whether people in spiritual crisis today consult a doctor or a clergyman. 57% of Protestants chose the doctor against 8% choosing clergy; Catholics ran the other way, 58% to 25%. The reasons given for avoiding the clergy: a perceived lack of psychological insight, and a dogmatic, moralizing cast of mind. He predicts — on the theory that it takes about twenty years for an educated class’s outlook to filter down to everyone else — that this preference will eventually become general.
His own clinical experience, he says flatly, backs this up in the starkest terms: among all his patients past thirty-five, there was not one whose problem did not ultimately come down to finding a religious outlook on life, and none were cured without recovering one — which, he’s careful to add, has nothing to do with any particular creed. He argues that Freud’s reduction of all such religious or philosophical doubt to disguised sexual repression misses this entirely — like a sinking ship’s crew worrying about the chemical composition of the water coming in rather than the leak itself.
Jung’s most personal point is about acceptance. A doctor who wants to help a human being has to be able to accept them as they are — including the worst in them — and can only really do that once he’s accepted the same thing in himself. He reads the Christian instruction to love one’s enemy as extending inward, to the enemy inside oneself, and argues that most people do exactly the reverse: condemning and hiding their own shadow rather than owning it. Self-acceptance, not moral performance, is for him the real content of the ethical demand — and the nearly impossible one.
He closes by placing himself deliberately on the “extreme left” of Protestant opinion, while still insisting a great many people are better off, and more honestly served, inside the Catholic Church than outside it — and that a primitive religion suits primitive man better than a Christianity too foreign to his blood for him to do anything but mimic it badly. There should be, he says, Protestants against the Catholic Church and Protestants against Protestantism too, because the living spirit outgrows every historical form it takes: “the names and forms men have given it matter little against it — they are only the leaves and flowers of the eternal tree.”
I included this piece because, reading it at the time, I started to suspect something my own analysis would only make explicit much later: that religion and faith — even inside the confusion Jung makes of them, blending them freely with archetypes and his own personal authority — have a merit of their own, one that went beyond my instinctive distrust of anything invoking metaphysical forces. It would take analysis to uncover in me where that distrust actually came from. But the seed of doubting my own doubt was already here, in 1932, long before me and, of all people planting it, Jung was the first one.
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How This Material Ended Up in the Cloud
From 1996 to 2016
Here’s something that contradicts my own self-image, though I’m not quite sure how to put it: while I thought of myself as an atheist, someone who considered anything with a religious basis mere manipulation, some part of me was unconsciously still practicing the Spiritism I’d absorbed with my mother’s milk. I don’t believe in reincarnation — I want to be clear about that — but I had a distinct impression, for lack of a better word, that I had somehow helped build the Gothic Cathedrals in a past life in the Middle Ages.
That impression got its outlet when we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with the customary trip to Paris, and took a side trip to nearby Chartres. The story — minus the confession I just made — is told in detail on one of the first websites I ever built, which predates the modern web as most people know it: I made it in Dreamweaver, the application anyone who worked in web design before the cloud era will remember. Dreamweaver’s most telling feature, in hindsight, is that it needed no internet connection at all — you could build a complete site on a laser disc, and it worked exactly the same as when it was hosted on a server. That’s the whole difference between the old model and the cloud, in a few words: a traditional server is like owning a house, yours to maintain and extend yourself; the cloud is like renting in a managed building, where someone else handles the plumbing, and you upgrade on demand. Either way, what actually gets loaded is HTML — the invisible skeleton under every page on the internet.
How I started uploading my site blogs in the cloud
HTML has an IBM grandfather. IBM invented GML, the markup language that directly inspired HTML — a straight evolutionary line from an internal corporate need to the language the entire web now runs on. I learned GML in the 1970s and ’80s at IBM in the United States, using it to write the manuals for the diagnostics I helped design for mainframes — the IBM 4341, in my case. So when Dreamweaver crossed my path in the mid-90s, I picked it up like I’d already been trained for it, because in a sense I had been. Uploading to the internet was expensive and difficult in Brazil at the time, so I worked straight off laser discs — and my first real project, the one you can now find in the cloud today, was Chartres.
Notice on this site’s blog that I had to do the translations myself and indicate them through banners, because there was no such thing as automatic translation as it is offered today!
From 2016 to 2026
How did I come to do that? Andre Baldinelli — a good friend, bonded over a shared taste for Ray Conniff, didn’t know I worked at IBM, and we came to be friends because of Ray Conniff. Long story short, I gave him all my Ray Conniff LPs, and he, as a token of his appreciation, took a site/blog I had designed using Dreamweaver, rented hosting space, and put it online up in the cloud. This site was the James Joyce Encyclopedia—my first project featuring the modern characteristics that became my personal trademark.
Andre, sharp with anything related to programming, pointed me to WordPress and taught me how to carry my old IBM-era habits into something modern and far easier than the laser-disc days I just described. In the ten years since, I’ve built more sites and blogs than I can count, Freud and Psychoanalysis on the Dock among them — and this whole analysis of Jung’s shadow is one of its byproducts.
