stand up, wondering who was what now. The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness. But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me.
He sat on that stone for hours, trying to work out whether it was him, or he was it. This was how Carl Jung described it to his assistant, the analyst Aniela Jaffé, when he was eighty and finally agreed to recount his life. Thinking about it then, he added:
Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married man, had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled that fire full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing whether it was I or I it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zürich, and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and time. This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onwards, moving further and further away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself away violently from the spot in order not to lose hold of my future.
A strange child and a strange childhood. When the young Bertha Schenk came to take the infant Carl for walks along the Rhine, Pastor Jung had often been looking after his son on his own, the mother, Emilie, being ‘away’ in some unknown place for people suffering from unknown ills. ‘Dim intimations of trouble in my parents’ marriage hovered around me,’ Carl later recalled. As a child he fell ill with fever and suffered horribly from eczema. ‘My illness, in 1878, must have been connected with a temporary separation of my parents. My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basel, and presumably her illness had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage.’ Usually the maid looked after him, but often it was his father. ‘I was deeply troubled by my mother’s being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken.’ Whilst Emilie was ‘away’ Carl slept in his father’s room. He remembered his father carrying him in his arms, trying to get him to sleep, pacing up and down, singing his old fraternity student songs. When Carl’s mother finally came back home his parents no longer shared a bedroom. Frightening things emanated from her room, indefinite figures, floating, headless, luminous. Carl had ‘vague fears’ and heard strange things in the night, all mixed up with the muted roar of the Rhine Falls nearby. He could not breathe and thought he would suffocate. ‘I see this as a psychogenic factor,’ he later told Aniela Jaffé; ‘the atmosphere of the house was beginning to be unbearable.’ He went on sleeping in his father’s room throughout childhood. In fact, until he was eighteen and preparing to go to Basel University.
‘I had never come across such an asocial monster before,’ recalled Albert Oeri, one of Carl’s few playmates during those early years. Albert had been brought to the parsonage by his father, an old student friend of Pastor Jung’s, to play with Carl. ‘But nothing could be done. Carl sat in the middle of the room, occupied himself with a little bowling game, and didn’t pay the slightest attention to me.’ Carl was not used to playing with other children, not even the village children who were anyway mostly out in the fields helping their parents with haymaking or herding the cows. When the Jung family moved to Klein-Hüningen, Albert’s family still sometimes visited on a Sunday afternoon. By now a different Carl had made an appearance: extrovert Carl, boisterous Carl, the one who did not like weaklings, especially one of his cousins whom he teased mercilessly. ‘He asked this boy to sit down on a bench in the entrance way,’ recalled Oeri. ‘When the boy complied, Carl burst into whoops of wild Red Indian laughter, an art he retained all his life. The sole reason for his satisfaction was that an old souse had been sitting on the bench a short time before and Carl hoped that his sissy cousin would thus stink of a little schnapps.’ But the moment he had done it he regretted it. Introvert Carl did not want to hurt anyone.
Under the loud whooping lurked the other Carl, the one with secrets to hide. The first of these was a dream he had when he was four, one so significant and so terrible he never told anyone about it until he was sixty-five: ‘A dream which was to preoccupy me all my life.’ He was in a meadow when he discovered a dark hole which he had never seen before, stone-lined, with a stone stairway leading far down. Fearfully he descended. At the bottom there was a doorway with a round arch and a heavy green curtain, brocade, leading through to a rectangular chamber with an arched ceiling, again of stone. A blood-red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform on which stood a golden throne and on this throne stood something which he first took to be a tree trunk, twelve to fifteen feet high and two feet thick: a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling and made, he then realised, of skin and naked flesh. On the top was a rounded head with no face or hair, only a single eye. An aura of brightness wafted above it. Carl was paralysed with terror, believing it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm towards him. At that moment he heard his mother calling from above: ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ and he woke sweating and scared to death. ‘This dream haunted me for years.’ Much later he realised it was an anatomically accurate phallus.
When the family moved to the old parsonage at Klein-Hüningen, Pastor Jung became chaplain at the local lunatic asylum as an additional role and Carl started going to school. Academic work was easy for him, but not the social side – he was not used to other children and they were not used to a child as strange as him. In time he learned to join in but he always felt it alienated him from his true self. At home he played alone for hours, hating to be watched, building high towers with wooden bricks, making drawings of battles and sieges, lighting fires in the garden. When he was ten he did something which was totally incomprehensible to him, even then: he had a ruler in his pencil case, of yellow unvarnished wood, and out of it he carved ‘a little manikin about 2" long, with a frock coat, top hat, and shiny black boots. I coloured him black with ink, sawed him off the ruler, and put him in the pencil case, where I made him a little bed. I even made a coat for him out of a bit of wool.’
He also put a smooth blackish stone from the Rhine in the pencil case, painted to divide it into an upper and lower half. This was his stone. ‘All this was a great secret. Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the top of the house [forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten] and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the roof – for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a soul would ever find it there. No one could discover my secret and destroy it.’ He used to go up there to visit the manikin, always surreptitiously, and deposit tiny scrolls in the pencil box for him, written in a secret language. Like sitting on the stone, it always made him feel better, bringing him back to his true self. This ritual lasted for about a year. Then he forgot all about it till he was thirty-five and writing Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, later translated as Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, the book which would signify his final break with Sigmund Freud.
Apart from arithmetic, which always remained a terrifying mystery to him, Carl was clever and when he was eleven he easily gained a place at the Gymnasium, the grammar school, which was situated in the precincts of Basel cathedral. The work, classics-based, was no problem – he already knew Latin which his father had taught him since the age of six, and he was already widely read, especially the Bible. If anything, boredom was the problem. But social life was another matter. Here came Carl, the poor parson’s son, walking from his village far out in the countryside, through meadows and woods and fields, in his bumpkin clothes and holes in his shoes so he had to sit for the rest of the school day in wet socks, talking in his broad yokel Basel dialect. And there came the well-dressed sons of the foremost families of Basel in horse-drawn carriages, with fine manners, plenty of pocket money, talking in refined High German or French about their holidays in the Alps, and Carl, having no holidays, felt an envy he had never felt amongst the poor farmers’ sons who had been his classmates at his local school.
Now, for the first time, he realised that his family was poor, and when any of his classmates invited him to their grand houses he felt ‘as timid and craven as a stray dog’. His feelings of inferiority, fatefully accompanied
