no handkerchief and my neck is black with dirt.’ His first year was completely ruined, he said, because he had the ‘disagreeable, rather uncanny feeling’ that he had ‘repulsive traits’ which caused the teachers and pupils to shun him, and it is true – many pupils did shun him, even at times Albert Oeri who was in the same class, because Carl was just too strange, too uncouth, too different. The only boys he spent his time with, if at all, were the sons of farmers, the poor ones who spoke the same local dialect. It did not help that he was clever, thirsty for knowledge, arrogant. On one occasion a teacher accused him of cheating because he could not believe this boy could write such an essay on his own. Carl was mortified. He had spent hours of hard work on it. Grown big by now, he got into plenty of fights and brawls. But he always felt ‘a certain physical timidity’ – a feeling that he was somehow repulsive.
In his twelfth year he had what appears to have been a breakdown. As he described it, he was standing in Basel cathedral precinct one day in early summer, waiting for a classmate before setting off on the long trek home, when another boy from the Gymnasium knocked him over and as he fell he struck his head against the kerbstone. He lay there, half-unconscious, but only half. The other half saw the advantage: if he lay there a little longer he might not have to go to school. From then on he had regular fainting fits, half real, half not, causing his parents so much worry that he was finally allowed to stay away from school for six months. ‘A picnic,’ he called it. But he also pitied his poor parents who were consulting many doctors, all in vain. No one could work out what was wrong with the boy. Finally it was decided he needed a change and he was sent off to stay with his architect uncle Ernst Jung in Winterthur. Carl loved it, spending hours at the town’s railway station watching the steam trains come and go. But when he returned home to Klein-Hüningen he found his parents more worried than ever: he might have epilepsy, he overheard, and what were they to do, with no money and a boy who could not look after himself? ‘I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality.’ That same day he went to his father’s library and started cramming. He had only one more fainting fit after that but did not let it master him, and soon he was back at school. ‘That was when I learned what a neurosis is.’
From then on he got up at five every morning to study before setting off for school at seven. Sometimes it was 3 a.m. He felt he was himself for the first time. ‘Previously I had existed too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.’ In this elevated state he went to stay with a school friend who had a house on Lake Lucerne. How lucky the boy was, thought Carl, and how lucky they were to be allowed to use the Waidling, the punt, plunging the pole into the water as they manoeuvred out of the boathouse and into the blue. But when Carl started doing some fancy tricks, showing off, the boy’s father whistled them back to shore and gave Carl a dressing down. Carl was seized with rage ‘that this fat, ignorant boor should dare to insult ME’. But just as quickly he realised it was another conflict with reality: the father was right, he was wrong. It occurred to him that he might be two different people, the unsure boy and the ‘other’, the sure and powerful one. Not only did this other Carl exist, he was an old man, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and drove about in a fly with high wheels and a box suspended on springs with leather straps: a man living in the eighteenth century. The one as real as the other.
Around this time Carl was giving much thought to the idea of God. Not necessarily the God of his father’s Protestant Reformed Church, but ‘God the Creator’, ‘God of all Things’. One summer’s day he came out of school and was again standing in the precincts of the cathedral – blue sky, radiant sunshine, gazing in awe at the pitched roof which had recently been retiled and glittered in the bright light – and thinking ‘the world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and . . . Here came a great hole in my thoughts and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and only knew: Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is happening, something I do not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of sins . . .’ And on it went, all the way on the long walk home, all through that night, and the next. By the third night the feeling had become unbearable. ‘Now it is coming, now it’s serious,’ he thought. ‘I must think.’ The thinking brought him to the idea that it was God, the creator of this beautiful world, who wanted him to think, and, what’s more, to think of something inconceivably wicked. In a way it had very little to do with him, he had no choice. Adam and Eve had been perfect creatures before they sinned, ‘Therefore it was God’s intention that they should sin.’
That thought liberated him and he gathered all his courage to think about the cathedral, the clear sky, and God sitting high above it on His golden throne, ‘and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the Cathedral asunder’. To his own amazement he felt an indescribable relief; and instead of damnation he felt grace had come down on him ‘and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known’.
He never spoke about this to anyone, or about the other two secrets of the phallus dream and the manikin, until, finally, many years later, he told Emma. ‘My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced in me an almost unbearable loneliness. My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone.’
His mother reminded him he had often been depressed as a boy, but by his mid-teens Carl’s depressions gradually lifted. He read voraciously: Plato, Socrates, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, all the writers he would later introduce to Emma. His school friends started calling him ‘Father Abraham’. Personality No. 1 was to the fore and he lived more in the present, active at school and out and about in Basel. But Personality No. 2 was never far away. One day, walking along the banks of the Rhine on his way home from school, he saw a sailing ship. A storm was blowing up and the mainsail was running before it. The sight propelled him into a detailed fantasy which would stay with him for the rest of his life: the river became a great lake with a high rock rising out of it, only connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. A wooden bridge led to a gate flanked by towers opening into a little medieval town, and on the rock stood a castle: ‘This was my house.’ The rooms were panelled and simple, a fine library held everything worth knowing, and there were weapons and canons for protection as well as a garrison of fifty men at arms. The little town had several hundred inhabitants and Carl was the mayor, the justice of the peace, and general adviser. There was a small port on the landward side of the town where he kept his two-masted schooner. ‘The raison d’être of this whole arrangement was the secret of the keep, which I alone knew. The thought had come to me like a shock. For, inside the tower, extending from the battlements to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column.’ It was as thick as a man’s arm and it stood like a tree, upside down with rootlets reaching into the air. These roots drew something from the air and conducted it down the column into the cellar where there was a laboratory in which Carl made gold out of the mysterious substance.
From this point on, Carl’s long, boring walk home from school became a short, delightful one, lost in the fantasy, making structural alterations to the buildings, holding council sessions, sentencing evil-doers, firing canons. Alternatively he might go for a sail in his schooner, and before he knew it he was standing on the parsonage doorstep. The fantasy lasted several months before he bored of it. Thereafter he started building with mud and stones in the garden of the parsonage, he studied fortifications, collected fossils, learnt about plants and read numerous scientific periodicals. Building miniature castles and towns is what he used to do as a young boy to bring him back to himself, and he would do it for the rest of his life.
Carl passed his matriculation examinations with ease and went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. Originally he, like Emma, wanted to study the natural sciences, but he knew he needed to earn a proper living, and, deep down, he knew where he was going. After all, six of his mother’s relations were pastors, healers of the spirit, and his Grandfather Jung, arriving in Basel from Germany, was a doctor of medicine with progressive views, believing that the insane should be given treatment, not incarcerated.
