(Barbara Hana: “Jung: Life and Work”, translated by Kristina Bojanović, CID, Podgorica, 2025)
About one of the most influential modern thinkers and the greatest psychologists in all of history - Carl Gustav Jung, several dozen biographical books have been written so far. Among these books dedicated to his life and work, the book stands out for its comprehensiveness, systematicity and penetratingness. Barbarian Rooster, Jung's student, long-time collaborator, close friend, and distinguished lecturer at the Carl Gustav Jung Institute.
The advantage of her book Jung: life and work compared to many other biographers is that she knew Jung personally and very well, having been friends and working with him for more than three decades. She built her view of this famous psychologist not only on the basis of his works, letters, interviews, etc., which are available to everyone, but also on the basis of listening to his lectures, seminars, discussions in the Psychology Club, intended for a narrow circle of people. Finally and most importantly, her source of valuable knowledge about Jung's intimate mental and spiritual life, his plans, dilemmas, internal conflicts, dreams and fantasies, were their intimate conversations in private. Her important motive was also to provide the most objective picture of Jung's personality and his life, which means denying rumors about the nature of his relationship with Toni Wolf and malicious gossip that Jung supported the Nazis.
Life, self-knowledge and psychological insights
When it comes to Jung's life, it is important to note at the outset that for him the subjective, inner life was always more important than the objective, outer life in physical and social reality. More important to Jung were his dilemmas, inner conflicts, dreams and visions than events in the outer world, his successes and failures at school, at university, career advancement, gaining status, fame, etc. Following this very Jungian position, Barbara Hanna presents his life story chronologically, but places emphasis on inner events, thoughts, emotions, worries, as well as personality transformations.
Important for understanding Jung's personality is his early relationship with his parents. His mother was an insightful, warm woman, but emotionally unstable, who was hospitalized several times, which for little Carl was always a stressor due to separation (restlessness, anxiety, nightmares, suffocation, eczema). His father, a Protestant minister, was a good, tolerant, educated man, but unsure of his faith, disappointed and weak.
In his early childhood, Jung had some mystical dreams and visions. Before he was four years old, he dreamed that he came across an underground phallic deity sitting on a golden throne in a pit in a meadow. A voice from above warned him: “It is a man-eater!” This dream occupied him all his life, because then he first, intuitively, understood not clearly enough that this chthonic deity was actually the dark side of God that is being kept silent. This miraculous, not at all childish dream was actually Jung’s initiation into the world of darkness, into the dark, unconscious world of the psyche.
Later, during puberty, he had a blasphemous vision of God sitting on a throne high in the sky and brutally demolishing the Basel Cathedral with his excrement. This painful discovery that God could be terrifying, raw and cruel was for the boy Karl that “happy wound” (Felix, blame), which brought him relief in his soul, because long before that knowledge had been suppressed, unconscious.
Even as a boy, Jung felt that he had two personalities, personality 1, a boy who was quite misfit and lonely, and personality 2, an extraordinary, balanced wise man. It was not until much later that he realized that he actually intuitively knew within himself his conscious ego (personality 1) and a largely unconscious, timeless, divine Self (personality 2).
Since as a boy he was very introverted, unsociable, alienated from his peers, absorbed in his own thoughts, prone to introspection, daydreaming and fantasies, and unsuccessful in mathematics, Jung did not like to go to school. It was only later, during his medical studies, that he showed his intellectual abilities, curiosity, passion for knowledge, as well as his oratorical abilities.
During his medical studies, he discovered that psychiatry, a field that combines natural and spiritual sciences, was the right field for his research into the normal and pathological human mind. After completing his studies, he was employed at the prestigious Burghölzli University Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich as an assistant to the famous Eugen Bleuler, the director of the clinic, who encouraged and supported Jung's professional and scientific progress. At the urging of Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia, Jung researched and treated this serious mental illness, and also, at his suggestion, examined patients using the Word Association Test (WAT).
At the Burghölzli Clinic, Jung founded the Laboratory for Experimental Psychopathology in 1905. In the same year, he became a senior physician at the clinic, as well as a lecturer at the University of Zurich.
On a personal level, a significant change in Jung's life was his marriage to Emom Raušenbah (1903), the daughter of one of the richest Swiss industrialists, whom he had met by chance seven years earlier as a fourteen-year-old girl, and he knew immediately that she would be his wife. Later, she became his collaborator and an important member of his analytical circle. A shadow appeared in their long-standing harmonious marriage in 1911 when Antonia (Toni) Wolf, a young and very intelligent girl, came to him for analysis, who fascinated him and with whom he remained in a close relationship until her death. This relationship of theirs was an open secret in analytical circles, and Jung did not hide it even from his wife, who of course did not like it, but she resigned herself to her fate.
On a professional and personal level, the most significant event in Jung's life was when, in 1906, he established a friendly relationship with Sigmund Freud, with whom he worked closely for the next six years. This multifaceted relationship, as well as the break with Freud, which had major consequences for Jung's personal and professional life and work, will be discussed later. After the disagreement with Freud and the separation from psychoanalytic doctrine, the extremely creatively fruitful years (1912-1921) of building Jung's own very complex theory - analytical or complex psychology - began.
In 1934, during the rise of Nazism, Jung found himself in a delicate situation when members of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, in which Germans held the main positions, asked him to accept the position of president and thereby save the Jewish members. Jung's difficult moral dilemma was "should I save psychotherapy and doctors or my own skin?" He accepted the position of president at a bad time, which provoked numerous conflicting comments and a passionate polemic, which continues to this day.
With particular warmth, tenderness, and sincere admiration, his collaborator and friend Hanna describes the last years of Jung's life, as well as the creation of some of his major works dedicated to alchemy. She points out that it is truly touching how intensely Jung, already old and ill, cares about the fate of the modern world and strives to prevent a catastrophe for humanity.
Jung, Freud and dealing with the unconscious
The story of Jung and Freud is long and complex. We will only present it briefly here, as necessary for understanding the origin and development of Jung's original theory.
Jung, impressed by Freud's revolutionary discoveries and ideas put forward in Dream interpretation on the unconscious, repression and dream analysis, in 1906 he entered into correspondence with him and sent him his book The study of word associations (1904), which is also dedicated to the study of the repressed. The following year, in March, he went to see Freud in Vienna, where they spent thirteen hours in an extremely lively, cordial and long conversation! It was an epochal meeting of two giants of psychology. The respect between the two great psychologists was mutual. Freud saw Jung as his heir and prince, the crown prince of the psychoanalytic movement, and Jung saw Freud as worthy of respect, a powerful spiritual father. The founder of psychoanalysis, he prepared Jung to be his heir and leader of the psychoanalytic movement. At his suggestion, after the establishment of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910), Jung became its first president.
After meeting Freud personally, Jung, despite great resistance from medical professionals, bravely, enthusiastically and skillfully defended Freud and his teachings on the unconscious, defense mechanisms, neurosis and psychotherapy. I became, says Jung, "openly Freud's soldier and fought against him".
But from the very beginning of his acquaintance with psychoanalysis, Jung had some doubts, primarily about Freud's theory of sexuality (especially his understanding of the Oedipus complex) and its great explanatory potential, but he kept his disagreement quiet for the sake of maintaining a good relationship with Freud.
In Jung's mind, the idea of the existence of the collective unconscious, the deepest and darkest space of the human psyche, which forms the foundation of the entire personality, took shape. It stores the spiritual experience of thousands of generations of our ancestors. And its structural and dynamic building blocks are archetypes, which represent inherited, universal patterns of thinking, feeling and acting. They are the innate and invisible frameworks of our entire experience, which manifest themselves in the form of emotionally charged symbolic images in myths, fairy tales, symbols, dreams and visions.
Jung hesitated for a long time and painfully whether, for the sake of truth, to publish the book Symbols of libido transformation (part one, 1911) at the cost of sacrificing a precious friendship. He suspected that the publication of this work would lead to an inevitable conflict and a painful break with Freud, and he was still strongly emotionally attached to his spiritual father. Finally, he broke down. “Just as he had sacrificed his academic career for Freud… so he now sacrificed Freud’s friendship for exactly the same reason,” writes Hanna (pp. 103-104). And indeed, Freud reacted with disapproval to Jung’s ideas presented in the first part, but his negative reaction reached its peak and their relationship was irretrievably damaged when the second part of the book appeared the following year, in 1912. The father of psychoanalysis could not accept that sexuality, in addition to its biological, instinctual nature, also had a spiritual, mythological and religious aspect. The point of theoretical rupture was a disagreement over the understanding of incest, which is essential for Freud’s key concept - the Oedipus complex. Freud interpreted incest literally, as an exclusively sexual phenomenon, while Jung pointed to its deeper spiritual, religious, and mythological meaning.
Jung finally realized with regret that he had to separate from Freud and go his own way, to follow his daemon. He loved Freud and suffered greatly at having to leave him, but he could no longer remain within the narrow confines of psychoanalysis. In 1913, Jung broke off correspondence and all personal contact with Freud. Freud experienced this breakup as a betrayal by a “faithless son,” and he felt bitterness, but he bore it stoically, because he had already been abandoned by close associates before him. Eagle (1911) and Steckl (1912). Jung experienced this breakup with his mentor extremely difficult and painful, because he was then branded as a "mystic" and abandoned by his friends and colleagues, so he was left isolated, without support, completely alone with his ideas. This led to a multi-year, most difficult, deepest and most painful life crisis for him, which would last six years, until 1919.
The painful breakup with his spiritual teacher was Jung's greatest trial in life, a major blow that left him disoriented, frightened, and confused.
At the end of July 1914, he received an invitation from the British Medical Association to deliver a lecture in Aberdeen on "The Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology," and in August the First World War broke out. He realized that he had to come to grips with his unconscious, to understand his strange dreams, fantasies, and visions in order to avoid falling victim to them, and thus overcome his crisis and mental confusion.
But that blow of fate that shook him to the core was at the same time the signal for the beginning of a painful and blessed process of self-awareness and self-realization of individuality. This spontaneous, natural process of painful self-knowledge of one's own psyche, especially the unconscious, during which the limited ego gradually gives up its privileged place to the immortal Self, which is the true center of the entire psyche, Jung called individuation. According to him, individuation is the search for one's own unique essence, for the uniqueness and integrity of the personality. This search involves confronting archetypes and integrating the archetypal figures of the Persona, Shadow, Anima/Animus on the path to wholeness and connection with "something infinite" that elevates and gives meaning to life.
When he had overcome the greatest crisis of his life due to his separation from Freud, Jung began to create his work. All his later work, all his most important works, were in fact the shaping, the elaboration of that raw material, which in the years of crisis flowed like volcanic lava from the unconscious and threatened to overwhelm him and destroy his mind.
People in old age do not worry much about what will happen to a person in the future, but Jung was most concerned at that time because he had witnessed two world wars and was a contemporary of the new "cold war", which threatened total catastrophe. His essay Present and future he is precisely dedicated to the concern of “what will the future bring?” In a time “filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction,” he asks: “What will happen to our culture, to our human existence, when hydrogen bombs begin to explode or if the spiritual and moral darkness of state absolutism spreads over Europe?”
Warnings and reminders
Like the Old Testament prophets, Jung warned his contemporaries. Today, he thundered, mental hospitals are increasingly full, and churches are increasingly empty, while schizophrenia is becoming a planetary disease. Modern man, living in an age of confusion and spiritual confusion, has the perverted idea that he can easily, by taking a shortcut, by taking drugs, reach enlightenment, to broader spiritual horizons and self-knowledge, to his own Self, instead of the arduous path of individuation that requires effort, courage and facing one's unknown being, Jung warned.
Modern man denies his archetypal roots, contemptuously rejects his instinctive aspirations, imagination and the mythical foundations of his being. As a result, we have today an intellectual barbarian, a technological savage, Jung visionarily warned his contemporaries more than seventy years ago. What would he say only today, in the era of the dominance of computers, mobile phones and highly developed digital technology, which, through the indiscriminate and excessive use of algorithms in all areas, increasingly enslaves, isolates and dumbs down man, instead of making him freer, more compassionate and wiser? Every society and every culture rests on certain mythical stories, as on its foundation. The disappearance of these stories is the death of the identity of the culture, which cannot survive without these stories. The spirit of the West has become impoverished and diseased at its core, precisely because it has lost its myth, its story, Jung warned.
Since the dawn of the scientific age, symbols and mythical representations have been despised and marginalized. They have, in fact, been pushed into the unconscious of modern man, where depth psychology has discovered a still-living treasury of mythological images.
One of the main causes of the disorders of the modern individual and the collective is the loss of the soul. This phenomenon manifests itself in the loss of the purpose of life, in meaninglessness, aimlessness, which is the most dangerous disease of our time, Jung believed. Imagination disappears, the sense of empathy is lost, and a rationalistic and insensitive attitude “I don’t care about other people’s suffering” dominates. The one-sided growth of a rational conscious attitude and the rejection of God, or the hubris of the modern arrogant man, is, Jung claims, “the shortest path to a mental hospital.”
Mission Carl Gustav Jung
Jung saw his mission as a modern scientist, thinker and prophet in finding therapeutic means for the mental healing and spiritual enlightenment of modern man who has repressed mythical images and forgotten ancient knowledge. Healing can be achieved by constantly awakening the "forgotten" treasures in the collective unconscious.
Jung saw his task as translating ancient spiritual knowledge contained in myths, rituals, and religious ideas into the language of modern man, articulating them as deep psychological truths, so that he could perceive them as meaningful and valuable, and understand and assimilate them. Jung's calling, which was revealed to him in his earliest dream of an underground phallus, was to explore the dark, terrifying, and unknown underworld of the human soul, inhabited by demons and gods.
Jung's important mission as a modern scientist and thinker, an archaeologist of the human mind and soul, was to reveal to today's confused and divided Western man his saving myth. This mission was foreshadowed by a dream about a knight in armor, whose task was to find the Holy Grail, a symbol of wholeness, or "to discover something that could encompass and unite the divided and endangered spirit of modern man." The myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who were searching for the Grail, is actually, says Jung, the pivotal myth of Western culture and what is most valuable in it. And this ancient myth tells modern man that it is necessary to search for the lost meaning of life in order to regain the fullness of life and achieve the integrity of the personality.
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