Jung the Man: Part II

Jung the Man:

Part II—His Appearance, Likes, Dislikes, Hobbies and Interests

“As with so many other iconic figures, the controversy that swirled about Jung during his lifetime has suffused it since his death.”

Deirdre Bair, 2003[1]

            Part I of this six-part essay provided a short outline of the key events in Jung’s life. From that chronological history we turn to other topics, using anecdotes and memoirs for insights on what Jung looked like, how he acted, his tastes and preferences.

Jung’s Physical Appearance

As a person, Jung was full of contradictions. From first to last he generated differing opinions, division and controversy, as his biographer Deirdre Bair notes in the quote above. From the seemingly straightforward—what he looked like—to the subtle and complex—his psychological make-up—he generated debate. When I began the research for this essay I assumed there would be little debate about Jung’s appearance, but even there we find contradictions. For example, the color of his eyes: Martin Freud, one of Freud’s sons, describing Jung in 1907, said Jung’s eyes were blue.[2] Charles Baudouin, who met Jung numerous times, claimed his eyes were gray.[3] Elizabeth Shipley Sergeant[4] and Stephen Black agree his eyes were brown.[5] Clearly eyewitness accounts aren’t always reliable!

In other respects there was agreement about Jung’s eyes. They were small,[6] alert, bright, shining, quick, shrewd, mischievous, very expressive, full of spirit[7] and penetrating,[8] able to see deeply into a person’s inner life[9]–eyes “made for scrutiny,” in the opinion of Charles Baudouin.[10] J.P. Hodin noted Jung had a “strong gaze.”[11] Barbara Hannah felt he could convey a lot “with a barely perceptible wink.”[12]

His eyes were set in a “strong face,”[13] a “sagacious face,”[14] a face with pink cheeks[15] and high cheekbones.[16] The fanlike creases at the corners of his eyes were due, Laurens Van der Post felt, to his continuous laughter, rather than from sun exposure.[17] Jung had an angular profile,[18] with a strong chin,[19] high broad forehead,[20] an arched nose,[21] and an expressive mouth.[22] Vincent Brome described his countenance as “austere,” but age brought a mellowing in his appearance,[23] as his hair thinned into what he called his “feathers”—soft wisps of white that circled his head.[24] He was clean-shaven except for a mustache that often had encrustations of his usual breakfast meal of a soft-boiled egg.[25]

Jung was a big man,[26] 6 feet, 1 inch tall,[27] with the broad shoulders[28] and “peasant’s frame” of a “countryman.”[29] With his magnificent physique[30] and “sheer physical presence”[31] he was “the very incarnation of a virility symbol,…”.[32] Martin Freud felt Jung held himself more like a soldier than a man of science and medicine.[33] As he aged he put on weight, leading observers to describe him as “stocky,”[34] “stout,”[35] and “a bulky figure,”[36] but he remained active and “strong-bodied,”[37] as he cut his own firewood[38] and worked on his stone-carving. Almost everyone who met him in the late 1950’s agreed that he didn’t look his age,[39] although his gait had become slower and heavier[40] and his breathing more labored.[41] He seemed to Elizabeth Osterman in her 1958 meeting with Jung to be “strong-bodied… very simple and immediate,” living “in the moment.”[42]

Jung could appear “simple” late in life in part because his clothing style evolved, or perhaps “devolved” would be more accurate. In the early years of his professional life, as a newly-graduated physician working at one of the most prestigious mental hospitals in the world, he wore the suits and stiff “drain-pipe collar” characteristic of Edwardian professional men.[43] Such garb was expected for men in his position, but surely was not Jung’s preference. From his earliest years, he had been indifferent to his appearance. His mother repeatedly reprimanded him for looking “like a little lout,”[44] even going so far as to criticize him about his appearance in front of strangers. The result was a lifelong predilection for casual clothes, a predilection he was able to live out as he got older and was self-employed. “Casual” meant English Harris-tweed sport coats, checkered sports shirts, Paisley ties, flannel trousers in dark colors.[45] He embarrassed his children and shocked the neighbors when he appeared in tattered shorts on camping trips.[46] He probably also shocked Laurens Van der Post when he appeared at one of their meetings wearing “… aggressive knickerbockers or plus-four fashion, …[with] a cap with a loud check pattern…” an outfit that Van der Post felt was “… more appropriate for a bookmaker … at a race-course…”.[47] Many visitors in Jung’s later years remarked on finding him in working gear: a “blue linen overall,”[48] as he washed his clothes in a tub of water at Bollingen, or clad “in a green workman’s apron,”[49] as he chiseled stone. Barbara Hannah summed up his sartorial style by saying it came from his personality #2:[50] it had nothing to do with prevailing fashion but was purely functional, old, comfortable and suited to the simple, introverted life he so preferred.

Casualness characterized not only the clothing of his mature years: his manner was casual too. Those who knew him spoke of his “direct manner,”[51] his “concreteness,”[52] and his “modest way of expressing himself.”[53] He did not put himself on a pedestal[54] but dealt with others “with a certain playful humor,”[55] “sanguine good nature and mischievousness.”[56] Some visitors mistook Jung for the gardener[57] or the old hired man[58] because of his clothes and modest manner. Jung seemed like a Swiss peasant when Stephen Black first met him; telling Jung of this impression, Black found that Jung had heard this often from others too.[59]

Besides his peasant manner, many people noted Jung’s “presence”—his “sheer physical presence,”[60] his “commanding presence,”[61] his “air of well-being”[62] and his “charisma.”[63] A “bull of a man,”[64] he “emanated a kind of radiance,”[65] a “force—powerful and simple; he was all there in his own nature and he was aware of it.”[66] He had a hearty, loud laugh that was reassuring,[67] a physical toughness,[68] lots of energy,[69] and “a vigorous bearing.”[70] When Mircea Eliade met Jung in 1952 (Jung was then 77) he found a man of “extraordinary vitality” and “astonishing youthfulness.”[71] In the last 6 years of his life, as he became more frail and fragile, he still radiated a strength and power that others found remarkable.[72]

His Likes and Dislikes

            Jung had a strong personality, with clear tastes and preferences. He loved being out in Nature,[73] being in the sun,[74] and being near water.[75] Outdoor activities—biking, sailing, mountaineering—were favorite pastimes.[76] He rode his bicycle not only for pleasure, but to work; he bought his first car only in 1929, nearly 30 years after he became a doctor.[77]

Brought up on Latin and Greek classics, he read them his whole life[78] (and his writings reflect his deep familiarity with the classical heritage of Western civilization). His mother encouraged him to read Goethe’s Faustas a child, and it had a profound and lasting impact on him,[79] as did Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.[80] He also considered Desiderius Erasmus one of his favorite authors; while still in college he bought an old copy of Erasmus’ collection of aphorisms from ancient authors.[81]

As a small child he loved to play with building blocks and he took this activity into adulthood, returning to it in the fallow years after his break with Freud, and again later on, when he built his Bollingen retreat.[82] He also loved games, feeling they were crucial for people’s sanity and well-being.[83] When he played games, he was competitive, and not above cheating to win.[84]

He loved dogs and would talk to them as he walked them beside the lake near his home.[85] He had many different breeds of dogs, including a large gray Schnauzer[86] and an English bulldog.[87] When his dogs died, he was “bothered… out of all proportions…”[88] Identifying with animals in general, he found the vivisection part of anatomy in his medical studies very difficult.[89]

While music did not play much of a role in his life (he told Margaret Tilly that it was too moving and made him feel sad),[90] he liked Mozart, Bach, Handel and Negro spirituals.[91] He also enjoyed Wagner’s “Parsifal” for its connection to the Grail legend, one of his major lifelong interests.[92] Barbara Hannah observed that if a group struck up a military song, Jung would join in.[93]

He liked Africa,[94] partly because there his psychic forces could be “liberated” and “poured back into the primeval expanses,” and more practically because when he was there nobody in Europe could contact him.[95] He also liked America for its energy and openness to new ideas,[96] although he found its extraversion and focus on the “yellow god”[97] less appealing. He liked the art and architecture of Islam, but not its culture or society.[98]

The only thing he read for recreation was crimi, detective stories. Simenon and Agatha Christie were his favorites and his French and English friends were quick to send him new ones as soon as they came out.[99] Jung explained that the appeal of crime novels was that someone else was solving the problems[100]—a nice change from his work as an analyst. For both his recreational reading and when seeing patients, he preferred a cold room. Barbara Hannah recalls the temperature being below 60 degrees—so cold that some patients would have to sit bundled up in fur coats![101]

While he loved philosophy and he and his father had good conversations about it, he had a strong dislike of theology, because his father forbade Jung to think. “You have to believe, not think.”[102] From his early years watching his father struggle with his own faith, Jung developed into what he called “a Christian-minded agnostic.”[103] He felt Christianity encouraged people to remain childish,[104] and he described the communion ritual as a “fatal experience for me.”[105] Church became for him a place of death, and he never went to church except for certain ceremonies, mostly weddings.[106] Funerals he tried to avoid, going to his wife’s funeral in 1955, being too ill to attend Toni’s in 1953.[107]

Jung’s formative years were spent in the 19^th century, and his cultural and personal preferences remained in the German Romantic tradition.[108] He had no use for modern art, modern music,[109] movies, television, planes—all terrible distractions that he predicted would prove harmful to children.[110] He disliked socialism and regarded the communism of the Soviet Union as the “anti-Christ.”[111]

He also hated to write letters,[112] to do math,[113] to tend to finances,[114] or to explain his psychology to people who knew nothing about it.[115] He tended to react with panic when confronted with legal action.[116]

As a male Swiss citizen he had to perform military duty one month every year.[117] He found this useful for letting loose a lot of aggression, but he hated being a subordinate, having to take orders.[118]

Jung was not a “schmoozer:” he hated cocktail parties and the social small talk that went on at them.[119] He was also not a dancer.[120] As a gourmand adept at gourmet cooking, he loved to eat and hated to see good food badly prepared.[121]

He had little use for movements like Theosophy and Steiner’s Anthroposophy because they were not empirical.[122] When, in the late 1950’s hallucinogenic drugs were developed and offered “mind-blowing experiences,” Jung was dismissive, knowing such artificial mind-altering drugs were no valid sources of enlightenment.[123]

His Hobbies and Interests

            After his marriage Jung was a wealthy man, and had both the time and the money to indulge his hobbies. Sailing, hiking, biking, cooking, building, stone carving and painting were his major avocations.[124] English friends taught him to sail on the English Channel[125] and thereafter he had sailboats custom-built for him. These boats were difficult for others to handle. When he took people out on the water he was a stern “admiral,” barking orders to all who sailed with him. His son Franz eventually stopped sailing with him, going out on the lake in his own boat.[126]

            Because he didn’t need to earn a living, Jung could take long holidays,[127] and he went hiking and biking with local friends multiple times a year, even at times when Emma was barely recovered from childbirth.[128] He took his children camping,[129] and went mountaineering with friends and students.[130]

            Laurens Van der Post described Jung as a wonderful, though “utterly unconventional cook,”[131] particularly adept at making complicated sauces using costly ingredients.[132] He also knew his wines and had the gourmand’s ability to pair wines with particular dishes.

            He took himself off to local quarries to learn the craft of the stone mason,[133] and the local masons spoke of him with great respect, for he handled each stone with understanding.[134] Stone carving was both a recreational and a healing activity for him: he processed his grief at the death of his wife by carving stone tablets in her honor.[135]

            His skill in painting was visible on the walls and ceilings of Bollingen to those few people he allowed into his sanctuary.[136] More readily visible to the public now are the paintings he did in his Red Book, in the years of his confrontation with his unconscious. These works of art reveal a man with a keen sense of form and color, steeped in medieval culture and style.[137]

            Jung’s intellectual interests reflected his independence of mind. He felt little need to conform to what was considered “acceptable” by the mainstream. Academics spoke of his interests as “woolly and suspect.”[138] Ever since his childhood, living with a mother who was psychic, he was familiar with parapsychology and this remained a lifelong interest.[139] He wrote his doctoral dissertation on experiments conducted with a cousin who had psychic talents[140] and he corresponded for years with J.B. Rhine, the American academic at Duke University who pioneered the scientific investigation of psi phenomena.[141]

            Another outré subject Jung found interesting was astrology, which he regarded “as a projected form of psychology.”[142] He understood the power of symbols and the Law of Correspondence, and he would have patients’ charts cast, for he recognized the chart as a source of insights about a person’s character and life meaning.[143] He also conducted experiments about astrology,[144] and his daughter Gret taught courses in Astrology at the Jung Institute.[145]

            The Chinese I Chingfascinated Jung.[146] He experimented with it before he met Richard Wilhelm and subsequent discussions with Wilhelm corroborated his appreciation of this mantic art.[147] He told his students “that book does not make mistakes.”[148] He wrote an introduction to Cary Baynes’ translation of Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching,as well as other essays about it.[149]

            Early in his adult life he discovered the Gnostics and felt a resonance with their ideas.[150] He was particularly taken with their sense of the Divine as including not just positive but also negative aspects, and their concept of gnosis—personal experience—correlated with his own stress on encountering the Self. His Septem Sermones ad Mortuuosreflected his immersion in Gnosticism.[151]

            Some years later he got into alchemy and it became the focus of many studies, including his masterworks, Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studiesand Mysterium Coniunctionis.[152] He was proud of his collection of alchemical texts and told Charles Baudouin that he possessed more of these ancient volumes than the library of Basel.[153]

            In old age he began investigating reports of UFOs and extraterrestrial beings. This became all-consuming, and his family and friends—Walther Niehus (his son-in-law), Fowler McCormick and Aniela Jaffé—helped him with this research.[154] He felt the UFO phenomenon was a “sign that an archetype was stirring”[155] in the collective unconscious. Ever the empiricist, Jung refrained from claiming that UFOs actually exist, but they clearly were a phenomenon and their “psychic aspects”[156] could not be doubted. That is, while scientific proof of the reality of flying saucers and extraterrestrials was not possible, it was an indubitable fact that people were reporting personal experiences—things they saw, creatures they met. These reports could not be denied.

His Daily Life and Routine

            The house Jung and his wife built in 1909 in Kusnacht was a reflection of their 19^th century Swiss bourgeois background and taste: nothing modern, nothing over-the-top, nothing glitzy. Full of Biedermeyer furniture,[157] parquet floors covered with Oriental carpets,[158] high ceilings,[159] walls hung with reproductions of Baroque paintings—a Ghirlandaio caught Charles Baudouin’s eye[160]—and tables full of bibelots and memorabilia of his trips to India and elsewhere,[161] the house was quiet and well-ordered.[162] It was also run with an eye to frugality: Jung surprised Ruth Bailey (his caretaker in his last years) when he went around turning off lights.[163] In his library patients were struck by the fact that only a “standard lamp” stood near a window, casting the rest of the room into darkness.[164] As noted above, Jung was frugal about heat too. Those who visited him in winter discovered that he liked his room cold—below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

            When he was not traveling or performing his month of annual military duty Jung had a regular routine. Like most Swiss, he was an early riser and it was not unusual for him to begin to see patients around 7:30 or 8AM.[165] During his fallow years (1913-1917), he would work in the morning, have lunch, go out to the lakeside and build little villages with stones and blocks, then see patients for the rest of the afternoon.[166] In the evenings he would delve into his unconscious, recording his experiences in the black books and later, the Red Book.[167] Emma was not included in these inward experiences; rather he confided in Toni.[168] In the heyday of his practice (in the 1920’s) he saw 8 or 9 patients a day, in one-hour sessions.[169] Most of the time he would meet with a patient several times a week, depending on what he felt the individual needed.[170] He would have lunch at 12:30 and supper at 7.[171] Later in life his work day got divided: half the day he would see patients, the other half he would do research and/or write.[172] He was not overworked: he kept this routine for only 4 to 6 months a year; the rest of the year he was traveling, on military duty, or off at Bollingen writing.[173] Even in the last decade of his life, he still kept active, arising early, working on his essays or correspondence in the morning, and relaxing in the afternoons. Barbara Hannah reported that he still saw 1 or 2 people a day even at age 85.[174]

Jung’s Ensouled Reality

            Some of Jung’s habits were familiar to anyone who saw him, e.g. he smoked a pipe almost constantly,[175] and after lunch was partial to having a Brazilian cigar.[176] In his 70’s he tried but failed to give up smoking.[177] People who shared a meal with him noticed immediately that he ate in silence. Like Winston Churchill, Jung did not like to engage in conversation during meals.[178] He required that his children eat in silence as well.[179]

            Other habits were not so obvious. Only some of his closest students recognized, for example, that when Jung called someone “dear sir” or “dear lady,” he was indicating his disgust with the person.[180] Only those aware of his appreciation of synchronicity knew how much synchronous events made an impression on him,[181] and how richly his life was filled with these “meaningful coincidences.”

            But it was only those who actually lived in his presence who became aware of just how deeply Jung’s reality was ensouled—permeated with recognition of and appreciation for the psyche. He regarded fire as a sacred miracle and whenever he built a fire he did so as a ritual act.[182] He felt inanimate objects had energy and took on the aura of their owner.[183] When she took over his care after Emma died, Ruth Bailey was surprised at how he greeted all the kitchen objects every morning,[184] and even more amazed that he expected her to do likewise. He would invoke the psyche constantly throughout the day; for example, when something got lost, the object was “bewitched.” It had been “magicked” away and he urged Ruth and Aniela Jaffé (his secretary in his last years) not to interfere in such situations: that the object would eventually be “magicked” back again.[185] In this same frame of mind he had carved over the door to his house Erasmus’ adage: “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit.”[186] When a visitor once asked him about it, he said he had it inscribed over his door as a reminder that he was always “in the presence of superior possibilities”[187] (i.e. the Divine). As we noted in an earlier essay on this blog site, Jung believed the psyche was real.[188]

            We live in a far different reality, one almost completely dismissive of anything psychic. As Morris Berman wrote years ago,[189] modern scientism has dis-enchanted the world and we are the poorer for it. Jung decried this effect of science, and he did all he could, in both his writings and in how he lived, to keep the reality of the psyche in the forefront of life.

            That Jung was so attuned to things psychic might have been due to his keen intuition, or to his strong introversion. Jung’s typology and personality are the subjects of Part III of this essay on Jung, the man.

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