Spring Publications
JUNG IN AMERICA, 1924-1925 by WILLIAM McGuire (Princeton)
In my next trip to the United States,” we read in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos.”
In his other published works, including the Letters, Jung supplied no details of that American trip, in 1924-25,2 other than sporadic references3 to visiting the Taos Pueblo and conversing about supernal matters with a chief or chieftain named Ochwiay Biano ( Mountain Lake).
He finally dealt with Mountain Lake and Taos at some length in the well-known account in his memoirs.4
Jung “travelled among the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico in 1924-25,” stated Jolande Jacobi in a biographical sketch she appended to The Psychology of C. G. Jung (orig. 1939); and Gerhard Adler’s chronology in C. G. Jung: Letters, Vol. 1 (1973)
also gives those dates.
Owing perhaps to the biennial implication of “1924-25,” the notion has prevailed that Jung spent a considerable length of time among the Pueblos. 5
In her biographical memoir (1976) ,6 Barbara Hannah has helped to set the record straight, drawing on information that she obtained from her friend the late Fowler McCormick.
She tells us that Jung met McCormick and George Porter in Chicago between Christmas 1924 and New Year’s, went by train to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Jaime de Angulo joined them, and then to Taos, where Jung “made great friends with a chief of the Taos Pueblos”; afterward, to the Grand Canyon, in northwest Arizona; to New Orleans, since Jung also wanted some contact with American Negroes, “a great number of whom were working at that time in the forests near New Orleans”; and finally,
to New York, where he gave a talk in the house of Kristine Mann.
I should like to present a few additional findings, some corrective, and comment on some aspects of this phase of Jung’s biography, which has an unexpected range of personal associations.
Undoubtedly further information and other corrections will come to light some day, when Jung’s family letters, diaries, and other private papers are made available, and when more comprehensive research is pursued in newspapers, letters of persons involved with Jung, and other papers and records that may be discovered – the sort of patient and dogged exploration that will be required when Jung’s eventual Jonesian biographer sets to work.
Some logistic details of Jung’s trip have, indeed, been supplied from Jung’s diary and letters home, through the kindness of his son, Franz.
The 1924 diary gives the date of departure from Kusnacht for the United States as Wednesday, December 10.
Jung went by train from Zurich to the North Sea port of Bremen, where on the
13th he boarded the North-German Lloyd steamer Columbus.
The ship, delayed one day by severe winter storms, docked in New York, covered with ice, on December 22.7
The next day Jung wrote to his wife: “Today we are in New York. It’s cold. Porter, Fowler McCormick, and Mrs. Wickes met me. I’m here till Wednesday the 24th, then Chicago.”
Chicago could be reached from New York by overnight train in eighteen hours, and evidently Jung, McCormick, and Porter celebrated Christmas Eve in a Pullman car.
Writing home from Chicago on December 27, Jung reported: ‘Tm staying with G. F. Porter.
On Monday the 30th, I leave for the Grand Canyon, and from there I go to the Zunis and the Pueblos.”
In Chicago, Jung’s acquaintance included not only Porter ( of whom more hereafter) and Fowler McCormick, but Fowler’s divorced parents, Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harold F. McCormick, and Jung undoubtedly paid his respects to them as well.
The relationship that he sustained for more than fifty years with various members of the McCormick family was an important strand of his life story. 8
The train of choice from Chicago to the Southwest was the Santa Fe Railway’s “California Limited,” which left Dearborn Station nightly at 8: 00.
Sleepers for the Grand Canyon were switched off the main line at Williams, Arizona, and reached the Canyon at 7: 00 the morning of the third day out,9 which for Jung and his companions would have been New Year’s Day, 1925.
Even on New Year’s Day, there were obligations to be met.
The following letter was typewritten on the stationery of El Tovar, a Fred Harvey hotel
at Grand Canyon National Park.
The letterhead features a panoramic view of the Canyon with the hotel perched on its southern rim.10
Dr. William A. White
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.
My dear Sir: January 1, 1925
Dr. Jung and I arrived here this morning and were met by some friends of his from California.
We are planning a few days with the Indians and the Negroes in the South and he will arrive in Washington the morning of January 12th to spend only one day.
The notice of his coming was so short and his movements, since he landed ten days ago, so rapid and his plans so uncertain, that I have not written previously.
He hopes greatly to see you in Washington and perhaps knowing ahead, you can arrange a time.
Unfortunately he can have but one day there as he sails from New York January 14th.
If you want to communicate with him, a telegram in my care at 38 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, will be forwarded.
We are racing along and our plans indefinite.
All best wishes to Mrs. White and yourself for the New Year.
Very sincerely yours,
George F. Porter
Barbara Hannah has given some particulars from Fowler McCormick’s recollections: “they all went to see the famous Grand Canyon and rode down into the Canyon on mules . . . The scenery, both from the edge of the Canyon and inside the huge abyss, made a strong impression on Jung”-though he never mentioned the Grand Canyon in anything that he published.
There is a shred, however, in a letter that Jung wrote to Frances G. Wickes on the same
day, on a sheet of El Tovar writing paper with still another view of the Canyon on its letterhead: 11
My dear Mrs. Wickes,
There are so many things worthwhile that I am rather late in returning to New York.
My ship leaves Jan. 14th. (La France) I arrive in NY. only Jan. 12th late in the evening or perhaps Jan. 13th in the early
morning.
Thus I am unfortunately unable to stop at your house.
situation will be rather crowded, as certain people from Chicago will come for … [illegible] to New York.
But I do want to see you once more before I leave. I also want to give your friends a chance to see me.
I propose we meet after dinner at 8 o’clock for an analytical colloquium.
Letters reach me c/ o George F. Porter, University Club, 5th Ave., N.Y.
I am so sorry, that I could not work out a different plan.
But I have at least the satisfaction, that I am able to carry through a remarkable program.
I saw the Canyon. But I say nothing about it.
With very best wishes for a happy New Year …
The “friends from California” who met Jung at El Tovar (Franz Jung has again supplied the facts) were Professor Chauncey Goodrich, of the department of English at the University of California in Berkeley, and his wife, the former Henriette de Saussure Blanding.12
The Goodrich’s were longstanding friends of Jung, and Professor Goodrich’s sister, Elizabeth G. Whitney, M.D., had pioneered Jungian analysis in the San Francisco Bay area.13
Her husband, James Whitney, M.D., also became an analytical psychologist, and their
son, James Goodrich Whitney (1917-1967), was the first Jungian analyst trained in San Francisco.
Evidently Jaime de Angulo, of Berkeley at that time, also joined Jung at the Grand Canyon.
What Fowler McCormick wrote me about the expedition, in a letter of August 11, 1972, is inconclusive: “Our party spent three or four days over New Years at the Grand Canyon, and from there Jung and I set off alone to take a journey in the land of the ‘endless horizon,’ that part of the Southwest lying between New Mexico and Eastern Texas.”
He mentioned neither Porter, the Goodrich’s, de Angulo, or the visit to Taos.
But all that had occurred thirty-seven years before.
The next exhibit consists of two brief items in the Taos Valley News} a weekly published in Taos, New Mexico; its bound volumes are to be found in the State Library of New Mexico, at Santa Fe.
The issue of the News was dated Saturday, January 10, 1925.
Thus, Jung had visited Taos on Monday the 5th and possibly Tuesday the 6th.
Illustrious Visitors to Taos Dr. Carl Jung, world famed psychologist and contemporary of Freud, in company with Fowler McCormick, son of the famous harvester machinery magnate and grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. visited Taos Monday of this week.
The party is touring the United States and came up from Santa Fe to see the ancient village.
While here they registered at the Columbian Hotel.
Visits Taos Again James Angelo, Professor of anthropology in Berkeley University, Calif.
visited Taos, and attended the Buffalo Dance at the pueblo, Tuesday.
Mr. Angelo has been a frequent visitor to Taos, this time accompanying Dr. Jung and Mr. McCormick.
The gentlemen are traveling across the country in a Chevrolet.
We may speculate that the Jung party, having visited the Grand Canyon first1 motored to Santa Fe between Friday, January 2, and Sunday, January 4 – rather good time for nearly 600 miles over second- and third-rate roads in a Chevrolet.
Near Gallup, New Mexico, the highway crossed a corner of the Navajo reservation, but there would not have been much time for a visit.
The Zulfi Pueblo lay about thirty miles south of Gallup, on a poor road, but there is no
evidence that Jung carried out his plan to visit it- not a reference to Sufi in the Collected Works.
The trip across country could also have been made by railway, from Williams to Lamy, N.M., and the Chevrolet acquired in Santa Fe.
From there to Taos was another sixty-four miles to the north.14
As for “Professor James Angelo, of Berkeley University,” he was certainly Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950), the authority on American Indian languages: Spanish by birth, he had an M.D. from Johns Hopkins, where he met and married Cary Fink, later Cary F. Baynes.
According to a biographical notice by an anthropologist, D. I…Olmsted, 15 who had never known de Angulo but is a student of his work, he taught at Berkeley in summer 1920 and did field work and research among California Indians.
After a divorce in 1922, Cary de Angulo went to Zurich to study with Jung and Jaime joined a linguistic survey in Mexico.
In 1923, he married Lucy Freeland, a philologist, and they went to Europe.
During a stay of several weeks in Zurich, de Angulo had several hours with Jung.
In early 1924, back in California, Jaime met Antonio Luhan, of the Taos Pueblo,
and his Amer. wife Mable Dodge Luhan, while the Luhans were staying at Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, and later that year Mabel Luhan invited Jaime to Taos, where he came to know D. H. Lawrence.
According to Olmstead, de Angulo introduced Jung to the Luhans in Taos, but the Luhans were actually in the East all that winter.16 D. H. and Frieda Lawrence had left Taos in October 1924 for Mexico and did not return until April 1925.11
Jung’s own recollections, many years later, were uncertain.
In a 1960 letter to Eugene Rolfe, who had wondered whether Lawrence was a “soul naturally Jungian,” a spontaneous generator of Jungian symbols, Jung wrote, “Lawrence must have known of me through Mrs. … , his American lady friend who has married a Pueblo and has a house in Taos, where he had lived for a while. His name was Antonio Mirabal ( or his brother’s name?).
I knew him, but I cannot recall her name ….She was certainly acquainted with my ideas.”18
Shortly afterward, when Rolfe went to see Jung at Klissnacht, they resumed the subject
of Mrs. Luhan, and Jung remarked, ‘] have stayed at her house in Taos.”
One may ask: who introduced Jung to Antonio Mirabal (not to be confused with Antonio Luhan) ?
This was the “Spanish” name of Ochwiay Biano, “Mountain Lake,” as Jung always called him.
There is an idea that it was Frances G. Wickes.
This idea may be based on something that M. Esther Harding wrote in her obituary
notice of Mrs. Wickes: “She was well acquainted with the Navajo Indians.
Indeed it was she who introduced Jung to the Indian Wiseman Mountain Lake …. Mountain Lake died in 1965 and sent a message of farewell to Frances not long before ‘he went to his Father.’ “10
The poet Muriel Rukeyser, who is at work on a biographical study of Mrs. Wickes, told me that Frances Wickes had met Tony Mirabal on a visit to Taos earlier than 1925, possibly through Mabel Luhan, whom she knew, and she may have written or told Jung about him.
In any case, Dr. Harding’s obituary notice is not without error: Mirabal was not a Navajo, and he did not die until 1975 (according to information I received from Taos).
The Tony Mirabal who died was evidently the man whom Jung had met; he was a respected tribal leader of the Pueblo.
But, according to Elsie Clews Parsons’ study of the Taos Pueblo, there were two cousins named Antonio Mirabal, one more and one less respected in their community; the Indian name of the former is translated “Mountain,”
and of the latter is translated “Mountain Lake.”20
I have not as yet been able to unravel this puzzle.
Jung apparently kept in touch with his Pueblo friend – we have, at any rate, Jung’s letter to him of Oct. 21, 1932, in reply to a letter from Mountain Lake.21
And Frances Wickes wrote Jung on July 3, 1935, while she was visiting in Flagstaff, Arizona: “I saw Mountain Lake last summer. Your picture was over his fireplace.
He talked much of you. He has done a grand thing for his people and won back the Blue Lake.”22
Blue Lake, high above Taos Pueblo, the source of the Taos River and the most sacred shrine of the Pueblo religion, had been part of more than 100,000 acres of tribal land taken, by decree of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, as part of the Kit Carson National Forest.
The Indians’ continual struggle produced in 1933 a rather diluted act giving them the use of the land, but the land and Blue Lake were not unconditionally returned to the Taos Pueblo until July 1971, when President Nixon signed a bill that had been enacted by Congress.
Muriel Rukeyser told me that both Mrs. Wickes and Jung gave their support to the Taos Pueblo in their struggle for Blue Lake.
The second news item from the Taos Valley News, above, states that James Angelo (Jaime de Angulo) attended the Buffalo Dance at the pueblo on Tuesday, Jan. 6.
Jung must have attended with him, for he wrote in 1928: “In the buffalo dances of the Taos Pueblo Indians the dancers represent both the hunters and the game.”23
And in 1952: “I observed that the dance-step of the Pueblo Indians consisted in a persistent, vigorous pounding of the earth with the heels.” 24
Barbara Hannah writes that Fowler McCormick told her the party “also paid a short visit to some more primitive Indians, who lived in caves and small houses in the Canyon de los Frijoles” near the pueblo of San Ildefonso, lying between Taos and Sante Fe.
In any event, by January 9 ( three days and some 1500 miles after the Buffalo Dance) Jung reached New Orleans, evidently still traveling with Porter and McCormick (by rail?).
The next letter (on Jung’s Klissnacht letterhead) , read together with the one he had written to Mrs. Wickes on New Year’s Day, shows how tightly planned his entire trip was: 25
My dear Mrs. Wickes,
New Orleans 9th of Jan. 1925
Concerning Lay I am not able to give a definite answer.
I am not informed about the amount of work that is waiting for me – I am sure, that there is no chance at all until May anyhow.
Concerning our meeting I want to give a chance to the people who are truly interested in my psychology.
I am not yet sure, whether I shall not be too tired to give a regular lecture.
Therefore let us have an informal meeting, where people can ask questions.
Perhaps I shall be able to talk about dreams.
It is a most unfortunate thing, that it is impossible for me to stay with you.
I should have liked nothing better.
But there is so much to do, that I better stay in the hotel.
I arrive Jan. 13th in the early morning from Washington.
During the morning there will be business.
From l2 o’clock on I am at your disposition.
Letters reach me: c/ o George F. Porter University Club 5th Ave. N.Y.
Best regards from Mr. G. Porter.
Please tell Mrs. Zinno, that I am staying in the Hotel.
Cordially yours,
- G. Jung
Beyond what Barbara Hannah recalls from Fowler McCormick that Jung “wanted some contact with American Negroes, a great number of whom were working at that time in the forests near New Orleans”- I can supply an additional fragment from McCormick’s
letter of August 11, 1972: “Jung had wanted to see the American Negro in a natural outdoor habitat instead of a large city.
I happened to know of a place near New Orleans where Negroes were cutting trees to make forest products and living a natural life in the open.
I am sorry to say that I do not feel that Jung’s opinion of the Negro was advanced materially by our visit.”
Between New Orleans and Washington, the next recorded stop, there is the tantalizing possibility of a stop in Chattanooga.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (N.Y. ed., p. 272), during his account of his trip to East Africa later that year, Jung tells of dreaming of an American Negro who had been his barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee, twelve years before.
That would have been in 1913, but we have no record of Jung’s going South on his trip that year, or of traveling beyond Washington, D.C., on his 1912 trip.
Memories contains a few errors of dating, and “twelve years” could have been a slip for “twelve months.”
In 1925, there was a through train from New Orleans to Washington via Chattanooga.
But what would impel Jung to get out there, on his tight schedule, and have his hair cut- and curled?
(Still, Jung did not write up alt his travels. His spring 1933 cruise with Professor Fierz to Rhodes, Cyprus, Alexandria, and Palestine has been documented so far only by a postcard to Mary Foote. 26 There is a hint of a youthful trip southward in one of the Association Studies, 1904: apparently Jung had smoked Manila cigarillos in a “Spanish colony.”21)
Jung evidently spent Monday, January 12th, in Washington and went on to New York by sleeper, a convenient option in those days.
We have a glimpse of his day in Washington, from a letter he wrote as he sailed back to Europe: 28
Dear Dr. Jelliffe,
Bord S.S. “France” Le 17 Jan. 1925
As you probably have heard from Dr. White of my flying trip through America I want to express to you my deep regrets, that I have not been able to call on you while I was in New York.
I spent only two days in New York and they were simply overcrowded with unavoidable
obligations.
Thus I found no chance to see you.
As Washington was by far less strenuous I could see White at least.
My time was unfortunately quite short as the trip was rather unforeseen ….Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D. (1866-1945), of New York, a close friend and associate of William Alanson White, had known Jung since 1907, when he and White met him at the First International Congress for Psychiatry, at Amsterdam.
In 1908, White and Jelliffe started the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, in which Jung’s Psychology of Dementia Praecox was published (1909); in
1913, they founded the Psychoanalytic Review, which published Jung’s lectures on “The Theory of Psychoanalysis.”
Jelliffe had been instrumental in arranging the lectures the previous year at Fordham
University, New York City, where he was professor.2°
For many years, Jelliffe carried on a correspondence with both Jung and Freud.
In a letter to Freud on June 8, 1926, Jelliffe wrote, “Visiting Jung in 1924, I was amazed to learn how narrow his vision was for the general situation and how one-sided he had developed his interests.
I felt he had really ceased to be a physician …. “30
Despite that impression a few months earlier, Jelliffe replied to Jung as follows: 31
February 20, 1925
Dear Dr. Jung:
It was a great pleasure for me to receive your letter of January 17th as well as a great disappointment in not seeing you in person.
But life is so full of both aspects of reality that would we have all the nice things that we want we certainly would not survive and as for the crushing things they would soon demolish us too.
This latter reflection comes in my telling you of a very deep personal loss which has come to me through the death of my younger son.32
He was 24 years old, had gone through his University with considerable distinction, not only in physical field of athletics, but in his scholarship as well and was going ahead with a great deal of individual value in medicine.
We are all very unhappy about it but have to face it.
I was glad therefore in a double sense to get your letter as I have always appreciated your friendship and hope that I might retain it ….Jung’s answer: 33
My dear Dr. Jelliffe,
228 Seestrasse
Kusnacht-Zurich
15.3.1925
Your letter with its sad news has remembered me again of the regrettable fact that I was unable to see you when I was in New York.
I did not know that you experienced such a cruel loss as the death of your son in the meantime.
Let me express you my deepest sympathy and condolence.
Death has been at work recently.
It has been a great shock to me to learn about the sudden death of Medill McCormick.
I had seen him in good health on my way through Washington, but death seems to be
more cruel when it takes away the young man, who is yet but a promise ….
Thus we have a little more light on Jung’s day in Washington:
a call on Senator Joseph Medill McCormick (1877-1925), cousin of Fowler McCormick. McCormick, one of the bitterest opponents of the League of Nations ( in conformity with the policies of his family’s newspaper, the Chicago Tribune)) died Feb. 25, 1925, of a heart attack in Washington.
His widow was accompanied from Chicago to Washington on the train by an old friend of the family,
George F. Porter4
As he had promised Frances Wickes, Jung was in New York on January 13.
We have Esther Harding’s brief account of the “analytical colloquium” that took place, as Jung had proposed when he wrote to Mrs. Wickes from the Grand Canyon: New York, 13 January [1925]
Dr. Jung gave a talk to a group at Dr. Mann’s apartment on 59th Street.
He spoke on racial psychology and said many interesting things about the ancestors, how they seem to be in the land.
As evidence of this, he spoke about the morphological changes in the skulls of people
here in the U.S.A. and in Australia.
He said that in America there is a certain lack of reverence, a certain ruthlessness.
The ancestors are not considered here, their values not respected.
He spoke of the “single-mindedness” of Americans, which would be impossible to Europeans because of all the many considerations to which they must pay due regard.
The American disregards these completely, is, indeed, utterly unconscious of them.35
Who else attended Jung’s talk? What actually occurred?
The letter that Jung wrote to Mrs. Wickes after he got home suggests that the affair was in some sense extraordinary: 36
Kusnacht Feb. 10th 1925.
My dear Mrs. Wickes,
I can confirm your ideas concerning our New York experiences.
Things had to be as they were and you really did most bravely and admirably, what you could and should do under such extraordinary conditions.
I felt it like a ceremonial for the Dead.
Thus the golden thread has not been injured, the contrary, it has shown itself in the fact, that the performance of a very dangerous rite has been possible without bad effects.
I think your attitude has been perfectly splendid, in as much as courage is concerned.
As to other realizations I don’t know yet.
But I must say, when I feel toward West, I get no bad feeling from you ….Twenty-three days after his arrival, Jung departed from New York at 9 a.m. on January 14, 1925.
We have the evidence of a news item in the New York Times (January 15, 1925, p. 21):
Dr. C. G. Jung, formerly a student of Sigmund Freud, and later head of the Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, sailed from New York yesterday on the France, after having spent an unannounced visit in this country.
It was at Dr. Jung’s school in Zurich that Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller and former wife of Harold F. McCormick, studied psychoanalysis several years ago.
Friends of Dr. Jung said that he had been here about a month and that he had kept his
identity from becoming public because he wanted a rest.
Anything a McCormick, particularly a Rockefeller McCormick, did caught the reportorial eye.
In March 1925, Fowler McCormick began working as a day laborer in the Milwaukee plant of his family’s International Harvester Company.
He was starting on the ground floor in order to learn the business to which he would fall
heir, and this program had been suggested to him by Mrs. James A. Stillman, the mother of his friend James A. Stillman, Jr.
When she visited him in Milwaukee on March 25, the New York Times took note, adding that he was one of the best swingers of the 200-pound pig-iron ingots in the plant.”
This industrial apprenticeship lasted about four months.
The Milwaukee Journal carried a page-one story on July 18, 1925, announcing that shortly after August 1 the young millionaire will sail for Africa with an expedition headed by Dr. Carl G. Jung.
The party will include a group of British scientists.”
The Journal went on to state that Dr. Jung, a disciple of Freud, is called the father of psychoanalysis.
He visited America last January, Mr. McCormick accompanied him on a trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and other southwestern states.
They spent much time studying early pueblo civilization and the ruins of the cliff dwellers.
Dr. Jung wrote a book on the results of. his discoveries.”
u ‘I look forward to my trip to Africa with the keenest expectations,’ said Mr. McCormick.
‘There is much to be learned by studying the so-called lower races.
I feel sure that the scientific knowledge gained will more than recompense us for the hardships we may have to endure.'”
In the event, Fowler McCormick withdrew from the African expedition at the last moment.
On his advice, Mrs. Stillman went to Europe and worked analytically with Jung and with H. G.Baynes.
“My life was smashed like broken crockery,” Mrs. Stillman said in an interview later. (‘Then Baynes and Jung took me in hand and taught me the real meaning of life.” June 1931, “Fifi” Stillman was divorced from her husband and married to Fowler McCormick.37
The name of George F. Porter runs through the documents of this American visit of Jung’s, and it is a name quite unknown today.
Barbara Hannah mentions him briefly.
“The second member of the party was George Porter who had often been to Zurich and whom Jung valued highly.
When he died some years later, Jung was much distressed and said that if he had only known about George Porter’s difficulties he would have gone to America at once to do all he could to help him.” 38
It was Porter, indeed, who had invited Jung, financed the whole trip, and made all the arrangements. 39
George French Porter was born in 1881, scion of a prominent Chicago family.
His father had built the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad and Dearborn Station.
Young Porter (Yale, 1903) was a businessman, an art collector, a philanthropist, a leading supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912.
During the World War he was a captain in the Army.
Before 1925, he had traveled to Zurich to consult Jung, and he was also at various times a patient of Dr. William Alanson White in Washington. ( “Melancholia,” the Chicago Tribune said.)
Several years before Jung’s visit, Porter had fallen in love with a young Frenchwoman, Mirna de Manziarly, who was a student at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.
Her mother, Mme. Irma de Manziarly, in Paris, was a leading member of the Theosophical Society and, since 1920, had been a close friend of Krishnamurti; she had brought Mirna, two younger daughters, and a son into the Theosophical movement.
In autumn 1924, Mirna left the Middle West and George Porter for India, to join her family at the Theosophical world center, at Adyar ( near Madras) , where in November others including Annie Besant and Krishnamurti arrived.
Early in 1925, Mme. de Manziarly and her daughters went up to the hill station of Ootacamund with Krishnamurti’s brother Nitya, who was ill with tuberculosis.
(Later, Krishnamurti took Nitya back to their house at Ojai, California, where Nitya died on Nov. 13, 1925.) 40
George Porter followed Mirna to India during the spring of 1925, and in due course he
cabled the Chicago Tribune the news of their marriage, at Ootacamund on June 3.
The Porters made a leisurely return journey to the United States, stopping in Zurich to see Jung.
After they had settled down in Chicago, Porter wrote to William Alanson White: 41
December 16, 1925
Dear Dr. White:
My wife and I got home from Europe in early October ….We saw Dr. Jung in Zurich in July and a little later in England.
He was preparing for his trip to Africa, where he now is.
He expected to return to Zurich about the middle of February or the 1st of March.
Those closest to him agree in feeling strongly that he is at the end of one period of his development, and that about his future there is uncertainty.
I understand that he did not give any definite assurance that he would take up the work with his patients again on his return, but of this I am not positive.
Some of us in America feel that there is a chance that, if invited on a worthwhile mission, he would come again to America.
We want him to have this opportunity.
The University of Chicago stands ready to invite him to give a series of lectures there at almost any date agreeable to him.
Friends in the East are making inquiries at some of the big eastern centers.
Would you care to consider inviting him to lecture at St. Elizabeth’s?
My thought is to have these invitations awaiting him on his return from Africa – that this may be the moment to strike when the iron is hottest.
I realize there may be many complications, and I am considering this letter and anything you may write as confidential ….
Dr. White replied, in part: 42
December 18th, 1925
My dear Mr. Porter:
… In re Dr. Jung, I do not know just exactly what you mean by his being at the end of one period of his development, except of course, as you state it in that very general way.
I shall of course be very glad to have him come to Saint Elizabeth’s and talk to our Staff, but as you realize the Hospital has no funds with which to reimburse him for such an enterprise.
Aside from that matter, you may be sure that we will be very glad to have him and if you will consider that an invitation you may so use it.
We are getting on here very nicely and will be very very glad indeed to see you when you come on. In the meantime please accept our very best wishes for the holiday season ….Jung never gave the proposed lectures.
And, indeed, he did not return to the United States until fall 1936, when he attended the Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences and later gave a seminar at Bailey Island, Maine.
Mrs. Porter, with her sister Yolande, opened a Theosophical book shop, called Aquarius,” in Chicago, and during September 1926 the Porters and Yolande were involved with a convention of Theosophists in Chicago, attended by Mrs. Besant and Krishnamurti.
On the way to a meeting, George Porter suffered a neck injury in an auto accident, and he went for treatment to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and also to Dr. White in Washington.
In February 1927, he and his wife made plans for a trip to Zurich so that he could consult Jung.
But on February 24, Porter put a bullet into his head.
The Tribune gave the tragedy a banner headline on its front page and published the text of Porter’s suicide notes to his wife and to their close friend Ruth Hanna McCormick, widow of Senator McCormick.43
He left most of his estate to his widow and large bequests to Yale, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Art Institute, etc.
“Dr. Carl Jung, famous psycho-analyst of Switzerland, of whom Mr. Porter spoke as ‘my dear friend,’ was given a personal bequest of $20,000.”44
Mrs. Porter later built a house at Ojai, where she has lived ever since,45 though she drifted away from Krishnamurti and from the Theosophical movement.
She is a trustee, and Yolande de Manziarly is librarian and teacher of music, at a pioneering educational institution, the World University in Ojai. ~William Maguire, Spring 1978, Page 37-51
l Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York ed., p. 247.
2 Jung’s previous visit to the U.S. had been in March and April 1913. See The Freud/ Jung Letters, 350 J.
3 “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (1928), CW 10, 184; “On Psychic Energy” ( 1928), CW 8, 86; “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower'” (1929), CW 13, 31; “The Complications of American Psychology” (1930), CW 10, 978; “Archaic Man” (1931), CW 10, 125, 132; “Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology” (1931), CW 8, 669; “Brother Klaus” (1933), CW 11, 474; “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” ( 1934), CW 9, i, 48; 51 “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” (1935), CW 12, 171; “The Tavistock Lectures” (1935), CW 18, 16, 271; “Psychological Typology” (1936), CW 6, 963; “The Symbolic Life” (1939), CW 18, 629, 688; “After the Catastrophe” (1945), CW 10, 431; Symbols of Transformation (orig. of the revision, where these passages first appeared, 1952), 480, 501, n. 34; “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” (1961), CW 18, 567.
4 Subtitled “Extract from an Unpublished MS.” when published in 1961.
5 e.g., “1924-25, field study of the Pueblo Indians,” in Gerhard Wehr, Portrait of Jung: An Illustrated Biography (New York, 1971; orig. 1969), p. 169.
6 Jung, His Life and Work, A Biographical Memoir (New York, 1976), pp. 158 ff.
7 New York Herald-Tribune, Dec. 23, 1924, p. 9.
8 For Jung’s first meeting with H. F. McCormick, in 1909, see The Freud/ Jung Letters, 150 F, 151 J. In March 1910, Jung made a hurried trip to the U.S. expressly to treat him, in Chicago; ibid., p. 301.
9 Official Guide of the Railways … of the United States … , 1925.
10 Typewritten letter, in the papers of William Alanson White, M.D., National Archives, Washington, D.C. (I am indebted to Arcangelo D’Amore, M.D., for bringing this correspondence to my attention.) White (1870-1937), who had met Jung in Europe in 1907, allowed him to analyze Negro patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, of which he was superintendent, in 1912. See The Freud/Jung Letters, pp. 513 and 516, n. 3.
11 Handwritten letter, courtesy of the Frances Gillespie Wickes Estate and of Mr. Franz Jung. Incidentally, Jung and Frances Wickes had first met in Zurich in
winter 1923, according to her book The Inner World of Childhood (rev. ed., New York, 1966), p. xi.
12 See Jung’s letter to her, 20 May 1940, in Letters, ed. G. Adler, Vol. 1 ( 1973).
Her son, Chauncey S. Goodrich, professor of Chinese at the University of California in Santa Barbara, also has Jungian interests.
13 L. Eliot, “Concerning Jung’s Influence in California,” in Michael Fordham, ed., Contact with Jung (London, 1963), p. 208.
14 Rand McNally Auto Road Atlas of the United States (Chicago), 1926 ed.
15 “Introduction: Life of Jaime de Angulo,” in Olmsted’s Achumawi Dictionary
(Berkeley, 1965), 1-4. De Angulo was a scholar not only of Achumawi but of at least ten other Indian languages.
16 M. D. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932), pp. 138 and 141-145 (de Angulo, at Mill Valley, talked to Mabel about the collective unconscious, the anima, the I Ching),· 271, 277-281 (Mabel was working that winter with her psychoanalyst, A. A. Brill, in New York City).
17 H. T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (rev. ed., New York, 1964), pp. 413, 419.
18 From a letter of Dec. 7, 1960, in Rolfe’s unpublished MS., Encounter with Jung,
and, together with the quotation in the next sentence, quoted with Mr. Rolfe’s kind permission.
19 Journal of Analytical Psychology XIII:1 (Jan. 1968), p. 68.
20 E. C. Parsons, Taos Pueblo (General Series in Anthropology, 2; Menasha, Wisc.,
1936), p. 29 and passim.
21 Letters, ed. G. Adler, Vol. 1.
22 Handwritten letter, unpublished, courtesy of the Wickes Estate and Franz Jung.
23 “On Psychic Energy,” CW 8, 86.
24 Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, 480.
25 Handwritten letter, courtesy of the Wickes Estate and Franz Jung. Two persons
whom Jung names can be identified with fair certainty. Lay is probably Wilfred Lay (1872-1955), teacher and writer on psychology, who learned Chinese in order to read the I Ching. See Jung’s letter to him, Apr. 20, 1946, in Letters, Vol. 1. Mrs. Zinno is surely Henri Fink Zinno, Cary F. Baynes’ sister, who lived in Zurich during the 1920’s and 1930’s and attended Jung’s Seminars.
26 Letters, 2 (1975), xxxiii.
27 cw 2, 174.
Handwritten letter in the Jelliffe papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Published by courtesy of Franz Jung. See N. D. C. Lewis’ chapter of Jelliffe in Psychoanalytic Pioneers (New York, 1966), edited by F. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, and M. Grotjahn, pp. 224-233.
Incidentally, Jelliffe was Mable Dodge’s psychoanalyst before A. A. Brill took her over.
I am indebted to Arcangelo D’ Amore, M.D., for access to a copy of this letter.
Carbon copy of typewritten letter in the Jelliffe papers, Library of Congress.
This and the foregoing quotation published by courtesy of Carel Goldschmidt,
Trustee for the Smith Ely Jelliffe Estate.
William L. Jelliffe, who died Jan. 21, 1925, in New York of an accidental pistol-shot wound. A graduate of Yale 1923, he was then a medical student at
Columbia. (New York Times, Jan. 22, 1925, p. 1.)
Handwritten letter in the Jelliffe papers, Library of Congress. Published by courtesy of Franz Jung.
New York Times, Feb. 26, 1925, p. 1. Twenty years later, on Sept. 24, 1945, Jung wrote to an American friend: “It is now 35 years [sic] since I was once in the Senate in Washington with the late Medill McCormick. There on the steps of the Capitol I told him that the U.S. were on the march to the domination of the Pacific and to the Imperium Americanum.” (Published by courtesy of Franz Jung.) The “35 years” has to be a slip; McCormick did not enter the
Senate until 1919, and during the two previous years was in the House.
First published in Quadrant (New York), Winter 1975 and reprinted in W. McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking (Princeton, 1977), pp. 30-31. Kristine Mann, M.D. (1873-1945), was a founder of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and of its library, now named in memory of her. See Letters, ed. Adler, Vol. 1, p. 357.
Handwritten letter, courtesy of the Wickes Estate and Franz Jung.
New York Times, Mar. 26, 1925, p. 25; June 6 and 7, 1931, both p. 1. Ironically, when McCormick (Princeton 1921) died in 1973, the Princeton Alttmni Weekly (Feb. 20, 1973, p. 16) added its bit of error to the chronicle of Jung’s travels: “McCormick’s special interest was in study with Dr. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, with whom he made a trip to Africa to study the problems of the black man, following a year’s study among American Blacks.” Hannah, p. 15 8.
Private communication from Mrs. George F. Porter, May 19, 1976.
- Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Awakening Years (London, 1975), pp. 111, 196-8, 219.
Typewritten letter, in the White papers, National Archives (see above, n. 10).
Quoted with Mrs. Porter’s kind permission.
Carbon copy of typewritten letter in the White papers.
Chicago Tribune, Feb. 24, 1927, p. 1 ( I am indebted to Mrs. Linda Peterson and to Dr. Richard S. Peterson, formerly of the Newberry Library, for research on George F. Porter and Fowler McCormick.)
New York Herald-Tribune, March 4, 1927, p. 4. According to Mr. Franz Jung (private communication), the bequest proved to be mining stock of slight value. Lutyens, p. 243.
