Aniela Jaffe’s “Jung’s Last Years”

“Jung’s Last Years” by Aniela Jaffe:

I was expected, Jung explained, never under any circumstances to allow myself to be irritated by his anger, nor by his occasional “grumbling,” his roarings and cursings! ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 102.

Jung’s health and vitality had been weakened by an attack of amoebic dysentery in India in 1938, and a severe cardiac infarct in 1944 was the next blow life dealt him. “It was then that life busted me, as sometimes it busts everyone!”  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 99.

The fatal illness of his wife Emma-she died in November 1955 -marked the time when his life was nearing its end. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

When I took up my duties with Jung I had known him for about twenty years-my analysis with him began in 1937, a few months before he went to India. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

Respect for life also characterized Jung’s analytical work.  Worried or depressed patients hoped in vain for exhortation or comfort.  Jung gave them something else: he wanted to get them to integrate the necessary suffering to their life.  To soothe it away or exclude it would rob them of a vital experience, while the core of the depression would remain and soon enough provoke new suffering. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 103.

Any kind of “joyful Christianity” or sentimental prettification exasperated Jung to the limit. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 104.

Usually he enjoyed a wonderful, deep sleep, and plenty of it, the result not only of his good constitution but of his close and positive relationship with the unconscious. Sleep was the source of his psychic strength. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 105.

Jung was a good Swiss citizen. Nothing but illness could prevent him from casting his vote, even in old age, and every Swiss knows the sense of responsibility and consciousness of duty this entails.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

Jung belonged to the “freethinking” or Democratic party. It may be remarked parenthetically that he supported women’s right to vote, a right hitherto non-existent in Switzerland and a subject of fervent disputes.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

Foreign newspapers came into the house on days of political crisis; and magazines, especially the English Listener and the American National Geographic Magazine and

the Atlantic Monthly, satisfied his need for information on political and other matters. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

As a student he had to get his money, or at least part of it, from the sale of antiques belonging to a relative. Jung knew what poverty was. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

But there was something else too: objects possessed for Jung, a meaning in themselves, so they had to be treated with special care. “Things take their revenge!” he once hurled threateningly at my head when I had mislaid or botched something-I no longer remember what. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

For anyone like Jung, who devoted so much care and attention to them, objects began to animate themselves, living a life of their own. They would start talking, and communicate things that remain hidden from others. Objects are not always inert; sometimes they seem to join in the game of life, to reflect the mood and thoughts of people.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

“‘You should make friends again with the nearest things,’ said Nietzsche and didn’t. He was wafted away on the great wind, drunk with his own words. Even things, thanks to the meaning immanent in them, answer us as we address them. They are socially minded and afford us delightful company in hours and days of loneliness.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 110.

Nobody enjoyed laughing as much as Jung; nobody made others laugh as he could. After the death of his wife his laughter became rarer and quieter. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 113.

His impatience was due not only to his temperament-astrologically he was a Leo- but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 114.

But then he became serious and began telling me about himself and the sensitiveness that had tormented him from early youth, how it had encumbered him in his relationships and made him unsure of himself, how ashamed it had made him feel, but how, because of this same impressionability, he had perceived beauties and experienced things other people scarcely dreamed of.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 115.

But whenever a concert pianist gave a recital on the grand piano at the house in Kushnacht-the last one was the Russian- Ania Dorfmann- he was impressed by Jung’s genuine feeling for music. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Once when in a consultation I wanted to tell him about my relation to my parents-the piece de resistance of a classic analysis-he wouldn’t let me get a word out. “Don’t waste your time! Anyway I know a person’s relation to his parents at first glance!” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Burning letters in the beautiful old stove with green tiles which stood in his library was a solemn and at the same time cheerful occasion. Once, with the fire roaring, he smote the side of the stove with the flat of his hand, as though clapping an old friend on the shoulder, and remarked, laughing: “This fellow is my discretion!” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 117.

That he could still remember the dreams of his earliest childhood when he was well over eighty is astonishing enough. After he had recounted them for the memoirs, notes of the same dream were found which he had written some forty years earlier, and they differed in not a single detail from the spoken versions. Sometimes even the wording was nearly the same. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 118.

“Thank God my memory does not burden me with personal things.!!-he [Jung] used to exclaim with relief. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 118.

These [Eranos] “wall sessions” were the unforgettable highlights of the summer. They acquired a different character when Erich Neumann, of Tel-Aviv, was there, for then a dialogue developed between the two, and we listened. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 119.

Not so Jung: no question of letting the plan drop! Of course I must go on the trip, I had also to accept the risk of danger. The unconscious was nature, and like nature it could either help man or destroy him. What mattered was that he should try to confront nature consciously, to fathom it and transform it. That was the whole venture of life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 121.

Before–going—to Africa in 1926 he learned Swahili, which stood him in good stead during palavers with the natives in Kenya and Uganda. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

He [Jung] had no Hebrew, which he regretted very much, especially after he became acquainted with the texts of Jewish mysticism, which he would have liked to have read in the original. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

After the death of his [Jung] wife, his four daughters and his daughter-in-law-each the center of a large family of her own-took turns staying with him for a while, to keep him company. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

It was obvious that dictating letters tired him, but they took an important place in his life. As his libido stopped flowing into the production of scientific works, they became a receptacle for his creative ideas, and so their number continually increased in his later years. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 123.

But at bottom he understood and accepted his “outsiderness,” because he knew that his ideas expected too much of his contemporaries. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 124.

Jung was all the more pleased and grateful for the successful interviews, such as those with Mircea Eliade, Georges Duplain, Georg Gerster, Gordon Young, Richard Evans, and John Freeman. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

A distinguishing mark of his [Jung’s] correspondence is that the great bulk of it was conducted with people unknown to him. Letters to the well-known or famous were in the minority. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

It was one of Jung’s exaggerations to say that the “man of the people” understood him better than the intellectuals,… ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

It was a particular joy to him that an abbess in Alsace read his “Answer to Job” with her nuns. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 126.

When Jung was writing, he enclosed himself in an invisible shell. Nothing could distract him or break through his concentration; it was a cardinal law that he was never under any circumstances to be spoken to while writing. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 128.

Very early on Jung had taken to giving the typescripts to his pupils to read before sending them to the printer. All criticisms, all suggestions for changes, cuts or additions were carefully weighed and were generally accepted. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 128.

“Jung smoked a water-cooled pipe.” “By choice he smoked Granger tobacco.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

The [Tobacco] mixture was kept in a dark bronze box, which for some unaccountable reason bore the name “Habbakuk.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

Jung was no cigarette smoker, but after luncheon he allowed himself a Brazilian cigar, which he would offer also to his friends. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

We had been sitting on the terrace shortly before his death, after a stroke had made speaking infinitely difficult for him. Even then he wanted to be told about what was going on in

the world, about the letters, people, telephone calls, and gave brief indications of answers, hints of thoughts. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 130.

Jung liked playing patience. He had no compunction, now and then, in an emergency, in helping fate a little by switching the cards around. The game had to come out, dammit! The scandalization of others who caught him out in such unabashed cheating did not disturb him in the slightest, it may even have spiced his enjoyment. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

He liked English thrillers, but Simenon was his favorite. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

For Jung the figure of the detective was a modern version of the alchemical Mercurius, solver of all riddles, and he was entertained by his heroic deeds. He also enjoyed science fiction. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

There was the laughing head of the trickster that Jung said looked like Balzac, and a naked female form with arms outstretched towards a mare-he called it Pegasus. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 133.

There was also a relief of a bear with a ball and one of a snake. Thus these stones lived. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Then followed a simple but delicious meal: soup-generally an enriched . Knorr or Maggi packet-soup-a dish filled with an abundance of cheeses, butter, bread, and fruit. A cup of coffee and sometimes a liqueur ended the meal. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

“It is well known that Jung was a connoisseur of wine.”  “Cocktails he detested.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Jung died in his house in Kusnacht, amid the great images that filled his soul. As the thought of death had been his familiar for many decades, it did not come as an enemy, although he

was familiar also with the pain caused by the finite11ess of life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

The spectacle of eternal nature makes me painfully aware of my weakness and perishability, and I find no joy in imagining an equanimity in conspectu mortis. As I once dreamt, my

will to live is a glowing daimon, who sometimes makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me. One can, at most, save face like the unjust steward, and then not

always, so that my lord wouldn’t find even that much to commend. But the daimon reeks nothing of that, for life. At the core is steel on stone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 136.

For relaxation, Jung played solitaire in the evenings, occasionally “helping fate a little by switching the cards around” in “unabashed cheating.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

We had been sitting on the terrace shortly before his death, after a stroke had made speaking infinitely difficult for him. Even then he wanted to be told about what was going on in the world, about the letters, people, telephone calls, and gave brief indications of answers, hints of thoughts. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 130.

Jung liked playing patience. He had no compunction, now and then, in an emergency, in helping fate a little by switching the cards around. The game had to come out, dammit! The scandalization of others who caught him out in such unabashed cheating did not disturb him in the slightest, it may even have spiced his enjoyment. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

He liked English thrillers, but Simenon was his favorite. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

For Jung the figure of the detective was a modern version of the alchemical Mercurius, solver of all riddles, and he was entertained by his heroic deeds. He also enjoyed science fiction. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

”It is exceedingly difficult to write anything definite or descriptive about the progression of psychological states. It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. ” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 137.

“At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called out, ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death.’ ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 137.

I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice…. . . A creative person has little power over his own life.  He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon …. This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 141.

” A few weeks later I returned to school, and never suffered another attack. The whole bag of tricks was over and done with! That was when I learned what a neurosis is.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

“For the time being I am undergoing the curse of letter-writing. Only through submission to detestable duties can one gain a certain feeling of liberation which induces a creative mood. In the long run one 1 cannot steal creation.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

“The high degree of assurance and composure that distinguish you [Freud] is not yet mine generally speaking …. Countless things that are commonplaces for you are still brand new experiences for me, which I have to relive afterwards until they tear me to pieces.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 144.

“And let those who go down with the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 150.

“After the parting of ways with Freud, a period of uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 150.

“I had wanted to go on with the scientific analysis of myths which I had begun in Symbols of Transformation. That was still my goal-but I must not think of that! I was being compelled to go through the process of the unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153.

… I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child’s life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistance and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153

A few years later the dream came true: Jung fell into a neurotic conflict between creativity and inertia. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 141.

When Jung was twelve years old, the “fatal resistance to life in this world” obtruded once more and led to a neurosis. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 142.

He [Jung] suffered from more or less genuine fainting spells and stayed out of school for a half year or more. ”I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

The dissertation, ”On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena” (1902), dedicated to his fianc6e and written at the suggestion of Eugen Bleuler, his chief, formed the prelude to the first creative period. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 144.

The real divergence between Jung’s standpoint and Freud’s first came to light in the theme of the mother-son incest. Jung dealt with it in the last chapter of Symbols of Transformation, entitled “The Sacrifice.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 148.

“A true assessment of Freud’s achievement would take us into areas of the mind that concern not only Jews but Europeans in general, areas that I have sought to illuminate in my works. Without Freud’s ‘psychoanalysis’ I wouldn’t have had a clue.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 152.

Jung wrote to Erich Neumann: ”In the case of bad books, it is enough that they get written. Good books, however, want to realize themselves and begin to pose questions  which one would rather leave others to answer” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153.

…although Jung certainly did spend some time playing with building blocks, during this long regressive period, stretching out over nearly six years (until 1918), he lived a normal middle-class life as psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a large international practice, and his family never had to suffer on account of his preoccupation. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 154.

The building game was only a prelude, a rite d’entre.  It released a stream of fantasies and had a calming effect on the emotions bound up with these inner images. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 154.

It was the concept of individuation, already sketched out in ” Septem Sermones,” that gave him relief, peace of mind, and the will to return to the world of scientific research; for the individuation process brings about the conjunction of opposites for which Jung had struggled during the preceding years. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 160.

Jung never completely recovered from Wilhelm’s premature death in 1930. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 162.

These visions filled Jung with indescribable bliss: ”One cannot imagine the beauty and intensity of feeling during the visions. They were the most powerful things I have ever experienced.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 163.

Having been stimulated by Karl Kerenyi’s book on the Aegean Festival in Faust Part II,  he began working on Mysterium Coniunctionis in his sixty-sixth year; he finished the two volumes sixteen years later. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 165.

“My lifework is essentially an attempt to understand what others apparently can believe” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 167.

Jung’s mother, Emilie Jung (nee Preiswerk, 1849-1923), had a similar gift and was interested in the “supernatural.” She left behind a diary in which she noted down all the premonitions, “spookish” phenomena, and strange occurrences she had experienced. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.

Every week, at a fixed hour, he [Dr. Jung’s Maternal Grandfather] used to hold intimate conversations with his deceased first wife, very much to the chagrin of the second! Jung’s psychiatric diagnosis was that he suffered from “waking hallucinations,” though at the same time he dismissed this as a “mere word.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.

Samuel’s second wife, Augusta (nee Faber, 1805-1862), Jung’s maternal grandmother, was gifted with “second sight” and could also see “spirits.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.

As Oeri indicates, Jung did not confine himself to reading “occult” literature, but began his own experiments and, during the years 1899 and 1900, organized regular seances. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 3.

The psychoid archetype is not to be confused with archetypal images or archetypal contents. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 7.

“Although on the one hand our critical arguments cast doubt on every single case [ of apparitions], there is on the other hand not a single argument that could prove that spirits do not exist. In this regard, therefore, we must rest content with a non liquet.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 9.

In the early twenties Jung, together with Count Albert Schrenk-Notzing and Professor Eugen Bleuler, carried out a series of experiments with the Austrian medium, Rudi Schneider, at the Burgholzli. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 10.

Jung told me later that in one series of experiments, papier-mache objects (cutouts of angels and beer mats) which had been covered with luminous paint and placed out of reach of the medium rose up in the air and sailed through the room as soon as the medium fell into a trance. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 10.

At one seance, four of the five people present saw an object like a small moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. It was absolutely incomprehensible to them that Jung, the fifth person, could see nothing of the sort, although they repeatedly pointed out to him exactly where it was. From this Jung inferred the possibility of collective visions on such and other occasions-for instance, the sightings of flying saucers. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 11.

“If such things can occur,” wrote Jung, “then it is also conceivable that persons in the vicinity of mediums might act as a source of ions-in other words, nourishment might be effected by the passage of living molecules of albumen from one body to another.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 12.

In later years Jung no longer concerned himself with spiritualistic or occult phenomena and he never evaluated his parapsychological experiments scientifically, yet he did not by any means dismiss them as worthless. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 12.

*Loneliness is for me a source of healing that makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment to me, and I need several days of silence to recover the futility of words. ~Carl Jung

“In this vast and shadowy region, where everything seems possible and nothing believable, one must oneself have observed many strange happenings and in

addition heard, read, and if possible tested many stories by examining their witnesses in order to form an even moderately ,sure judgment,” he says in his foreword to Fanny Moser’s book. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 13.

From earliest times death and the idea of a life after death have filled man’s thoughts, and in religion, philosophy, and art have prompted answers to what is rationally unanswerable. To throw all this to the winds is, from the psychological standpoint, symptomatic of an atrophy of instinct and a willful disregard of one’s psychic roots, both of which must be paid for dearly. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 13.

Yet insects have no cerebrospinal system at all, but only a double chain of ganglia corresponding to the sympathetic system in man. Jung concludes that the ganglionic system can evidently produce thoughts and perceptions just as easily as the cerebrospinal system. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 15.

Jung expressly emphasized, however, that the principle of synchronicity should be applied only when a causal explanation is unthinkable. “For, whenever a cause is even remotely thinkable, synchronicity becomes an exceedingly doubtful proposition .. ” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.

In the last essay he wrote before he died, Jung recapitulated the salient points in a dream series of an eight-year-old girl. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.

it was a momentous event when he became acquainted with Wilhelm in 1928. Their first meeting, which soon developed into a friendship, took place when Wilhelm, with the help of his learned friend Lau Nai Suan in China, had after ten years of work just completed a new translation of the I Ching, along with a commentary on the oracles. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 26.

The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 31.

He [Jung] pointed out that the proton radiation from the sun is influenced to such a degree by the conjunctions, oppositions, and quartile aspects of the planets that the occurrence of electromagnetic storms ( sunspot periods) can be predicted with a fair amount of probability. The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.

“Astrology seems to require differing hypotheses, and I am unable to opt for an either-or. We shall probably have to resort to a mixed explanation, for nature does not give a fig for the sanitary neatness of our intellectual categories of thought.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.

“I incline. in fact to the view that synchronicity in the narrower sense is only a special instance of general acausal orderedness that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 42.

Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the “kingdom of the second Fish” -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33

In reality the archetype must be regarded as the “arranger” of synchronistic phenomena. It is their condition, not their cause. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 37.

Even in apparently banal synchronistic events it is possible in most cases to uncover the organizing archetype. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 38.

Jung’s method of research was pre-eminently historical. It consisted essentially in comparing his ideas and intuitions, and the insights he had gained from the empirical material provided by his patients, with the historical evidence. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 46.

He would let the contents rise up from the unknown psychic depths, not only carefully observing them but treating. them as realities to be lived with, felt, and experienced through active participation. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

This experimental phase began at the end of 1912 and lasted till about 1919. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

The study of Gnostic traditions nevertheless left him unsatisfied.  For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years old and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them. For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

Soon afterwards he acquired the first alchemical work for his library from a bookseller in Munich. It was the two volumes of Artis Auriferae, a compilation of some thirty Latin treatises, published in Basel in 1593. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 53.

In the course of his psychological interpretation of alchemical texts, which were then not understood at all, Jung came to realize the truth of the alchemical saying “liber librum aperit” (one book opens another). ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 54.

In his old age Gerhard Dorn, a learned natural philosopher, doctor, and Paracelcist from Frankfurt-am-Main, who lived in the sixteenth century, came to mean more to Jung than most other alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 55.

The Book of Krates (ninth century) presents the whole alchemical doctrine in the form of a dream. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.

From the numerical standpoint they differ in that the alchemical conception is characterized by the quaternity-in keeping with the Gnostic saying “In the Four is God” whereas the Christian conception found its most differentiated expression in the Holy Trinity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 63.

Elsewhere Jung contrasted the transformation in the Mass with an analogous transformation process described in the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist of the third century, and compared the Christian ideas of redemption with those of the alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.

His [Jung’s] observations on the religious aspect of evil start from the ancient numerical dilemma that runs through alchemy-the opposition and interplay of the trinity and the quaternity, where the “fourth” takes over the role of evil. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.

Behind the bond between the sexes stands the self, the archetype of wholeness, which contains and at the same time unites the opposites in human nature. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.

The dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950, contains several allusions to the “heavenly marriage,” thus proving how the unconscious world of images reasserts its timeless significance as a dark counterpart to the spiritual world of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 68.

He described it as “psychoid,” that is, not purely psychic but to a certain extent physical and organic. One might say that it too is utriusque capax. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 69.

Reverting to this idea of a transcendental unitary reality.  In his memoirs, Jung admitted that he had reached the bounds of scientific understanding, for which reason he called Mysterium Coniunctionis the culmination of his work.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 70.

The “subtle body,” or “breath body” as it is sometimes called, is an archetypal idea that can be traced back to classical antiquity. It occurs in Poseidonius and Plotinus, in Proclus and Synesius, and later in Paracelsus.  ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 72.

For the Paracelsists, matter acquired the ineffable quality of an “increatum,” and hence was coexistent and co eternal with God. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 59.

I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre. That was the first event that broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

One of the books most frequently quoted by Jung is the anonymous Rosarium philosophorum; it was first published in Frankfurt in 1550, and is also contained in the second volume of Artis Auriferae. Jung’s monograph “The Psychology of the Transference” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

“Consequently alchemy gains the quite new and interesting aspect of a projected psychology of the collective unconscious, and thus ranks with mythology and folklore. Its symbolism is in the closest relation to dream symbolism on the one hand, and to the symbolism of religion on the other.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 57.

“Novum lumen”: “To cause things hidden in the shadow to appear, and to take away the shadow from them, this is permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God; through nature….All these things happen, and the eyes of the common men do not see them, but the eyes of the understanding and of the imagination perceive them with true and truest vision.” ~Michael Sendivogius, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.

“The conventional guises are dropped and the true man comes to light. He is in very truth reborn from this psychological relationship. [Transference]” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.

The organizing factor would then be the archetype of wholeness, which is as much physical as psychic and may thus be thought of as a “subtle body.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

Synchronicity, Meier says, “presupposes a tertium, higher than soma or psyche, and responsible for symptom formation in both-approximating to the theory of the ‘subtle body.’ ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

The phenomenon is in accord with the alchemical conception of imaginatio as a half corporeal, half spiritual being, whereby the soul is enabled to bring about “many things of the utmost profundity outside the body” by imagining them. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Michael Sendivogius says: “Moreover the soul by which man differs from other animals operates inside his body, but it has greater efficacy outside the body, for outside the body it rules with absolute power.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

For Jung the stone “contained and. at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit,” and his kinship with it was “the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

“The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. ” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Yet, unlike the alchemists, what fascinated Jung his life long was not Matter, but Psyche. For the scientist in him she was the object of rigorous empirical research; as a physician he succored her with deepest understanding; as a man he was the master and servant of her transformations. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 77.

At the Congress of the International Society at Bad Nauheim in May 1934, Jung stipulated that the German-Jewish doctors who had been ejected or excluded from the German section could individually become members of the International Society with equal rights, thus preserving their professional and social status. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Jung, to put it briefly, saw the Jews as a “race with a three thousand year-old civilization,” whereas he attributed to the “Aryans” a “youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Yet he himself, long before the advent of Hitler, had warned in 1918 about “the blond beast menacingly prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. ” But who took the warning seriously then? ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 91.

“The doctor who, in wartime, gives his help to the wounded of the other side will surely not be held a traitor to his country.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

In psychology the object of knowledge is at the same time the organ of knowledge, which is true of no other science.  . . . If the organ of knowledge is its own object, we have every reason to examine that organ very closely indeed, since the subjective premise is at once the object of knowledge

which is therefore limited from the start. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 87.

“Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand years as ‘God’s chosen people’ was not put up to such an idea by some quite special psychological peculiarity? ”  ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89.

When Hitler seized power it became quite evident to me that a mass psychosis was boiling up in Germany. But I could not help telling myself that this was after all Germany, a civilized European nation with a sense of morality and discipline. Hence the ultimate outcome of this unmistakable

mass movement still seemed to me uncertain, just as the figure of the Fuhrer at first struck me as being merely ambivalent. . . . Like many of my contemporaries, I had my doubts. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89-90.

The driving forces of a psychological mass movement are essentially archetypal. Every archetype contains the lowest and the highest, evil and good, and is therefore capable of producing diametrically opposite results. Hence it is impossible to make out at the start whether it will prove to be positive or negative. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 90.