The man who coined ‘synchronicity’

JUNG: A BIOGRAPHY

By Deirdre Bair

Little, Brown and Co., $35, 860 pages

REVIEWED BY RICHARD RESTAK

Carl Jung is best known today to the general public as the psychiatrist who coined the term “synchronicity”: events related by their significance rather than by their causes. If this definition strikes you as unduly vague, consider the following personal example:

After several hours spent reading “Jung: A Biography” I set out for a walk in the nearby park. While huffing and puffing my way up a steep hill I pondered whether I would write this review by hand or compose it on a word processor. Cresting the summit, I found my answer lying at my feet — a shiny new pencil peeping up at me from a clump of leaves.

I picked it up to discover embossed along its length animal figures and cartoons identifying it as most likely belonging to a young child who had probably dropped it on the way to school. After returning home and sharpening the pencil, I began my handwritten notes for this review.

Would you accept this as an example, in Jung’s words, of “an experience that indicated events do not always obey the rules of time, space and causality”? Perhaps not, and you might be right. You could reasonably explain it as nothing more than an odd coincidence: If I weren’t reading Jung and thinking about how best to proceed with my review, I either wouldn’t have noticed the pencil or, if I had, never bothered to pick it up.

And if I were reviewing a book other than about Jung, I most likely wouldn’t now interpret my experience as an example of synchronicity linking my nascent review with my inner conflict between hand-writing or typing it. In other words, synchronicity, as with other terms fashioned by Jung — such as “extrovert,” “archetype,” and the “collective unconscious” — involves distinctly subjective responses.

I mention all this about synchronicity because “Synchronicity propelled me to write this book,” according to Deirdre Bair, author of “Samuel Beckett: A Biography,” which won the National Book Award, as well as critically acclaimed biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Anais Nin.

“Suddenly [in the mid-1990s] quite a lot of people who didn’t know each other, and in several cases didn’t know me either, were asking what my next book might be, and had I thought of writing about Jung?” Struck by this odd confluence of opinions, the author began the research that culminated in “Jung: A Biography.”

The son of a Protestant pastor in a small rural village in Switzerland, Jung grew up in a home where visionary experiences formed an ordinary aspect of everyday family life. Jung’s mother, Emilie, an introspective and solitary woman, believed in ghosts, entertained visions and regularly spoke with her son about the mysterious nocturnal spirits that prowled the Jung house.

In response to his mother’s involvement with the occult and spiritualism, Jung retained a lifelong interest in things mystical. While in medical school he regularly participated in seances using a homemade Ouija board and a glass that moved over the letters in response to questions. For his doctoral dissertation he chose “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena.” At least into the 1930s Jung continued to attend seances either as an observer or a participant.

As with previous biographers, this author devotes quite a few pages to the initially rosy relations between Jung and Sigmund Freud, which by 1911 gave way to acrimonious, bitter cross-accusations of professional betrayal. But, as the author points out, such a downward course was probably inevitable in light of the widely discrepant backgrounds of the two men.

Freud was a Jew, an atheist, and a member of the working middle class. Jung was a Christian, a mystic and independently wealthy (thanks to his marriage to the daughter of Johannes Rauschenbach, a man of such prodigious financial resources that he once wrote a check to cover the debts of the Swiss city of Schaffhausen at a time when that city was in severe financial difficulties).

In addition, Freud and Jung’s professional training differed in important ways. Freud started his career as a neurologist and only later switched to psychiatry; Jung had never considered any medical specialty other than psychiatry.

And while Freud lacked a hospital affiliation and as a result maintained a private practice consisting of patients who for the most part were wealthy and educated, Jung worked out of the Burgholzli, an internationally recognized public mental hospital that provided him with firsthand knowledge of mental illnesses afflicting the entire social spectrum, from poor, uneducated schizophrenics to members of the higher social echelon (even on one occasion a fellow psychoanalyst, Otto Gross).

Further, while Freud had spent the decade previous to their first meeting on March 3, 1907, isolated from the academic and medical communities, Jung had already established himself as a scholar with an international reputation.

But their most important discrepancy involved Jung’s disagreement with Freud on the importance of “sexual trauma” as the root cause of mental illness. During his tenure at Burgholzli Jung had seen many hospital patients “in which sexual things were of quite secondary importance compared with the role played by social adaptation.”

As an illustration of the different worldviews of these two monumental figures, the author cites an eerie event that took place during their first meeting while the two men sat talking in Freud’s study:

“Suddenly there occurred such a noise from the glass-fronted bookcase in front of which they were sitting that both jumped, fearing it would fall on them. ’Now this is a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon,’ Jung insisted. ’Oh, no, that is complete nonsense,’ Freud replied.

“To prove his point, Jung insisted there would be another noise, and immediately there was ’an indescribably terrible noise in the cabinet!’ ’Freud looked at me with horror then,’ Jung remembered. ’This raised a distrust of me in him, for you see, something like that isn’t possible, something like that doesn’t exist in his worldview. Consequently, for him, I had to be absolutely out of kilter somewhere.’”

Given such differences in background, education, and “take” on the world, the proper question isn’t “Why did Jung and Freud eventually go their separate ways?” but rather, “How did these two very different personalities establish and maintain their relationship as long as they did?”

Perhaps because Freud and Jung also shared several unedifying traits and attitudes. Along with an off-putting bluntness and briskness with those who disagreed with them, both Jung and Freud were confirmed misogynists. To take one example among many, the Viennese psychoanalysts, headed by Freud, were notoriously reluctant to recognize women as colleagues.

On the home fronts, Martha Freud served, in the author’s words, as a “super-housekeeper” worthy only of conversation with the Great Man about their children and household events. Jung, in turn, expected his wife Emma “to be primarily a contented Hausfrau [housewife] who would step out of that role only when he required her considerable charm and intelligence to ease professional situations.”

Eventually the differences outweighed the similarities and the Jung-Freud relationship turned increasingly hostile, culminating in 1912 in a complete severance of other than perfunctory communication between the two. Along with his disagreement about “sexual energy as the root of all mental dysfunction,” Jung also found Freud’s megalomania increasingly difficult to stomach.

For instance, after Jung published “Psychology of the Unconscious” in 1911 Freud claimed, incorrectly, that Jung’s emerging work on the collective unconscious was merely the expression of his own findings. “In short, Freud was claiming ultimate authority for all things pertaining to psychoanalysis by insisting that no matter who expressed an idea, he was its originator,” notes the author.

In his later years Jung wrote a prescient assessment of Freud. “He was really a layman when it came to psychiatry … He simply only knew his theory. And his theory did not suffice. It suffices for a certain area but not for the whole.”

Other areas of controversy deftly covered in this definitive biography include Jung’s alleged sympathy for the Nazis (not proven); his womanizing (true beyond any reasonable doubt); his usurpation of the work of another psychiatrist and former patient Johann Honegger, a disorganized, deeply disturbed man who eventually committed suicide. (This is definitely unproven.)

Overall, “Jung: A Biography” is a bulky (best to read it while placed on a table or other support), intensely researched effort that provides more details about Jung than probably anyone other than his most ardent acolytes will be interested in learning. Nonetheless, most readers when finishing the book will agree with the author’s opinion of Jung’s life and work: “fascinating, frustrating, contradictory, and intriguing, but ultimately of importance and value.”

Richard Restak is a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist who has written on medical ethics, neuroscience and behavior. His books include “The Brain” and “The Mind.”