The psychologist Carl Jung, who was born 150 years ago this weekend, seems never to have visited Ireland. But he loomed large in the lives of two of our greatest writers, for very different reasons.
He and James Joyce shared a city – Zurich – for a period during and after the first world war. Unfortunately, they also shared a deep, mutual scepticism, exacerbated by the attempts of third parties to bring them together. Here’s Joyce, writing to his patron Harriet Weaver in 1921:
“A bunch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense…of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.”
One of that bunch was Elizabeth McCormack Rockefeller, a Jungian disciple and philanthropist who subsidised Joyce for a time, but wanted him to undergo analysis and suspended funding when he wouldn’t.
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Jung, for his part, believed Ulysses was evidence of the author’s latent schizophrenia, which he also thought explained Joyce’s heavy drinking. Asked to write the preface for a German edition, he suggested among other insults that the book could be as easily read backwards as forwards.
When the publishers showed that to Joyce, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, he telegraphed back a terse response in German, “Niedrigerhangen”, meaning: “Ridicule it by making it public” (yes, they have a word for that too).
Jung later repented by publishing a more respectful version and, in a letter to Joyce, admitting that difficult as he found Ulysses to read, “I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it.”
As for the author, family tragedy eventually forced him to relent in his scepticism enough to allow Jung treat his daughter Lucia for the actual schizophrenia with which she was diagnosed in her mid-20s. “I wouldn’t go to him, but maybe he can help her,” he wrote.
Jung thought Lucia had the same madness as her father, without the genius to channel it, and famously likened them to two people going to the bottom of a river: one diving and the other drowning.
Ellmann thought Jung was fundamentally wrong about Joyce’s supposed self-medication against mental illness, in part because of his unfamiliarity with Irish drinking habits. “It was not easy for Jung, who had been brought up in a ‘fanatical anti-alcoholic tradition’, to understand Joyce, whose rearing was diametrically opposite,” he wrote.
The writer drank at night only, Ellmann pointed out, and with a combination of “purpose and relaxation”. He enjoyed company but also used it to study human behaviour and to unburden himself of anxieties. In summary: “He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.”
By contrast with Joyce, Samuel Beckett had only one encounter with Jung, but it brought a shattering insight that changed his life. When he attended a lecture by Jung in 1934, it was at the suggestion of his psychiatrist Wilfred Rupert Bion, who had been treating Beckett for depression.
Some of that related to an intense relationship with his mother, an austere woman from whom he inherited his tall, thin frame and hawk-like features, but not her narrow worldview. Relations between them were exacerbated by Beckett’s apparent prenatal memories of a claustrophobic life in the womb.
In the lecture, Jung recalled the sad case of a pre-teenage girl he had treated years before. She was troubled by recurrent dreams, which the psychologist thought (but didn’t say) were premonitions of imminent death. And she did indeed die soon afterwards. But the bit that astounded Beckett was Jung’s one-line summary, added as an afterthought.
For Beckett, that explained a lot about his own life. Bion thought so too and went on to develop theories involving “psychological birth” in the womb, a result of which was that “biological birth did not necessarily bring mental separation from the mother”.
Beckett gave up therapy the same year. But he often referred to Jung’s story in conversation. And a 20 years later, he put it in the mouth of Maddy Rooney, the main character in his radio play All That Fall (which I had the strange experience a while back of hearing at Tullow Church, Foxrock, in the Beckett family pew, among a blindfolded audience).
All That Fall is the most localised of his works, set along Brighton Road on a race day in nearby Leopardstown. Mrs Rooney goes to meet her blind husband off the train, which we later learn has been the scene of a tragedy involving a child, never explained.
On the way home, she remembers something she heard in a talk once, from “one of those new mind doctors”, that had “haunted” her ever since.
She goes on to retell the story Beckett had heard, about the “strange and unhappy little girl” and recalls the doctor’s conclusion, which he had found so mind-blowing: “The trouble with her was that she had never been really born”.
