Pilgrim (34 page)

“Not entirely, no.”

“Let me start again,” Jung said, getting up and crossing the room to sit in a chair. “Haeckel said:
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
—but what he should have said is ontogeny
repeats
phylogeny. Still, he was a biologist—a scientist—and you have to forgive him a few self-important words. And so…”

Jung lifted a box of cheroots from the table beside him and struck a match. In the moonlight, he looked like a Chinese Buddha in a cloud of incense.

“What Haeckel suggested was that in the development of any individual, human or otherwise—a frog, for instance—from conception to birth, the embryo’s increasing complexity
retells
the evolutionary history of its own particular species. That way, your little fish began as a single cell—as a fertilized egg—which reflects one of the most primitive of life forms, namely the one-celled protozoa. Are you with me?”

“Tell me
protozoa
.” Emma pushed herself higher in the bed, leaning in against the pillows. “I think I know it, but I want to hear you say it.”

Jung adored the role of mentor and posed for a
moment with the cheroot in his hand, his profile moonlit and his Prussian haircut standing at attention.

“
Proto-zoa
,” he said. “
First animals
. Or, if you like,
first beings
. Now it gets exciting. As the fertilized egg develops, it divides and multiplies…”

“Does it also add and subtract?” Emma smiled.

“Don’t interrupt. As it divides and multiplies, what it is doing is forming a mass of cells—an
unorganized
mass, not unlike a sponge. Think of the sponge in your bath and all the different shapes and sizes it comes in. So…it passes on through stages that resemble a jellyfish. Later—after it’s started to elongate, its nerve cells migrate to the back and become encased in a sheath of cartilage. This ultimately stiffens into bone—a spine and a spinal cord—and this way, it takes on the characteristics of the earliest marine vertebrates.
Gills
develop, like those of a fish…”

“My little fish.”

“Precisely. And then these gills, over time, are replaced by lungs. Et cetera, et cetera. Do you see? All of these things have already happened to your little fish, and more and more and more until it is ready to climb up…”

“…out of the sea. Which is, to be born.”

“Which is to be born, my dear one. And thus—the whole process of embryonic development reflects the process of evolution. Ontogeny repeating phylogeny.
And here endeth the lesson,
as my father used to say from his pulpit. And yet, there’s more to be had from Haeckel’s theory than mere biology…”

“No, Carl Gustav. No. Not more. I’m tired. It’s after two o’clock in the morning.”

“But this is important. Immensely important. You don’t understand. It has to do with my work. It has to do with…”

Everything.

Oh, no. Don’t you start.

I just thought you’d like to know I’ve been listening. And I agree with you:
there is more.

“Emma, please. Just stay awake long enough to hear one last thing.”

“Yes, Carl Gustav. But tell it quickly.”

Jung sat forward. He had—but why?—an erection.

You get too excited, Carl Gustav. You get too excited about ideas.

I can’t—I can’t help it. Oh, dear. Pray God she can’t see me.

It wouldn’t matter if she did. She isn’t interested. Not now.

I hadn’t thought I wanted to—but there it is. Jesus. Look at it.

I don’t need to look at it. I can feel it. What you suffer from
—
amongst other things
—
is nothing less than intellectual priapism. It’s that simple. Get an idea
—
get an erection.

Stop.

Why don’t you say your piece? Emma has begun to drift
—
and if you don’t begin your dissertation, she will be gone before you can impregnate her mind with your brilliance. An image I think you rather enjoy…Remember Sabina Spielrein. Think of that luscious new intern you saw in the corridor with Furtwängler. Think of your traumatized
pianist, whose lovely hands are longing to be busy. Say your piece, Carl Gustav. Say your piece. All of us are longing to hear it
—
begging you to undo your mental flies and flood our brains with your theories. Please. Please begin.

You bastard.

Well, I like to tell the truth. You just don’t like to hear it. Tell us, oh wondrous doctor of the soul, what it is you want to say.

It was only…

Say it aloud. Remember, it is Emma you want to impress.

For the moment.

“It was only…it is only that, given the obvious rightness of Haeckel’s theory, I cannot help wondering—pondering the possibility that if ontogeny repeats phylogeny in the biological sense, then might it not also repeat it in the psychological sense. Might not each individual inherit the psyche—or a portion of the collective psyche—of the whole human race? Don’t you see? If Haeckel is right—and he is—then doesn’t his principle suggest something more than merely one
physical
process reflecting and repeating another
physical
process? Could it not be that the individual’s nature—which is unique—also reflects and repeats to whatever degree the nature and the experience of its ancestors? The whole race? Why not? Why not? Isn’t that why some of what we
know
we never had to
learn?
Emma? Emma…?”

Too late. She was asleep.

Jung stubbed the cheroot in the ashtray and hurried across the floor to the bureau, where he rummaged
amongst the debris from his pockets for notebook and pen.

In the bathroom, he sat on the closed seat of the toilet and, using his knees as a desk, wrote in his journal:

I am my mother’s dreams incarnate. I am my father’s atavistic fears. In this cave where I am sitting…

He looked up and blinked.

The lights above and around the mirror were glaring at him, reflected in every tile and in all the glass and all the metal with which he was surrounded.

What cave?

Why had he written
cave?

In this cave where I am sitting…

All at once, he wanted to weep and did not know why.

A notion had taken hold of him.

An intellectual erection.

And its power was as overwhelming and all-pervasive as the power of the erection straining against the thin white cotton of his pyjama trousers.

Out. Out.

Could there be such a thing as an intellectual ejaculation?

Why not?

Stay out of this.

I can’t stay out. I’m part of it. Conscience. Remember? Conscience and memory, pressing against the thin white membrane of your brain. This cave you are sitting in, Carl Gustav, is your
mind.
Look around you. What has been painted here? What animals are there? What other creatures
—
other men?

Jung stared at the ceiling.

Whose handprint is that? Whose gods were these? Whose totems
—
emblems
—
signs and symbols…? Don’t be afraid of it. Stand up and look at it.

The notebook fell to the floor. Using the sink to propel him to his feet, Jung dropped the uncapped pen into the cavern of its white enamel bowl.

He stood on the toilet seat and raised his arms.

There were shadows in the corners—cracks in the ceiling. Did they form the shapes of beings he had never seen before? Or were they maps of rivers and mountain ranges—routes for the journeys made by others who had gone before him…

Jung felt like a suppliant, his arms outstretched, his fingers splayed, his sight overwhelmed with tears.

I have come such a long, long way
, he thought in a voice he had never heard before.
We have come such a long, long way. And I can
remember
it…

I can remember…

Ontogeny had just repeated phylogeny in a voice as clear and distinct as if it had spoken aloud.

I can know what I never had to learn. And I can remember what I never, never myself, experienced.

Jung climbed down and wept.

He would never be the same.

13

There are some whose experience of life is so far removed from our own that we call them
mad.
This is mere convenience. We call them so in order to relieve ourselves of
taking responsibility for their place in the human community. Thus, we relegate them to asylums, shutting them out of view and beyond calling distance behind locked doors. But for them, there is no difference between what we think of as
dreams and nightmares
and the world in which they live their daily lives. What we call
visions
and relegate to mystics
—
the miracles of Christ
—
the lives of the Saints
—
the apocalyptic revelations of John
—
are for them the stuff of common, everyday experience. In their view, there can be sanctity in trees and toads
—
living gods in fire and water
—
and a voice in the whirlwind to which, if only we would listen, they would direct our attention. Such are the conditions under which those who suffer
dementia
exist. They do not live in “other worlds,” but in a dimension of
this world
which we, out of fear, refuse to acknowledge.

This had been written in 1901 by a man whose existence was rarely mentioned in 1912—or thereafter. His family had gone so far as to change its name in the belief that his disgrace was so great and so universal that even to speak of him amongst themselves was ruinous. The spectacle of his decline and death had brought catastrophe to everyone with whom he was connected.

Robert Daniel Parsons was an American student of psychology. He had come to Europe in 1898 in order to complete his studies with the then pre-eminent teacher of psychopathology, Pierre Janet, at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and with Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich.

Both Janet and Bleuler were regarded by their
students with nothing less than awe. Together with the Austrian Krafft-Ebbing, these two men had broken the restraining skin that had separated psychiatry from the rest of the medical profession. Freud had not yet entered the larger picture with his
Interpretation of Dreams
, leaving the field largely to Janet and Bleuler. There were disagreements between them, but never a major schism. They were not so much the founders of different theories as the self-appointed spokesmen for different schools.

Jung, as a student, had experienced the teachings of both these “giants”—giants, that is to say, in their own time. That Jung would outstrip them both was not even a subject of discussion prior to 1912. By then, however, it was becoming perfectly clear to Jung himself—and somewhat resentfully clear to his masters—that he and Freud were to claim the entire attention of the twentieth century where psychiatry and psychotherapy were concerned. While Janet and Bleuler tended to hang back in the safety of their established reputations, Jung strode forward fearlessly into what he would come to realize was an ever-widening sphere of understanding—sometimes alarming, sometimes even terrifying—but never to be rejected. From the night of May 12th, 1912, when he experienced his “bathroom epiphany,” there would be no turning back. Terror, yes—and terror, as we will see, is quite the right word—but no turning back.

As for Robert Daniel Parsons and his place in history, he became an advocate of the “sorry mass of
madmen” to whom he dedicated his life and, in time, his agony and his death.

In Paris in 1901, he experienced an epiphany equal to Jung’s 1912 revelation, but more profound in that it was more political—and more revolutionary.

By declaring that
the mad are not mad but merely different
, Parsons embraced the psychiatric equivalent of anarchy. If anarchism is the belief that all government should be abolished, Parsons’s version of this was that all governance of the mad should be abolished.
Down with Sanitoria, down with psychiatric wards in hospitals, down with Bedlam and down with psychiatric experiments.
Down, too, with all enforced medication, treatments and restraints. Down with laudanum, ether and chloral hydrate. Down with hydrotherapy. Down with straitjackets, locked doors and barred windows.

At first, Robert Daniel Parsons was perceived as a kind of manic entertainment. He was barely twenty-two years old—a tall, lanky, curly-headed Westerner from Wyoming whose handsome figure and
angelic boy-face
, as someone described it, drew an immediate audience amongst his fellow students. They delighted in his antic interruptions of Professor Janet’s lectures, and even Janet himself thought him charming. At first.

But Parsons’s ideas burned far too hot for them to be contained in a few eccentric outbursts in the lecture hall. They spilled out into the corridors and through the doors of the Salpêtrière into the streets. They took possession of student cafés and bistros. They started appearing in the press. There were soon
disciples and fellow advocates—many of them women.
The mad have rights
became a rallying cry and raids were conducted in which groups of
Parsonites
attempted to release the mad from their “prisons and torture chambers.”

In the long run, Parsons was effectively expelled from the Salpêtrière Hospital—no longer allowed entrance to its halls and disavowed by both staff and faculty. Professor Janet refused to acknowledge having him as a student, claiming only to be acquainted with Parsons’s extra-curricular escapades.

Parsons then “disappeared” for two years, becoming a farm labourer near Rossinière in the high valleys of the Alps northeast of Montreux. His only correspondence was with his younger sister Eunice, who was then a student at a women’s college in New Hampshire.