Again, in Zürich/Küsnacht at the Jung-Institut, I keep intermittently experiencing myself as bitter, irritable, critical, unfair. Sigh. It's hard to disentangle or clarify this... as always. It doesn't feel as though it's all quite so maddening this time, though – and, also as usual, a number of people obviously experience me as pleasant, fun, even kindly (which I am... if intermittently).
My first exam in Fundamentals went well, if a bit weirdly – an exceptionally, well, idiosyncratic elder analyst somehow took my musical background as a cue for him to talk, for nearly fifteen minutes of the forty allotted, about how much he loved Richard Strauss... seeing the dismayed second examiner looking, only semi-covertly, at her watch, I leapt in with: yes, isn't Strauss fascinating, with all of those anima figures in the operas (name three or four), while his wife Pauline was so heavily animus-ridden but drove him to be creative (explain in two sentences), plus of course his identification with hero and trickster figures in the tone poems (from Till to Nietzsche), and then there's that immense drive towards a sort of final individuation shown in the last works such as Capriccio, Metamorphosen, Four Last Songs...
Anyway, I passed that one. With a first (he said, ever the proud schoolboy). Three more to go, including a distinctly exasperating one about Buddhism and psychotherapy. (They might fit together, but then again they might not, depending on what you are emphasizing, and whether you are feeling particularly dogmatically Zen-ish that day.)
This afternoon, while reading and taking notes, I was also musing uneasily on the emotional awkwardness I often see in myself here. And then I was looking at a postcard, tilted on the nightstand next to the bed in my small but Swisstically neat apartment – it is from Philip, another student; on Thursday, I think it was, we were chatting idly in the library, and he suddenly turned to the woman at the desk and bought two copies of a new postcard they have made with a mandala that Jung drew, and gave me one, saying, Here's a gift for you. I was slightly startled – Philip is senior to me here; he has about another year of studies, has been a surgeon all his life, and has just retired permanently from medicine to do this work (literally a few days before we started this set of training weeks). He has always been intelligent and businesslike, sometimes gruff or even humorously bitter – but he is obviously ecstatic to have left the scalpel behind (having done it so long – the Jungian idea that you want to do something very different in the second half of life). Giving me that postcard out of the blue was perhaps just part of the effervescence that he seemed to have for everything that day.
(That mandala... I've seen the original in Bob Hinshaw's sitting room in Daimon Verlag, in Einsiedeln – a Jungian publishing house. Someone had decided years ago to tape it to cardboard, then cover it in some kind of cellophane, neither of which held up well. It's good to see someone made a decent reproduction of it – despite his disclaimers, Jung could draw quite well, as you can see in the Red Book.)
Then, while I was studying over lunch in the student room, Carlos was roaming around and taking photographs of favorite places. A picture of me with The Great Man (Jung did hate the 'great' thing, and didn't even want to allow for a Jung-Institut) was another gift, along with pictures through some of the round stained-glass windows into the garden.
These casually kindly gifts... perhaps I shouldn't worry too much about being so annoying: somehow there seems to be something there, not something logical, but something that can draw my attention....
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