The last of three weeks in Zürich is ending – drained, tired. It was less dramatic than the middle week: but with some interesting class discussions about why this work would feel dramatic to many of the students – not merely the pragmatic pressures of full days and full-on work, but the psychology of constantly looking back and forth from the world and patients to one's own inner world – especially into the places in that world which are less comfortable, or less stable.
I am treasuring a casual compliment paid to me by Someone Important on the last day of classes, after the last class – she looked at me appraisingly for a moment as everyone else scattered, as though she wanted to say something but was trying to figure out how to put it, then simply said, 'You are really becoming an analyst!' – and said good-bye and turned to go upstairs to a meeting.
I was so startled I just gaped... must write an email thanking her for the unexpected compliment.
Then there were Nancy's remarkable and intense seminars – receiving from her what seemed like more complex insights per second than one can quite manage to grasp – the kind of multiple levels of awareness that recalls for me Asimov's fantasy of the psychologists of the Second Foundation, with their science-fictional awareness beyond the everyday. But that is... inflation.
Hmm, haven't heard that word more than ten times a day for three weeks.
A final-evening party, wine, finger food, everyone tired – so many Jungians are introverts, you can see when they start to quietly wilt under too much social contact. But friendly, hugs, chat, leaving.
•••
Then today the trip to the tower house at Bollingen, and the publishing house and monastery library at Einsiedeln – one I've made five or six times now –
The Jung grandson (or grand-nephew?) who showed us around Bollingen was the retired medical doctor again, the one who tends to point out that he doesn't understand his elder relative's ideas whenever he talks about them. He's often a bit more brusque, even sarcastic, than the other descendants; but today he was gentler, friendlier – and unexpectedly, although the weather was sharply cold and damp, he was casually dressed with a scarf hanging open around his neck (we were all shivering in coats of course).
He recognised me from last summer, and asked a few questions as the other students wandered around the house – he was clearly in a good mood. I took most of the students back up the hill to wait for the bus; but a few people stayed behind –
and he told them how, after his own father died, Jung had made a point of being especially kind to him, and staying in contact with him – he was only 14, I think. He told us how Jung had turned to him one day and said, go up to my study and get the red box down from the shelf, and bring it to me here –
it was Jung's microscope from his years in medical school; he gave it to the young man as a gift, one he still keeps to this day.
And as he told this story, he wept, a little bit...
I like him more, these days.
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