Some facts concerning the ethos or genesis of psychiatry and psychoanalysis
By: Yvonne Owens
Tags: Dreams, Psychiatry, Magic, Shamanism, Psychology

Antonia Wolff and Emma Jung

Facts concerning the ethos or genesis of psychiatry and psychoanalysis:

‘Penis Envy’ was a theory that Freud was forced to promote in place of his actual findings, accrued from years of research and documentation, on the high incidence of ‘female hysteria’ among his patients after a decade of having been ostracized by his peers in Vienna and the professional world. His actual findings were that the vast majority of his female patients suffering from so-called ‘female hysteria,’ labelled ‘neurotics,’ had been sexually abused in childhood — by the adult males in their circles — who were, of course, precisely, Freud’s peers. He finally recanted his original findings and caved to promoting the theory of ‘Penis Envy’ to explain the phenomenon, after 10 years of him and his family being frozen out and, more importantly, starved out.

If he ever wanted to publish again, if he ever wanted to ply his craft again, if he ever wanted to once again make a living from his profession, he had to utterly refute his own earlier work. For most of his personal and professional life, Freud was irretrievably compromised and neutered. This likely explains his many, complex castration fantasies and theories. That and the sheer ongoing terrorization of life experienced within an aggressive elite patriarchy, being ‘disciplined,’ coerced and controlled by senior and/or ranking males.

Jung escaped this fate by living in autonomous personal and professional circumstances in Switzerland, his society consisting for the most part of his enlightened female circle. This included: his wife and intellectual partner, Emma Jung (she was his “intellectual editor” to the end of her life and after her death, Jung described her as “a Queen.”); his analysand, protege and lover Antonia Wolff (who lived in the house with the Jungs, and worked closely with Emma); and a coterie of students who became the first generation of Jungians, which included many distinguished women analysts, authors, researchers who became his equals and ultimate peers.

Wolves are guides and psychopomps, guiding the soul to the otherworldly ‘West’ after death, and leading shamans to enlightenment and psychic power in the Underworld in mythologies and spiritual systems going back thousands of years. Wolff is thought to have suffered from Lupus disease, a condition that gives a wolf-like appearance to the face. At a certain point in their analyst/analysand relationship, Wolff had stopped the session and told Jung, “I am no longer your patient. We will become lovers, and I will show you my realm of the Underworld.”

There followed a period that Jung’s male peers called his “six-year nervous breakdown,” where Jung journeyed with Wolff in the Underworld, met his guide, Philemon, an “old man with kingfisher wings and the horns of a bull,” who became his trusted inner guide throughout his life, and who inspired his signature theory and practice of Dream Therapy. These events also influenced Jung’s theories of synchronicity, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. During this period, Emma Jung and Wolff worked together to keep Jung functioning in the outer world — eating, sleeping, writing, and publishing.

When Jung wasn’t in his tower room study, he like to sit in the courtyard under an old tree on his favourite bench. Six hours after he died there was a terrific thunderstorm, the tree was struck by lightening, falling over and smashing the bench. Otherworldly synchronicities were typical of Jung’s experience of a ‘numinous’ (magically and psychically empowered) existence, and even attended his death.

Just prior to his encounter with Philemon in the Underworld, Jung had found a dead kingfisher in his garden. The brilliantly hued bird was uninjured, intact, and looked like it was just sleeping. It mystified Jung as kingfishers don’t frequent the alpine regions of Switzerland, it being too cold and too far inland in the Swiss Alps. During his next Underworld journey, experienced as a visionary dream, Jung met Philemon and recognized him as an ally by his brilliantly coloured kingfisher wings.