Jung's Answer to Job

A Commentary

Paul Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317710714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Greeted with controversy on its publication, Answer to Job has long been neglected by many serious commentators on Jung. This book offers an intellectual and cultural context for C.G.Jung's 1952 publication.
In Jung's Answer to Job: A Commentary, the author argues that such neglect is due to a failure to understand Jung's objectives in this text and offers a new way of reading the work. The book places Answer to Job in the context of biblical commentary, and then examines the circumstances surrounding its compositions and immediate reception. A detailed commentary on the work discusses the major methodological presuppositions informing it and explains how key Jungian concepts operate in the text. Jung's Answer to Job: A Commentary unravels Jung's narrative by reading it in the chronological order of the biblical events it analyses and the book to which it refers, offering a comprehensive re-reading of Jung's text. An original argument put across in a scholarly and accessible style provides an essential framework for understanding the work.
Whilst taking account of the tenets of analytical psychology, this commentary underlines Answer to Job's more general significance in terms of cultural history. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of analytical psychology, the history of ideas, intercultural studies, comparative literature, religion and religious studies.

Part One

Background

Chapter 1

Genesis of the text

Jung on Answer to Job

In her introduction, written in 1961, to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Aniela Jaffé who, as recent research has shown, made a substantial contribution to its final version,⁷⁹ claimed that Jung maintained a ‘highly critical and negative’ attitude towards the publication of this autobiographical work. One reason for this attitude, she claimed, was that ‘the hostility aroused by his book, Answer to Job, was still too close, and the incomprehension or misunderstanding of the world in general too painful’ (MDR, p. 14). Conceived by Jaffé as ‘Jung’s religious testament’ (MDR, p. 12), Memories, Dreams, Reflections contains useful information on the personal context in which Jung wrote his Answer to Job and some important reflections on what Jung saw as its significance. In this chapter, I shall set Answer to Job in the context of Jung’s childhood, examine two dreams which, Jung claimed anticipate the main themes of the work, and survey Jung’s detailed remarks in his published correspondence.

JOB IN JUNG’S CHILDHOOD

As we are reminded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s family background was intensely religious: six parsons in his mother’s family, and on his father’s side, not only his father, but also two uncles (MDR, p. 59). In Göttingen, Jung’s father, Johann Paul Achilles Jung (1842–96), had studied Oriental languages and written his doctoral dissertation on an Arabic commentary on the Song of Songs (MDR, p. 111).⁸⁰ Although Jung used to read his father’s copy of Luther’s translation of the Bible, he was prevented by ‘the conventional “edifying” interpretation [die übliche “erbauliche” Deutung]’ of the Book of Job from taking a deeper interest in this text. Otherwise, he wrote, ‘I would have found consolation in it, especially in chapter 9, verses 30–31: “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me”’ (MDR, p. 59). Moreover, faced with his father’s evident loss of any real faith, which made what he said sound ‘stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself’, Jung was seized ‘with the most vehement pity’ for his father (MDR, pp. 59–60, 73). If the feeling he associated with Woman was ‘innate unreliability’, for him Father came to mean ‘reliability and – powerlessness’ (MDR, p. 23). In a passage that has received very little attention, Jung suggests that, as a boy, he had identified with the figure of Parsifal when confronted with the spectacle of his father struggling to come to terms with his loss of faith:

My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a ‘fisher king’ whose wound would not heal – that Christian suffering for which the alchemists sought the panacea. I as a ‘dumb’ Parsifal [Ich als ein «thumber» Parzival] was the witness of this sickness during the years of my boyhood, and, like Parsifal, speech failed me. I had only inklings.

(MDR, pp. 241–42)

As the Amfortas parallel suggests, and as we know from elsewhere in Jung’s autobiography, it is likely there were also problems of a sexual nature that afflicted the relationship of his parents; for example, we are told that, at one stage, they were ‘sleeping apart’ (p. 33). Jung goes on to hint darkly that his father regarded his suffering ‘as a personal affliction for which you might ask a doctor’s advice; he did not see it as the suffering of the Christian in general’, and he quotes Christ’s words in Matthew about ‘eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’ (p. 242; cf. Matthew 19:12).

In his letter of 13 June 1955 to the Bernese pastor Walter Bernet, Jung reflected in the following terms on his father’s loss of faith and early death:

It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father’s fate, much as I was tempted to do so.

(L2, p. 257)⁸¹

In the wake of those visionary experiences as a child, to which Jung in this letter alluded, there were, however, also implications for Jung’s theological conceptions:

God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible – both at once – and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself or herself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear they will fall victim to the tempter and destroyer. […] The religious outlook which I imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation with the universe had disintegrated.

(MDR, pp. 73–74)

Jung drew attention to the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation’, as evidence that the figure of the Judeo-Christian God was a complex one (MDR, p. 73). In fact, such experiences as the subterranean phallus and God’s defecation onto the roof of Basle Cathedral led Jung, as a child, to develop what could be called a ‘Dionysian’ view of God.⁸² That view is reflected in Jung’s assertion that ‘God alone was real – annihilating fire and an indescribable grace’ (MDR, p. 74). Looking back, Jung believed that, having as a child developed the sense that God could be ‘terrible’ (furchtbar), he could have found his doubts and uneasiness reflected in the Hebrew Bible, and particularly the Book of Job, had he at that stage been sufficiently familiar with it (MDR, p. 64).

Reading the two-volume work Christliche Dogmatik (1869) by Alois Emanuel Biedermann (1819–85), Jung discovered a conception of God that was closer to his own (MDR, p. 74). Nevertheless, Biedermann had nothing to say to Jung about the devil, nor about such problems as ‘suffering, imperfection, and evil’ that could also be described as ‘God’s dark aspects’ (MDR, pp. 76–77). So the relief was all the greater when, at the recommendation of his mother, he turned to Goethe’s Faust, the great dramatic poem of German literature, the effect of reading which he describes as ‘pouring’ into his soul ‘like a miraculous balm’ (Es strömte wie ein Wunderbalsam in meine Seele) (MDR, p. 78). In particular, Jung was drawn to the figure of Mephisto, and to what he saw as Goethe’s serious, albeit ultimately unsatisfactory, attempt to deal with the problem of evil:

The real problem, it seemed to me, lay with Mephistopheles, whose whole figure made the deepest impression on me, and who, I vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers. At any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation at the end remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the fringes of my conscious world. At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and – more important – the mysterious role it played in delivering humanity from darkness and suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet.

(MDR, pp. 78–79)⁸³

However, Jung, like the orthodox literary criticism of his time, regarded Faust’s eventual triumph over Mephistopheles as a flaw in Goethe’s work, describing it in terms of a sleight-of-hand. Hence, perhaps, Jung’s preference in his late teen years for Schopenhauer, whose ‘sombre view of the world’ gained his ‘undivided approval’, but whose metaphysics of the will he was unable to accept (MDR, pp. 88–89).

Yet the mark on Jung’s works of Goethe’s Faust is much greater than Schopenhauer’s. Vast portions of Goethe’s text are cited in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911–12), the work with which Jung broke away from Freud; in his writings on alchemy, Jung undertook a hermetic reading of Faust, Part Two (see the ‘Epilogue’ in Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12 §§558–62)); and there is an important intertextual link between Faust, the Bible, and Answer to Job. In Answer to Job, Jung makes three direct references to Faust (CW 11 §718, §742, §750), of which the second is the most significant. Speaking of the representation of the ‘totality that transcends consciousness’ in the alchemical figure of the puer aeternus (Eternal Youth), Jung writes: ‘It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated one-sidedness which saw the devil only outside.’ More important, Faust itself is greatly indebted to the Book of Job, for the wager between God and Mephistopheles, set up in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, is obviously based on Yahweh’s wager with Satan. In an interview with Mircea Eliade in 1952, Jung said of Answer to Job: ‘The book has always been on my mind, but I waited forty years to write it. I was terribly shocked when, still a child, I read the Book of Job for the first time. I discovered that Yahweh is unjust, that he is even an evil-doer.’⁸⁴ As well as being a commentary on the Bible, Answer to Job has an equally important ‘biographical’ dimension as part of Jung’s life-long reception of Goethe:

Faust struck a chord in me and pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as personal. Most of all, it awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness. Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher, encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow, Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negating disposition represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the brink of suicide. My own inner contradictions appeared here in dramatised form; Goethe had written virtually a basic outline and pattern of my own conflicts and solutions. The dichotomy of Faust-Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person, and I was that person. In other words, I was directly struck, and recognised that this was my fate.

(MDR, p. 262)

Typically for Jung, the response to Faust was an intensely individual one. Other parts of Memories, Dreams, Reflections suggest that, as well as dealing with an intellectual problem, the sense of urgency behind his Answer to Job was just as personal.

BACKGROUND DREAMS

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote that his life was ‘the story of the self-realisation of the unconscious’, and so he could understand himself ‘only in the light of inner happenings’, with which his autobiography primarily dealt (MDR, pp. 17, 19).⁸⁵ One such example of these occasions ‘when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one’ (MDR, p. 18) is the short sequence of dreams that are related in Chapter 7, entitled ‘The Work’. Here, Jung describes in detail two dreams he had had at some stage in the 1940s, before writing Answer to Job. In the secondary literature on Jung, these dreams, which help illuminate the text, have received very little attention,⁸⁶ so I will look at them here in some detail.

In the first dream, what he called the coniunctio, the concept in terms of which Jung came to understand the significance of the transference (Übertragung) in psychology, and the problem of Christ, which he would first take up in Aion (1951) and later again in Answer to Job, were ‘condensed in a remarkable image’:

I dreamed once more that my house had a large wing which I had never visited. I resolved to look at it, and finally entered. I came to a big double door. When I opened it, I found myself in a room set up as a laboratory. In front of the window stood a table covered with many glass vessels and all the paraphernalia of a zoological laboratory. This was my father’s workroom. However, he was was not there. On shelves along the walls stood hundreds of bottles containing every imaginable sort of fish. […] As I stood there and looked round I noticed a curtain which bellied out from time to time, as though a strong wind were blowing. Suddenly Hans, a young man from the country, appeared. I told him to look and see whether a window was open in the room behind the curtain. He went, and was gone for some time. When he returned, I saw an expression of terror on his face. He said only, ‘Yes, there is something. It’s haunted in there!’

Then I myself went, and found a door which led to my mother’s room. There was no one in it. The amosphere was uncanny [unheimlich]. The room was very large, and suspended from the ceiling were two rows of five chests each, hanging about two feet above the floor. They looked like small garden pavilions, each about six feet in area, and each containing two beds. I knew that this was the room where my mother, who in reality had long been dead, was visited, and that she had set up these beds for visiting spirits to sleep. They were spirits who came in pairs, ghostly married couples, so to speak, who spent the night or even the day there.

Opposite my mother’s room was a door. I opened it and entered a vast hall; it reminded me of the lobby of large hotel. It was fitted out with easy-chairs, small tables, pillars, sumptuous hangings, etc. A brass band was playing loudly; I heard music all along in the background, but without knowing from where it came. There was no one in the hall except the brass band blaring forth dance tunes and marches.

The brass band in the hotel lobby suggested ostentatious jollity and worldliness. No one would have guessed that behind this loud façade was the other world, also located in the same building. The dream-image of the lobby was, as it were, a caricature of my bonhomie or worldly joviality. But this was only the outside aspect; behind it lay something quite different, which could not be investigated in the blare of the band music: the fish laboratory and the hanging pavilions for spirits. Both were awesome places in which a mysterious silence prevailed. In them I had the feeling: Here is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight world and its superficiality.

(MDR, pp. 239–41)

According to Jung, the dream could be interpreted with reference to what he regarded as its two key symbols. First, the ‘reception room for spirits’ (Geisteremp-fangsraum) is an absurd or farcical representation of the coniunctio, the Jungian conception of the transference. Seen in this light, the dream was a reminder to Jung that he had ‘not yet dealt with the major concern of “philosophical” alchemy, the coniunctio’, and thus ‘not answered the question which the Christian soul put to me’ (MDR, p. 241). Second, the laboratory with the fish represents Jung’s interest in the symbol of the fish (the ichthus), particularly as a symbol of Christ (MDR, p. 241). More specifically, it reminded Jung of his father, a pastor who, as ‘a caretaker of Christian souls’, looked after the ‘fish caught in Peter’s ne...