Carl Jung “Went Mad”

Like so many of Jung’s writings, the implications of this quote have only begun revealing themselves to me. I know they are very, very large.

Here was a man who studied directly under the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and was slated to become his successor, a position that would have come with great prestige, but who chose instead to listen to the promptings of his soul, which told him that psychiatry was barking up the wrong tree with its unchecked scientific reductionism and atheism. Jung severed his ties with Freud and launched into an independent analysis of the human psyche.

What followed is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting events in the history of psychology. Jung “went mad.” After striking out on his own, Jung became the laughing stock of his academic peers. Socially isolated and reminded of the intense loneliness he had felt as a child, he started hearing voices and seeing visions.

“As a psychiatrist I became worried, wondering if I was not on the way to ‘doing a schizophrenia,’ as we said in the language of those days… I was just preparing a lecture on schizophrenia to be delivered at a congress in Aberdeen and I kept saying to myself: ‘I’ll be speaking of myself!’”

But Jung wasn’t suffering a meaningless neurochemical disorder. As he recounts in The Red Book, he was picking up on legitimate psychic phenomena in the collective. For instance, the rivers of blood he saw that would soon rage throughout Europe, signifying the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people? That turned out to be a little war you might have heard of by the name “World War I.”

Of course, Jung went on to revolutionize the field of psychology and we have yet to begin to grasp the mind-boggling significance of his discoveries. I, for one, have experienced real psychological breakthroughs as a result of some of his work. But my interest in Jung goes beyond the content of his philosophy.

I firmly believe that in Jung, we have one of the highest-profile examples of a sacredphrenic, albeit a high-functioning one, someone who at the very least occupied the extreme end of the “schizotypal” spectrum and clearly fit the definition of a modern-day shaman. His rejection of the “schizophrenia” diagnosis—Jung knew it better than anyone because he once assisted Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist who coined the word “schizophrenia”—mirrors my own staunch rejection of the diagnosis, and encourages me to deepen my inquiry.

Following his influence, I’m trying to spend more time cut off from all minor distractions and instead engaged with substance. There’s a reason Cal Newport begins the book Deep Work by describing Jung’s isolated work habits. Arguably, he did some of the deepest work that’s ever been done. I aspire to see where he was pointing.