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Dr. Jung and His Patients

Betsy Cohen
Published online: 22 May 2015.

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 Dr. Jung and His Patients
BETSY COHEN

A Little History: My Path to Jung

1953
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When I was eight years old, I peeked into my Aunt Hannah’s living room where she taught
modern dance to suburban housewives on the North Shore of Chicago.
“Class, you are all flowers who can unfold . . . watch me,” she chirped in her lilting voice as she
swept her arms upward. When the surreal class was over, I asked her what was happening in there.
“Oh, sweetie, I am teaching from Jung’s writing about the golden flower.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychiatrist. He is important,” she said.
I learned later she meant The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, translated by
Richard Wilhelm and with a foreword and appendix written by C. G. Jung. It was stunning,
almost a shock that the housewives of the North Shore of Chicago would pay attention to my
Aunt Hannah’s emphasis on something so deeply about the mind. I was impressed, curious, and
amused by her class.

1963

I noticed a new book by Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), resting on the small bookshelf
above my mother’s bathroom toilet. I remembered this must be the same guy Aunt Hannah was
dancing to! When I asked my mother, Aunt Hannah’s youngest sister, about the guy, she said,
“Oh, sweetie, he is the great psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. He is important.” Hmmm, I thought—
the very same words as Hannah’s. Promptly I read his autobiography.

1965

As an undergraduate psychology major at the University of California, Berkeley, I read only a few
more sentences about Jung. Those sentences contained pretty much the same content as Aunt
Hannah’s and my mom’s and were augmented by the cerebral and uninspiring list of Jung’s
concepts: archetypes, types, and collective unconscious.

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 34–49, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047.
q 2015 C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2015.1021231.
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 35

1970

During my last year of graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, finally, a course on
Jung was taught by someone who knew something about Jung’s writing, a Jungian therapist. I was
intrigued with Jung’s ideas of the male and female within. I wrote a paper for the Jungian teacher,
drawing a connection between Jung’s animus and anima and ideas from Soul on Ice by Eldridge
Cleaver, a hero of the Sixties. I was particularly interested in Cleaver’s work because I had a
personal connection to him; he was dating my roommate and was kind to those of us envious girls
who weren’t dating him; he brought us jellybeans!

New Year’s Morning, 1970

The phone rang unusually early after a most-likely wild night. I answered to the voice of a man with a kind
English accent. “Is this Betsy Cohen? I am Dr. Joseph Henderson, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst.”
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“Yeah?” I responded.
“I read your paper on Jung’s anima and animus, and I would like to publish it in the first
Bulletin of the San Francisco Jung Institute,” he said.
“Sure,” I said and fell right back to sleep. He was a stranger, and I was too tired and hungover
to be impressed.
Out of the blue, the wake-up call from Dr. Henderson.

1970 –1995

After completing my graduate studies and

Immersion in the Bath.
(1946/1966, CW 16, 243)
beginning my psychotherapy training, I first
wanted to digest the work of Sigmund Freud,
Jung’s teacher. My practice began, and I
stayed with Freud and his disciples for
twenty-five years. One day something hap-
pened that changed my allegiance. A light
went on. I read Jung’s “The Psychology of
the Transference” (1946/1966, CW 16).
I realized that Jung knew something that
Freud did not, something about the depth of
the analytic relationship. Jung was willing to
dismantle the hierarchy between patient and
therapist that was so important to the
Freudian analytic model. Jung used the series
of medieval images of the Rosarium to
illustrate the analytic relationship. He relied
on the king and the queen to illustrate
the relationship between the analyst and
analysand.
 36 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

In the drawings, the partners are both disrobed, which symbolically suggests they learn about
one another as equals, naked to each other’s emotional truth, immersed together in the alchemical
bath where both are transformed. My understanding and recognition of Jung’s vision evoked
admiration and resonance in me, and for this reason, I chose to become a Jungian analyst.
Now, after a decade of practice as a Jungian analyst and into my fifth decade of practice as a
therapist, I decided to investigate and learn about Dr. Jung and his patients. I had a large question:
does a modern Jungian analyst do therapy the way Jung did?
When I attempted to answer my question, I found there was no adequate scholarly research
that examined Jung’s clinical work, 236 cases in all. I wanted to fill the gap. To accomplish that
goal, I decided to read the entire collection of his cases and see what, if any, conclusions I could
draw. What did the man I had come to admire actually do with his patients? I proposed to share
my findings as a paper that I would present at the Congress of the International Association for
Analytical Psychology that was to be held in Copenhagen in August 2013.
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Jung’s 236 Clinical Cases

As I set out to start my research, I began the task of reading through the 222 cases that are scattered
in the 18 volumes of Jung’s Collected Works. Another 14 cases are published in the 1925 Seminars
(1925/1989). Sifting through his clinical opus became an overwhelming task, akin to working out
at a gym when your trainer drives you to lift weights that are beyond your ability—just too heavy.
Before beginning the process, I should have memorized and taken to heart Sonu Shamdasani’s
words “[Jung] did not publish any lengthy detailed case studies from his therapeutic practice”
(2003, 153). As I read through the cases, I discovered that his case examples are usually short
paragraphs that describe each patient’s moment in time. These moments primarily illustrate his
theories rather than demonstrate the process that unfolded between Jung and his patient. Clinical
events such as dialogue, inquiry, interaction, examples of patient and/or analyst vulnerability,
impasse, enactment, therapeutic failures, deepening of work, phenomena such as we read in clinical
writing today, did not manifest in Jung’s writing.
Throughout my reading, it became clear that we had been left with only incomplete retellings or
records of Jung’s work. We have little sense of the quality of his practice. We do not get a sense of the
patient’s progress as his or her life unfolded, and often we have no idea about the outcome of treatment.
As I read, I began to wonder if Jung imposed theory on the patient or if his theory emerged
from his experience and knowledge of the patient. Or both? Today, we look for theory to emerge
from the clinical experience. It comforts me that Shamdasani states that for Jung all his
psychological theories were subjective confession (2003, 89).
I pondered whether we can teach the practice of therapy from what Jung did with his patients.
In most cases, he writes about a symptom a patient brings to him and then offers his theory as a
way of understanding the patient’s symptoms. As David Tresan (n.d.) writes, with Freud and Jung,
“Meta theory lies like a heavy mantle on the clinical facts and tends to share, perhaps misshape and
custom design, the reality of their experiences.” Jung’s theory focused more on the structure and
function and map of the psyche than on analytic technique, analytic process, developmental
patterns, or his actual experience in the room with the patient.
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 37

For analysts, the most potent teacher is the personal analytic work, a requirement of analytic
training regardless of theoretical orientation. One’s felt experiences as a patient are significant
influences that shape analytic practice more formatively than reading someone else’s theory and
clinical descriptions. And Jung didn’t have an analyst except for himself and Toni Wolff. (Jung
would state that he was the first one to demand that the analyst should himself be analyzed.) Does
this lack of his own analytic process limit his capacity for relatedness with a patient? Perhaps his
typology as an introverted, intuitive thinking and judging type (John Beebe, personal
communication) oriented his interest more toward theory than toward relatedness or emotion.
The therapeutic process he became interested in was transformation: what were the factors that
brought it about?
As Jung aged, he became more interested in the objective psyche, in the alchemical, universal,
and cosmological. He articulated a language for the transcendent. He studied the philosophers, and
by the end of the 1920s, he looked for the largest possible configuration for the universe, the nature
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of reality we live in. Consequently, he became less interested in the clinical work with the
individual patient.

Is Jung a Relational Analyst?

This was the orienting question for me. Jung implies he was such in his writing, particularly in
“The Psychology of the Transference,” where he so clearly illustrates that the process is a mutual
one in which both partners are transformed (1946/1966, CW 16). Although he proposes this
theoretically, he says little about therapeutic technique. Today we know that the relational aspect
of the therapeutic dyad matters because research in neurobiology reveals that insight alone does not
change patterns in the brain. Rather, when the affective experience is connected with the narrative,
physiological changes occur in the brain. Containment in a trusting therapeutic relationship is
what provides the environment for these changes to occur.
What originally drew me to Jung when I read “The Psychology of the Transference” so many
years ago was the importance he placed on what went on between the analyst and analysand, and
how he made that explicit. Although at that time I did not articulate it so clearly, I had identified
Jung as a relational analyst. By acknowledging the unconscious connection within the analytic
dyad, the often unconscious struggles of the pair, Jung was raising into question how the
relationship was understood, the nature of the transference-countertransference field, the
phenomenon of dissociation, the dissociable nature of the psyche, and the processes that led to
healing. In his writings on analytic technique—“The Aims of Psychotherapy” (1931/1966,
CW 16), “Principles of Practical Psychotherapy” (1935/1966, CW 16), and the introduction to
“The Psychology of the Transference” (1946/1966, CW 16)—he sounds like a contemporary
relational analyst.
The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and
the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a “You.” ({454)

If I wish to treat another individual psychologically at all, I must for better or worse give up all
pretensions to superior knowledge, all authority and desire to influence. I must perforce adopt a
dialectical procedure consisting in a comparison of our mutual findings. But this becomes possible
 38 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

only if I give the other person a chance to play his hand to the full, unhampered by my assumptions.
(1936/1966, CW 16, {2)

The very fact the patient has emotions has an effect on the doctor . . . It is his duty to accept the
emotions of the patient and to mirror them. That is the reason why I reject the idea of putting the
patient upon a sofa and sitting behind him. I put my patients in front of me and I talk to them as one
natural human being to another, and I expose myself completely and react with no restriction.
(1935/1989, CW 18, {319)

To me it was puzzling that a man who knew about the alchemical bath and unconscious bond
between analyst and patient would not allude to this experience with himself and a patient.

How Many Cases Were Relationally Oriented?

The surprise of my findings was that in only eight cases does he discuss mutuality, his impact on the
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patient or the patient’s impact on him, how he is affected by their relationship. For example, in one
case he dreams that he looks up high to see his patient and his neck gets a crick (1937/1966, CW
16, appendix). He tells her his dream. He realizes he has been looking down on her. Rather than
use this dream and his experience with the analysand to elaborate what was going on between
them, he uses the clinical material to illustrate how a dream has a compensatory effect. Jung neither
invites his reader to explore the deeper issues of what was transpiring between himself and his
patient, nor does he inform us about where the process led. We find a contrast, a wide gap between
what he believes needs to happen in analysis and what he says he does with his patients.
Since he acknowledges the power of the dyadic relationship, intersubjectivity, the analytic
third, the importance of emotion (“The essential basis of our personality is affectivity”
[1907/1960, CW 3, {78]), I assumed he would be more open about his own vulnerability.
I assumed he came to his thinking in “The Psychology of the Transference” because of his own
experiences. He was forever altered, turned inside out, by his relationships with two women
patients, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. From asking himself what was happening to him, from
his internal experience, he lit on the concept of anima. But in his explanation of his work with his
patients, he rarely exposed his personal vulnerability.

Arbitrary Separation of the Personal and Impersonal

As I read through the eighteen volumes, I waited and watched for what came to life for me, for
what emerged and excited me in the process of the research. Since he provided little evidence of in-
depth interpersonal work with patients, I looked for larger themes. Jung tried to differentiate or
separate the personal and the archetypal or objective: “It is therefore absolutely essential to make
the sharpest possible demarcation between the personal and the impersonal attributes of psyche”
(1917/1972, CW 7, {150).
A problem inherent in that distinction is found in Symbols of Transformation (1952/1967,
CW 5), where he quickly abandoned a description of the mother/child bond for the archetypal
mother bond. His disciples, particularly Michael Fordham, elaborated the personal mother and
child dynamic, which is now the bedrock of Jungian analytic work.
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 39

Another example occurs in the 1935 Tavistock Lectures (1989, CW 18), where he advises the
analyst to separate the personal and impersonal elements projected in the transference. He writes
that the personal transference is resolved through the reductive analysis of the patient’s projections,
after which the synthetic method can begin. But as practicing analysts know, the work is messy,
and the separation of personal and impersonal, reductive and synthetic elements is not only
arbitrary, it is impossible; the shape and nature of the personal complexes remain throughout the
therapy and life. Furthermore, embarking on the synthetic method of amplification and active
imagination of a symbol without addressing the personal realm can often be used defensively by the
analyst to protect both the analyst and patient from primitive, frightening, or destructive
material (contained in the transference, projected onto the analyst, and felt by the patient)
(Steinberg 1988, 31).
Jung was contradictory on the subject of transference, and he “ . . . even contradicts himself in
the same article. This is probably indicative of some personal emotional conflict he experienced in
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relation to the issue of transference” (Steinberg 1988, 29). Rather than condemn Jung for his
inconsistency, one can respect him as one also considers that his ideas evolved over sixty years.
He did not rigidly cling to previous hypotheses. For example, in 1921, agreeing with Freud, Jung
notes “the transference is the alpha and omega of psychoanalysis” (1921/1966, CW 16, {276).
And in 1935, “A transference is always a hindrance; it is never an advantage,” or “It is abnormal to
have a transference,” or “Transference or no transference, that has nothing to do with the cure”
(1935/1989, CW 18, {349). And, even in 1946, when he again asserts the importance of the
transference, he admits it is not his favorite suit. “I personally am always glad when there is only a
mild transference . . . Far less claim is then made upon one as a person” (1946/1966, CW 16,
{359). Perhaps not wanting this “claim” to be made on him is why so few of Jung’s cases illustrate
his relationship with his patient. Underneath what might be personal discomfort with emotional
intensity or intimacy, we sense a man burdened by his own intense intimacies with Sabina
Spielrein and Toni Wolff. And perhaps, even though theoretically his model of transformation
included the mutual transformation of the analytic pair, we might wonder if there was some degree
of mistrust of his own unconscious processes.
In struggling to understand Jung’s division of the personal and impersonal or archetypal, I was
surprised by his two well-known and lengthy cases: Miss X, “A Study in the Process of
Individuation” (1934/1990, CW 9i); and his work with Wolfgang Pauli (1953/1993, CW 12).
In spite of the fuller treatment of these cases in his writing, he does not allow the reader a view into
the process of the treatment.

Kristine Mann and Jung

Kristine Mann (1873–1945) had been practicing as an analyst in New York for about eight years
and was familiar with Jung’s ideas for about twelve years before the commencement of her analysis
with Jung in 1928, when she was fifty-five years old. What struck me about their work together,
described in over fifty pages (twenty-four of her drawings and Jung’s explanation of his associations
to the alchemical text of Jakob Böhme) was that it was difficult for me to discern a sense of their
relationship. The analysis has a distant, academic quality. Little is written of their interaction. The
 40 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

reader can glimpse his kindness toward her, however, when he initially helps her with her
insecurity about her capacity to draw.
Throughout Jung’s writings, he makes generalities but does not relate them to the personal
relationship with the patient. He does note that she felt discomfort in the transference, as if to her
father, and felt silly, unnatural, like a lost child, and had “self-pity” about not having children.
We do not learn of his response to her concerns. Although he does not specifically record his inner
experience nor how he relates to her discomfort, he hints at his acceptance of her experience.
Jung found his language in alchemy, a language that was original, with no prior dictates.
He saw the patterns in the universe and psyche that were expressed by the alchemists, patterns that
offered understanding and meaning. The danger for Jung was in drifting too far from his original
experience with his patient.
When Jung did not appear in Miss X’s second painting, he wrote, “The personal relationship
to me seems to have ceased. The picture shows an impersonal natural process” (1934/1990,
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CW 9i, {531). Jung continues, “It was an objective and interpersonal process and not a personal
relationship” ({539). What goes on between the analyst and patient that is not personal? The
interaction of the first phone call? The way a patient sits on the sofa? The way the patient leaves
the session? The way the analyst faces the patient? I would ask, Is any of analysis not personal?
From the same picture, number two, Jung says he did not infect her with alchemical ideas
(1934/1989, CW 9i, {542). Given his point of view about the mutual influence the analyst and
analysand have on one another as he described in “The Psychology of the Transference,” it is
surprising that he would aver so surely that she was uninfluenced by his alchemical ideas. Not only
is it impossible to believe that his ideas did not affect her, but she also had an influence on Jung.
It is clear that her drawings helped him, enlivened and inspired him with his newly discovered
language of alchemy. She helped lead him to alchemy. Her drawings fed his awakening, and he fed
his knowledge into her. We learn very little about the people in her life, how her symbols
connected to her personal life or problems with her mother. Does Jung write from an analytic
persona? How much of the real person of Jung do we see? How much do I read into these analyses
from my own projections and search for his relational capacity?
Jung saw something true about his Miss X. The lightning in her second painting illuminated
the light in her soul, the deepest core of her being, the dawn of consciousness, and what he saw
reverberated with her. When he saw the first pictures, he knew more about her than she knew
about herself, and his affirming the reality of her experience, her artistic products, is what we all
need from our analysts. We can only surmise that he held her with value; she felt this; and the
experience had a healing impact. Jung’s lack of clarity about exactly what he did and how he
communicated this to her—that is a mystery.
As I try to imagine what it was like for Dr. Mann to sit at Jung’s feet, my contention is that she
felt better from being in the presence of greatness. She might have thought: the great Jung is
listening to me and talking about my drawings. What he was learning from her drawings was
groundbreaking for him, and she was learning a magical language of symbolism illustrating her
connection to an alchemical text from the seventeenth century! Now there’s a mutuality! When an
idealized figure assigns meaning to something, it reverberates. Also wouldn’t anyone feel
tremendously enhanced by a powerful, spiritual, profound connection to symbols that one never
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 41

knew one had, knowing that these were shared experiences with human beings from the 1600s and
throughout history? She also could have been healed by his reflection of her and his enthusiasm—a
word whose etymology is from the Greek word enthousiasmos, meaning divine possession or
inspiration (Partridge 1958, 183)—especially his enthusiasm for her drawings. His enthusiasm was
infectious and seemed to dominate the therapy. She felt special, important, a conduit for historical
alchemical texts, rich and deep, that she was not a superficial person, that deep within she mattered.
And she inspired her guru.
Many patients came to Jung with a god-like transference, and many improved because of
his charisma, personal warmth, vitality, shamanic numinosity, his enormous respect for his patients,
and the twinkle in his eye. They felt they were with a miracle worker in whom they had confidence.

Pauli and Jung

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Immeasurably helpful for Jung’s new language of alchemy (and synchronicity) was his
correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958), the Nobel Prize physicist. I spent six months
trying to understand if Pauli was or was not Jung’s patient, as there is much conflicting evidence.
In the process of reading about Pauli and Jung, I found some drama.
Wolfgang Pauli, in 1928, at age twenty-eight, became a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH). He was suffering from personal crises in his life. His parents’ marriage had
broken up; his mother had committed suicide by poisoning herself (1927); his father had married a
woman Pauli’s age; and Pauli had married a vaudeville dancer in December 1929, and she left him
after only a few weeks of living together. Throughout this period, he was both rising rapidly in the
world of physics and haunted by nightmares and insomnia. As Jung described, “He [Pauli] felt
terribly lonely because everybody seemed to be against him. Then he began to drink in order to forget
his troubles but he got exceedingly irritable and in these moods he began to quarrel with other
men . . . once he was thrown out of a restaurant and got beaten up” (1935/1989, CW 18, {402).
In the beginning of 1932, on the advice of his mathematician friend Erich Hecke and his
father, Pauli reached out to Jung for help. Jung met with him in January for only twenty minutes
and soon after sent him a note referring him to a Dr. Erna Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was from
Austria, had studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, and had begun her studies with Jung six
months previous to the referral.
Pauli wrote Rosenbaum saying that he had consulted Jung partially because he knew that Jung
was successful with women but that in the short interview Jung explained to Pauli that, even
though he [Jung] was not that successful with women, it was imperative that Pauli be in treatment
with a woman. Pauli, in his note to Rosenbaum, asked who she was, “Old, young, physician or
amateur psychoanalyst, unknown or famous?” (von Meyenn, 2011, 26). Rosenbaum expressed
doubt she could help him because of his distrust toward women, but she was willing to try (25).
I imagine that, with nothing said directly by Jung to Pauli about the referral and because Pauli had
hoped to work with Jung, when Pauli saw his new analyst for the first time in February 1932, he
began the therapy with anxiety.
Rosenbaum met with Pauli for five months—by our current standards, only a beginning—and
then returned to Berlin. Biographers mention neither the ending, nor feelings about the ending of
 42 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

this therapy where Pauli and Rosenbaum discussed 250 of Pauli’s dreams. By the end of October,
he had sent her all his dreams, by that time 400. Initially, Rosenbaum discussed Pauli’s dreams only
with him and tried to handle them all. She soon became overwhelmed by the abundance and sent
them to Jung. Following the therapy with Rosenbaum, Pauli had a three-month period of self-
analysis. Jung then took over the analysis of the dreams in November 1932, but only for two
months, because after 1932, he did not have time to analyze any more of Pauli’s dreams, beyond
the first 400. The common understanding is that Jung analyzed Pauli’s dreams throughout their
long history together. A prolific dreamer, 460 dreams are recorded from 1932 alone. Today we
have fewer than 1000 dreams recorded (von Meyenn 2011, 27).
There is no agreement about whether Pauli was Jung’s “patient.” After the brief dream analysis
period, “Jung and Pauli corresponded and later met, not for analysis but for a comparison of ideas”
(Zabriskie 1995, 535). Marie Louise von Franz believed Pauli had not been in analysis with Jung.
Others disagree and hold the view that after Pauli finished his three-month self-analysis, Jung took
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over the analysis for two years (Meier 2001, 5). But was it analysis?
I believe what matters is not the frequency of visits, but the relationship between the two.
Pauli and Jung’s relationship began before they met. Why did Jung refer Pauli to someone else? I’ve
perceived or intuited five possible reasons:

1. He wanted Pauli’s dreams “pure,” “unadulterated,” without Jung’s influence.

2. Jung had been accused of (consciously or unconsciously) influencing his patients to dream
archetypal dreams. He wanted to prove that people have archetypal dreams without him.
3. He believed Pauli needed to see a woman because Pauli had told Jung he had difficulty with
women.
4. Jung concluded, during their twenty-minute session, that Pauli was “too one-sidedly
intellectual and scientific . . . The reason he consulted me was that he had completely
disintegrated on account of this very one-sidedness” (Shamdasani 2003, 154). Jung believed his
student would be able to help Pauli with his “female” side.
5. At this point in his life, age fifty-seven, Jung was not interested in seeing patients with serious
personal problems and preferred referring them to Toni Wolff and other analysts. Jung also
sent Joe Wheelwright, the co-founder of our San Francisco C. G. Jung Institute, to Toni
Wolff, as Jung thought Wheelwright had too much of a mother problem.

Pauli Broke Away from “Analysis” with Jung

On July 26, 1934, Pauli wrote Jung:

I feel a certain need to get away from dream interpretation and dream analysis, and would like to see
what life has to bring me from outside. . . . development of my feeling function is of course important
but it does seem to me that it could come about gradually through life itself, and cannot emerge solely
as the outcome of dream analysis. Having given the matter much thought, I have come to the
conclusion that I shall not continue with my visits with you for the time being, unless something
untoward should arise. . . . (Meier 2001, 6)
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 43

Is Pauli correct? Perhaps dream analysis alone does not develop a feeling function and needs to
occur in the context of a valued, reliable, consistent, mutually honest relationship being held,
attended to, and honored for its meaning to both analyst and patient. It upsets me that it took
three months, as far as we know, for Jung to respond to Pauli (and Jung was in town teaching that
summer). I imagine Pauli was anxious to receive Jung’s response. On October 29, in the last
sentence of a letter, Jung wrote, “I also thank you for the news of your well being and hope you
continue to make progress” (Meier 2001, 8). Jung’s response and the timing suggest a distant and
disconnected state of mind. Did he forget? Was he annoyed? Was he indifferent? Was this a way of
being respectful and taking the patient’s word as knowing what was best? We don’t know. Would
any analyst today wait three months to respond?

Jung’s Experiment: The Pure, Uninfluenced Dream?

Jung explained in his 1935 Tavistock Lectures, “I saw he [Pauli] was chock-full of archaic material,
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and I said to myself: ‘Now I am going to make an interesting experiment, to get that material
absolutely pure, without any influence myself, I won’t touch it’” (1935/1989, CW 18, {402). And
about the beginner analyst, “I was absolutely sure she would not tamper with it” ({402). Did this
experiment have a sound premise?
“His [Pauli] was a case absolutely untouched by myself, or by any other outside suggestion”
(1935/1989, CW 18, {406). Jung wrote that he did not want to interfere clumsily. “That is why I
refrained from disturbing this particular case myself and entrusted the task to a beginner who was
not handicapped by my knowledge.” Jung wanted to prove that Pauli’s archetypal dreams and
drawings, part of the objective psyche (“collective unconscious”), illustrated the blueprint for the
natural process of individuation; and therefore, he would examine the progression of the dreams in
as pure and impersonal a way as possible. He assumed Pauli, even though he was meeting with
Dr. Rosenbaum, was isolated with her, without relationship, emotion, or dependency. At this
point, Jung thought the doctor could just observe the process. Yet Jung knew of Heisenberg’s
principle that the psyche of the observer affects the observed. How could Dr. Rosenbaum observe
Pauli’s dreams without a personal influence?
In my experience I have found that the objective psyche is experienced through the personal.
As Jung wrote in The Psychology of the Transference (1946/1966, CW 16), the unconscious field
always influences both participants in the relationship. And I contend Pauli was influenced by
Jung’s rejection and by Rosenbaum’s presence. Who was Erna Rosenbaum other than a person, a
woman, a doctor, Pauli’s therapist, in the room with Pauli for five months of therapy?
Jung explained in his Bailey Island Seminar and in New York (1936–1937) that Rosenbaum
had just begun her own analysis, had a
good instinctive mind, was not a fool, had common sense . . . I suggested to her how to deal with
him . . . Pauli must write his dreams out carefully, and that she should listen and nod her head; and, in
case she was astonished or puzzled, should say so. She should not, however, try to understand or
analyze these dreams. (Shamdasani 2003, 154)

Jung, however, did consider Rosenbaum’s role important in that she was a woman and “she
produced that substance or secret which is characteristic of women, namely, a productive force,
 44 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

a pregnancy force” (155). So was she an influence? Pauli wrote letters to her after their analysis, and
it is clear he had transferential feelings toward her (Joe Cambray, personal communication).
Jung’s experiment was pure classical Jungian analysis, a pristine analytic form with less
emphasis on relatedness or personal connection. The experiment was derived from his belief that
the objective psyche cannot be influenced, that it is “independent in the highest degree”
(1929/1993, CW 12, {51). Jung borrowed his understanding of objective, impersonal archetypes
from Plato’s ideas, but Plato knew there was a highly personal element to these ideas. Jung believed
we should be able to take someone’s dreams and look at them as a thing in itself. He was grasping.
It was a bold attempt to have an archetypal psychology separate from emotion and personal
experience. Jung was seeking a language for his understanding, more like a mathematical language,
perhaps to keep his theory within the realm of science. For me, this language lacks in its description
of human beings.
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Jung’s Influence

Jung writes about Pauli’s therapy with Rosenbaum: “No interpretations worth mentioning were
then attempted because the dreamer, owing to his excellent scientific training and ability, did not
require any assistance. Hence conditions were really ideal for unprejudiced observation and
recording” (1929/1993, CW 12, {45). It is curious that Jung believed Pauli did not need assistance
since Pauli turned to Jung for help. Jung, in his admiration, experienced his own idealizing
transference toward Pauli.
Some biographers of this relationship claim that Jung was hands off during Pauli’s time with
Rosenbaum. I find it hard to believe that Jung did not discuss Pauli with Rosenbaum. He had
already influenced the therapy by giving her exact instructions on how to engage with Pauli. Joseph
Cambray states that “Jung in effect served as supervisor and observing the process once removed,
thus softening the boundaries between him and Pauli” (2009, 9). Jung, Rosenbaum’s teacher for six
months, viewed her as a beginner. It is hard to imagine that he did not in some way supervise her.

Outcome of Jung’s Experiment

Did Pauli find his center through the mandalas he drew? The physicist F. David Peat thought
Jung’s assessment of Pauli’s mental health too positive as Pauli continued to drink excessively and
held the opinion that “his sharp critical acumen and tongue retained for him his titles, the scourge of
God, the terrible Pauli” (Peat 1988, 17; quoted in Zabriskie 1995, 536). After his brief analysis with
Dr. Rosenbaum, after Jung’s experiment, when Pauli was still drinking too much twenty years later,
he sought help from Marie-Louise von Franz. In Pauli’s letters to von Franz, he admits that they
had a “crush” on one another, although von Franz denies this. Unfortunately his wife, who
considered Pauli’s intense interest in dreams a frivolity, was so distressed over the possibility that
his reputation as a physicist might be damaged by his interest in Jungian psychology, that she
burned a box of letters from Marie-Louise von Franz after Pauli died (Gieser 2005, 4).
After his death, Franciska Pauli said of her late husband: “He was very easily hurt and
therefore would let down a curtain. He tried to live without admitting reality” (O’Connor and
Robertson 2003). Pauli’s friend Ernst Hecke thought Pauli was excessively preoccupied with his
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 45

dreams, and that he was a person whom others had trouble reaching (Gieser 2005, 147). No wonder
Pauli needed more help! Von Franz said that Pauli came to her for analysis but wanted a
pseudo-analysis, because he was too proud to admit he needed a real analysis . . . I saw that he was in
despair, so I said we could try. He didn’t submit to the transference (and perhaps the integration of the
feeling function). That made our work together very difficult from the start. The difficulties began
when I asked him for the associations which referred to physics. He said, “Do you think I’m going to
give you unpaid lessons in physics?”

He had angry feelings that manifested in a negative transference and refused to pay her. “He was
split,” concluded von Franz (Sieg 1991, 56).
Pauli described their relationship as “two people sitting in a car and neither of them can drive.”
Both were thinking types, very weak on feeling. He wanted his dreams analyzed, not as a part of an
analysis but as part of a philosophical dialogue (more akin to his correspondence with Jung).
He thought his dreams were fabulous gifts to von Franz as he was the famous dreamer that Jung
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chose as the subject for Psychology and Alchemy (Gieser 2005, 149). “He concluded that Jungian
psychology should be transformed into a philosophy and not used as a framework for therapy”
(Sieg 1991, 56).
Again, what drew me to Jung was the focus of his psychotherapy writings on the importance
of the relationship between analysand and analyst. There can be no doubt that Pauli was
influenced by Jung and Rosenbaum. Perhaps Pauli’s healing took place in the twenty-five years of
correspondence between Jung and Pauli (1932–1957) as much as from the mandala dream series
that appears in CW 12. Maybe he was one of those lopsided individuals, so gifted in one area, but
very undeveloped in others—individuals like Mozart, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemingway. Jung
saw himself as a scientific scholar for Pauli, more than an analyst (von Meyenn 2011, 31). They
had a relationship at the border of patient/colleague, an intellectual collaboration, all aspects of
which, in a relationally based process, one would hope could be included.
What can we learn from the stories of Miss X and Pauli? For me, it’s a reminder to both
honor the profound influence analysts have on analysands and their psyches and question whether
the objective psyche can be purely objective. The objective is always known through the mind and
body of an individual and specific person. When we encounter an archetype, we need to connect it
with the person in front of us in a relational way, as the archetypal and the personal illuminate one
another and remain inseparable.

Appendix
The following locates the eight cases in which Jung allows the reader to see into the process
between him and his patient:

1. A patient dreams she is about to cross a wide river, and a large crab, hidden in the water, seizes her
foot and won’t let her go (1917/1972, CW 7, {123). Jung asks her how he, Jung, seems to her
when they are not together. She replies that sometimes he is idealized and other times demonic.
She was upset when he told her she was masculine. He acknowledges that their relationship is
fundamental to the treatment, and that he is the obstacle to her treatment ({144).
 46 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

2. A female philosophy student in 1910, with a mild hysterical neurosis, projects God/Spirit/
Father/Lover onto Jung. “The doctor [Jung] became a kind of father and a kind of lover—in
other words, an object of conflict” (1928/1972, CW 7, {206). Jung admits the transference
was not resolving, that neither the patient nor himself had the “sound common sense” to
know exactly what to do. He invited her into his dilemma and suggested “we” pay attention to
the unconscious, particularly her dreams ({{209, 210).

3. Jung is the third doctor for a female patient who always knew better than the doctors she went
to. She was psychologically inaccessible in that, through her very rational idea of reality, she
always knew better.
After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human
understanding. . . . I had to hope something unexpected, irrational would happen, in order to
burst her intellectual wall. I was sitting with my back to the window, listening to her impressive
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dream of the night before in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of
jewelry. . . . there was a tapping at the closed window . . . a fairly large flying insect . . . in the
obvious effort to get into the dark room . . . I opened the window and caught the creature as it
flew in . . . it was a scarabaeid beetle . . . whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a
golden scarab . . . “Here is your scarab.” For some strange reason the beetle had changed its
habits at this moment and wanted to enter a dark room. (1951/1969, CW 8, {983)

In seeing the scarab enter the room, her “natural being could burst through her armor”
and “the process of transformation could at last begin to move. Any essential change of
attitude is usually accompanied by symbols of rebirth in the patient’s dreams and fantasies.
The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol (Egyptian)” (1952/1969, CW 8, {845).
Jung explained this happening between the two of them as synchronicity, but what is
unsaid is the interaction between the two of them, patient and doctor, both startled, both
in discovery and awe, and that togetherness of experience also was part of her healing.

4. A twenty-five-year-old unmarried female has “exaggerated sensitiveness and hysterical fever . . .

and pronounced feelings of inferiority.” She had three initial dreams about crossing the frontier,
with three different doctors, each dream showing her attitude toward the doctor. With the first
two failed therapies, Jung believed her crossing the frontier in the dark was her moving out of her
unconscious state. In her initial dream with Jung, she dreamed she had already crossed the frontier
and had two mattresses in her handbag. Jung felt erotic and excited toward her, his “head reeling”;
perhaps, he mused, she had a “nymphomaniac possession”’ on him. He looked “askance” at her and
found her “unsympathetic.” His personal reactions were coming out. He put her down, and he
then dreamed she was looking golden, high up on the topmost pinnacle or a parapet. He bent his
head so far back to see her so high up that he got a crick in his neck. He told her the dream and
several of her symptoms initially went away (1937/1966, CW 16, {{546–553).

5. A fifty-eight-year-old female doctor from the United States had a previous Freudian analyst
who rarely spoke and expressed no emotion. This drove the woman half-crazy. When she told
Jung about her previous analysis, Jung “naturally had an emotional reaction and swore: She
 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 47

reproached him: ‘You have an emotion!’ Jung: ‘Why not? I have a good right to an emotion’”
She objected, “But you are an analyst!” Jung said, “Yes, I’m an analyst and I have emotions.
Do you think that I am an idiot or a catatonic? . . . Your analyst apparently had no emotions
and if I may say so, he was a fool.” She was no longer half crazy. “That one moment cleared her
up completely.” She concluded, “Thank heaven. Now I know where I am. I know there is a
human being opposite me who has human emotions.” In relaying this conversation to an
audience, Jung said, “My emotional reaction had given her orientation. She wasn’t a thinking
type. She was a feeling type and therefore needed that kind of orientation. But her analyst had
been a man who simply thought and existed in his intellect, and had no emotional connection
to her feeling life.” She “needed the emotionality and feeling gesture of another human being
in order not to feel alone.” (1935/1989, CW 18, {320).

6. A female American doctor/analyst, from a women’s college that Jung labeled an “animus
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incubator” (1935/1989, CW 18, {339), had a married male patient who fell in love with her.
Her patient, now husband, wanted to show her she was a woman, but it wasn’t until she sought
treatment with Jung and developed a powerful erotic transference to him and fell in love with
him, that she was able to connect to her feelings and, in so doing, realize she was a woman. Jung
understood her need to fall in love with him, and after six months of treatment, she declared her
love for him. Jung realized he could not act superior to her. He stayed with the process, “felt
himself into the situation and didn’t differ too much from the patient” ({342).

7. Jung treated a male patient from abroad a few times a year for nine years. Jung did not push
him to face his truth. The patient realized he needed time to learn to trust Jung, that he
needed Jung, and that he couldn’t face his truth alone. Jung saw that the therapy needed “the
two of us and that was the therapeutic task, not the fulfilment of theoretical pre-suppositions”
(1961/1989, CW 18, {517). Jung learned the language of the patient.

8. “Jewish girl . . . funny little character, a very pretty, elegant little thing” had “a frightful
neurosis, a terrible anxiety neurosis, with awful attacks of fear,” and “I thought, ‘what a useless
beast.’” The night before their first session, Jung dreamed of a young, pretty girl, a goddess,
who came to him but he did not understand the case. However, in the dream he had a
revelation, “She has an extraordinary father complex.” She came from a Hasidic family, and
Jung, who didn’t see a father complex in her, asked her about her grandfather. He had been a
great mystic, and her father had broken away from mysticism. The patient was skeptical and
scientific, “with that murderous intellect that you very often find in Jews.” Jung realized she
needed the spiritual and couldn’t live by intellect alone, told her she had been “untrue to her
God,” that her grandfather led the “right life,” that she had forsaken the mystery of her race
(1939/1989, CW 18, {635). The following night, Jung dreamed the patient asked him if he
had an umbrella since it was raining. He found an umbrella, handed it to her on his knees, as if
she were a goddess (1961, 139). He told her this dream, and in one week, Jung cured her
anxiety neurosis by reminding her she could not live on intellect alone and that she was a
“child of God” who needed “a symbolic life” (1939/1989, CW 18, {635).
 48 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 9 : 2 / SPRING 2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is dedicated to Harvey Alan Bailey 1937 – 2012.

As I was beginning my research, my beloved husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died four
months later, highlighting for me ever more, the fragile temporal constraint of love in relationship and
in life, as we also have with our patients. As Joan Didion so eloquently described in A Year of Magical
Thinking, her account of the loss of her husband, grief comes in waves. These waves washed over me as I
approached Jung’s texts, but reading them helped me focus my sad mind.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph
number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press
(USA).
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———. 1928/1972. The relations between the ego and the unconscious. Two essays on analytical psychology.
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———. 1935/1989. The Tavistock Lectures. The symbolic life. CW 18.
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———. 1939/1989. The symbolic life. The symbolic life. CW 18.
———. 1946/1966. The psychology of the transference. The practice of psychotherapy. CW 16.
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———. 1952/1967. Symbols of transformation. CW 5.
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CW 8.
———. 1953/1993. Psychology and alchemy. CW 12.
———. 1961. Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 1961/1989. Symbols and the interpretation of dreams. The symbolic life. CW 18.
Meier, C. A., ed. 2001. Atom and archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters 1932 –1958. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
O’Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. 2003. Wolfgang Ernst Pauli. School of Mathematics and Statistics,
University of St Andrews, Scotland, http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Pauli.html.
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 Betsy Cohen, Dr. Jung and His Patients 49

Peat, F. D. 1988. Divine contenders: Wolfgang Pauli and the symmetry of the world. Psychological
Perspectives 19: 14 –23.
Shamdasani, S. 2003. Jung and the making of modern psychology: The dream of a science. Cambridge, UK:
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BETSY COHEN, PhD, is an analyst member and faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She
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is the author of The Snow White Syndrome: All about Envy (MacMillan, 1987). She has also published several
articles in JUNG JOURNAL: “The Intimate Self-Disclosure,” “Emmanuel Levinas and Depth
Psychotherapy,” and “Jung’s Answer to Jews.” She contributed a chapter entitled “Tangled Up in Blue:
A Revision of Complex Theory” to Why and How We (Still) Read Jung (edited by Jean Kirsch and Murray
Stein, Routledge, 2013). In 2010, she completed her PhD dissertation, “Welcoming Eros into Analysis,”
using the ancient wisdom of Plato and the Song of Songs as templates for contemporary psychoanalysis.
Correspondence: betscohen@aol.com.

ABSTRACT

The author studied the total of Jung’s 236 clinical cases, as described in The Collected Works and 1925
Seminars. She questions whether Jung was a relational psychoanalyst, as he describes himself in many of his
theoretical writings about psychotherapy. She discovers that only eight examples include discussion of his
relationship with the patient from a relational perspective. Dr. Cohen looks carefully at two of Jung’s well-
known cases, those of Kristine Mann and Wolfgang Pauli, and examines why Jung separates the personal and
archetypal (objective) psyche in his analysis with them.

KEY WORDS
Jung, Jung’s patients, Kristine Mann, Wolfgang Pauli, relational psychoanalysis