A Day in the Life of..
I was born in the Swiss canton of Thurgau in 1875. My father was a Protestant preacher. Years after my death in 1961, American wine lovers would embrace a white grape that happened to come from my canton: Müller-Thurgau.
I passed my certification exam to become a doctor today. I would never really practice medicine. My first job was doing occupational therapy in an asylum. Although I later became a famous psychoanalyst, I never myself underwent analysis.
Our maid took care of me during my mother's many hospitalizations. She held me quietly for long periods of time. The experience informed my concept of the "anima," which I define as the "personification of the feminine nature of a man's unconscious."
I married my beloved Emma today, whom I wooed through letters with the guidance of her mother. I am a poor-salaried doctor, and Emma is the second-richest heiress in Switzerland. I am 28.
I met Sigmund Freud today for the first time. He cancelled all of his appointments, and we talked for 13 hours. He seemed lonely, and lacking peers or proteges who understood his ideas.
Dear Professor Freud; Worry and patients and all the other chores of daily life got me down for the first 2 days. The case I told you about - abandoned by her last lover, who is altogether pathological; abandoned also by an earlier lover - is cleared up.
I told Professor Freud that I had reservations about the primacy of sexuality in his theory, and that he had substituted sex for the mystical.
Our ship (traveling with Freud) docked into the west side of the Hudson River, I checked into the Hotel Manhattan. New York is very expansive. Gradually, one gets used to this city.
Dear Professor Freud,
Since last writing you (long enough last!), I have made good use of my time. I was at the the Congress of Swiss Psychiatrists in Luasanne and spoke on "forms of unconscious fantasty."
Professor Freud´s letter to me said, "spare me your tokens of friendship." This is the end of seven years of correspondence. The rest is silence.
Freud told me on New Year's Day 7 years ago not to "deviate too far." Today, he published The History of Psychoanalysis, and threw me under the bus.
Please accept my heartfelt sympathy over the passing of your mother. Death is a faithful companion of life . . . We have still to understand how very much wanting to live = wanting to die.
Professor Freud called my new, 700-page book, "Psychological Types," the work of a snob and a mystic. In this book, I showed my own system of thought - and how the psyche has four parts. I am 46.
A writer named Herman Hesse has been seeing me weekly for the past year, on the verge of a serious psychotic break. After WWII, he will win the Nobel Prize. This year, he wrote one of my favorite books: "Siddhartha."
I went with a group of friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico . . . I fell into a long meditation . . . Then followed Columbus, Cortex and other conquistadors who with fire, sword, torture and Christianity came down upon these remote pueblos dreaming peacefully in the Sun.
Now that I am known abroad, I have so many writers requesting my audience: H. G. Wells, James Joyce . . . even the Americann writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wanted me to treat his wife, Zelda.
It is impossible for the individual German simply to shake off this obligation by laying the blame on others, for instance the wicked Nazis. Nor can we Europeans shake off the German atrocities in the eyes o Indians or Americans.
I divide my patients into two groups: neurotics and schizophrenics. I place Pablo Picasso in the second category because he "produces pictures which immediately reveal their alienation from feeling."
A physician of Adolf Hitler telephoned me, and asked me to visit Berchtesgaden to evaluate the Fuhrer. The doctor reported that high-ranking officers were concerned about his erratic behavior and heavy drinking. I made excuses to decline.
Concerning my so-called "Nazi affiliation" there has been quite an unnecessary noise about it. I am no Nazi, as a mater of fact I am quite unpolitical.
I´ve publicly propounded my concept of synchronicity in my new paper, "Synchronicity - An acausal connecting principle." It gives a spiritual dimension to the word, coincidence. Inspired by this famous word I coined, a band called The Police would name an album, "Synchronicity," years after my death.
My unfinished book before my death in 1961, the year that John F. Kennedy became president, was my most famous. "Man and his Symbols" was completed by my associates, and informed the counter-culture of the American Baby Boomers.
