During his stay in the latter, Jung also travelled to Orissa to visit the temple in Konark, celebrated for its erotic sculptures. Visits to Allahabad, Benaras and Darjeeling followed, where Jung collected honorary degrees, before moving on to Calcutta. “He preferred Buddha’s mode of overcoming the world by reason to that of Christ by sacrifice.” “It was not surprising that Jung was drawn to Buddhism,” states McLynn. Sanchi, an important Buddhist pilgrimage area, was of special interest to Jung because, for him, Buddhism was the most appealing of religions. Delhi and Agra were a distinct improvement, but it was the next destination, Sanchi, in Madhya Pradesh, that was to be the most significant of his Indian stay. The beginning of Jung’s Indian journey was not very promising, for when he landed in Bombay in December 1937 he was depressed by the endless bustle of the city. Jung therefore made no plans to visit holy men or spiritual leaders, as he had an exact notion of their archetype, and refused to accept that which he could not attain on his own. He considered the ‘Oriental’ to be archetypal, without the Occidental extremes of personal differentiation. As he admits in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), he was also in search of himself – or, rather, the truth peculiar to himself. Jung had been anxious for some time to go to India, in the hopes of affirming his convictions on the value of the wisdom of the East. In late 1937, Jung left Switzerland for India on the invitation of the British government, to attend the 25th-anniversary celebrations of the University of Calcutta. Moreover, his unconscionable lack of professional ethics permitted him to seduce many of his female patients. Jung was also a prodigious philanderer, whose long-suffering wife, Emma Rauschenbach, had to live in a ménage à trois with his mistress, Toni Woolf, as well as put up with a coterie of female admirers known as the Valkyries. There is little doubt that Jung was a xenophobe and anti-Semite, and his rightwing views and Nazi sympathies drove Thomas Mann to denounce him publicly. It was Jung who redefined alchemy for the modern world, who rediscovered the universality of myth and symbol, who diverted psychology from the confines of Freudianism, and who gave us the concepts of the collective unconscious, the archetype, synchronicity, introversion and extraversion, among others.Īlthough he was a great sage, he was not without foible, as is evident from Frank McLynn’s Carl Gustav Jung (1997), the first comprehensive biography of the psychologist. Whenever I study this photograph – which is often as, happily, it graces my study wall – my thoughts almost invariably float to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, the 20th century’s master physician of the soul, interpreter of symbols and intrepid explorer of the human mind. Linking the landmasses to the north is a curious semicircular chain of small but dense cloud, which evokes the much-quoted traveller’s maxim, Ceylon, the pearl in the necklace of India. To the north lies India, with its cirrus-flecked mountains and cumulus-encrusted plains, highlighted by the surrounding wastes of blue-green water. In it, Sri Lanka is patchworked and fretted by cloud formations, with a vortex eye exposing Sri Pada (Adam’s Peak) and the central hills. There is an exquisite photograph by the US space agency NASA of Sri Lanka and part of the Subcontinent from space, taken during the Gemini 11 mission in September 1966 (see pic).
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