In fact even the institute’s director stated, right from the start, that to create training courses for would-be Jungians would be a total absurdity because the individuation process for every individual person is so utterly unique.
Soon enough, though, the institute had been turned into a training centre for producing future Jungians while any plans for in-depth research were abandoned. And, thanks to that peculiar inverting of reality one so often encounters in such situations, it didn’t take long before people were looking back amazed at Jung’s failure to grasp the true aim of the institute or understand what its purpose was meant to be.
This is how delicately, but persistently and insidiously, history is rewritten. In Jung’s own name, officially and very efficiently, Jungians were managing to get rid of Jung. Naturally there could and still can be any number of plausible excuses, round-about reasonings, in-depth defences to justify the ongoing march of evolution. But the result was described with horrifying simplicity by Wolfgang Pauli—the famous physicist, and collaborator with Jung in their work on synchronicity, who had been invited to serve as scientific patron before threatening to resign because the institute had totally betrayed its principles.
According to him the grandly named C.G. Jung Institute had already devolved into a conveyor belt aimed at the mass production of what can never be reproduced; into some kind of Faustian assembly-line mentality although, of course, inbuilt in this mentality is a refusal to see the truth about itself. And there is more than a little irony in the fact that it was Pauli as a scientist who felt he had to defend the unconscious against therapists who were professional experts at ruining their patients’ dreams.
But it wasn’t only Wolfgang Pauli who happened to see things this way.
Henry Corbin, too, stood appalled as he watched those who called themselves Jungians taking the discoveries made by Jung in the depths of the unconscious and then converting them into mechanical tools—into little instruments or some kind of automatic apparatus they can conveniently switch on in any and every situation regardless of how appropriate, or inappropriate, the device might happen to be.
For him, as for Pauli, it was a horror to see people with their collective fantasies about individuation turning discoveries of such profundity into such mechanical and even destructive cliches.
In the case of Corbin, though, what astonished him most of all wasn’t the Jungians. It was the fact that, when he mentioned his very negative impressions to Jung, Jung immediately and from the core of his whole being agreed.
There is no real need to say that actually there was no need to be so surprised. Jung himself had made it only too clear in his writings how painfully aware he was of the tendency for well-meaning followers and disciples to get everything back to front by confusing discoveries with dogmas; by never learning truly to explore or discover for themselves; by snatching at the end result of someone else’s learning experience “in the hope of making the process repeat itself” and, in so doing, “turning the whole process upside down”.
“This”, as Jung adds, is how it happened in the past “and how it still happens today.”
Then there are all the times he used to write about the endless rubbish his pupils loved fabricating and inventing on the basis of things he himself had said, or published; about all the people who claim to speak as legitimate representatives in his name but essentially don’t have a clue “what it’s all about”. And that’s not even to mention his own observations of how, at those moments which matter most, the so-called “Jungian gang” were neither better nor wiser than any other perfectly ordinary humans—let alone the observations made by others about how quickly Jungians could turn into little more than monsters.
But as for what it is that Henry Corbin found most surprising in Jung’s full-bodied response: Jungians have already enjoyed for years playing around with the report that once, in an exasperated although humorous mood, Jung had announced to a group of his followers “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian.” What they apparently are not aware of is that this was much more than some kind of in-joke intended for Jungians alone.
As a matter of fact Stella Corbin used to describe to me how Jung physically came alive from tip to toe at the exact same moment he would say these words, to her and her husband, each time they met in private. And she remembered in particular when the two Corbins were leaving Jung’s Zurich home one evening and, still standing on the doorstep, he boomed out at them through the night: “Thank God I’m not a Jungian!”
This problem of Jungians was inseparable, to his mind, from the problem of institutes created in his name as well as from the even bigger problem of the future that lay ahead for his work. And it’s no accident at all that—when he spoke about the Zurich institute, in particular, to people he trusted—his forecast was rather bleak.
At times he would describe it as coming along well enough, only to add what a danger there is of professional teachers and teaching systematically killing off every true idea. That, he adds, is the sad fate one can hardly escape; but with a great deal of care it should be possible, at best, to keep the boat “afloat for a while” and help those archetypal ideas to live out their destiny whether inside the institute or outside it.
And then he notes that no real truth can ever be destroyed, however desperately people try to wipe it out.
He also could be even more specific, though, about all the problems of followers and disciples—insisting that “the Institute would be lucky if it did not outlive its creative uses within a generation”.