Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse

With some academic qualifications, the young Hermann Hesse went to work in a book shop, firstly one near his home, and then moving to Basel. Initially writing reviews and sketches Hesse began to grow in his belief that he could be a writer, and began to succeed. From childhood he took with him the difficult contradiction for the need for closeness with his family, alongside his awareness that he had to get some distance from them. He knew full well that he would be able to start living his own life only after he stopped using his parents as a yardstick for his behaviour. The sense that he was not entirely free after all, and could never leave his origins behind, permeates his early writing. As a child and adult, Hesse suffered constantly from headaches and eye strain, often feeling ‘indisposed’. Unable to sleep, he realised that the night demonstrated how disastrously arrogant it was for the logic of the daytime world to believe that all aspects of life were within the firm grasp of reason.

By 1916, a successful author but with an unhappy marriage plus three children, Hesse’s sense of being deeply ill at ease within himself became unbearable. Seen as a traitor in Germany for his lack of support for nationalism during and after World War 1, and dealing with the death of both his parents, Hesse was near total mental breakdown. When his headaches became unbearably intense, plus panic attacks, dizziness, exhaustion, and lack of sleep Hesse began to meet with a Catholic psychiatrist J. B. Lang. Lang specialised in dream work, and was part of the circle around Carl Jung. The initial 12 consultations in 1916, were followed by another 60 the following autumn, and the relationship continued after that. Lang helped Hesse come out of depression, analyse dream material, and resume writing: leading to Hesse’s book ‘Demian’.

The idea of opposing but related figures – the doppelganger principle interested both men –and emerges in much of Hesse’s subsequent writing. Lang – the more radical, emboldened Hesse to abandon everything that inhibited his vocation as a writer – wife and children included. Whilst the analysis helped Hesse, Lang became overly involved, taking on practical tasks to do with Hesse’s divorce; falling in love with a woman who later Hesse married (a second disastrous marriage); asking Hesse to appraise his [Lang’s] dreams in a complete role reversal; and, an increasing involvement with esotericism: it all led to Lang’s self-destruction. Hesse then preferred to seek out Carl Jung himself, and underwent a course of therapy with him, taking on an understanding of the archetypes, and consulting Jung about ideas that Hesse was exploring in ‘Siddhartha’.

In June 1921 Hesse consulted Jung and in his Zurich notebook, Hesse wrote: ‘He [Jung] has sent me away with the maxim: “Desire to do (consciously) what you (instinctively) want to do!’

The following day Hesse noted:

‘My last visit to Jung. We speak about me having virtually no dreams any more. He tells me that I don’t need any … and that patients often ask him how they should “solve” this or that problem. Jung tells them that they shouldn’t be seeking to solve it, but rather just to have a crack at it, to grapple and struggle with it. Problems aren’t there to be “solved”; they are pairs of opposites that between them produce a tension that is called life.’

Years later Hesse wrote in a letter:

‘I have always had respect for Jung, but his works did not make such strong impressions on me as did those of Freud.  … I also had several analytic sessions with him … I got a nice impression of him, though at that time I began to realize that for analysts, a genuine relationship to art is unattainable …’