The Cultural Moment 

 The first few decades of the twentieth century saw a grpt dealof experimentation in literature, psychology; and the visual arts. , ~Writers tried to throw off the limitations of representationalconventions to explore and depict the full range of innerexperience-dreams, visions, and fantasies. They experimentedwith new forms and utilized old forms in novel ways. From theautomatic writing of the surrealists to the gothic fantasies ofGustav Meyrink writers came into close proximity and collisionwith the researches of psychologists, who were engaged in similarexplorations. Artists and writers collaborated to try out newforms of illustration and typography; new configurations of textand image. Psychologists sought to overcome the limitations ofphilosophical psychology; and they began to explore the sameterrain as artists and writers. Clear demarcations among literature,art, and psychology had not yet been set; writers and artistsborrowed from psychologists, and vice versa. A number ofmajor psychologists, such as Alfred Binet and Charles Richet,wrote dramatic and fictional works, often under assumed names,whose themes mirrored those of their "scientific" works.' GustavFechner, one of the founders of psychophysics and experimentalpsychology; wrote on the soul life of plants and of the earthas a blue ange1.3 Meanwhile writers such as Andre Breton andPhilippe Soupault assiduously read and utilized the works ofpsychical researchers and abnormal psychologists, such asFrederick Myers, Theodore Flournoy; and Pierre Janet. W B.Yeats utilized spiritualistic automatic writing to compose apoetic psycho cosmology in A Vision. 4 On all sides, individualswere searching for new forms with which to depict the actualitiesof inner experience, in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal.In Berlin, Hugo Ball noted:The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life iscompletely confined and shackled. A kind of economicfatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists itor not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interestsand his character. The church is regarded as a "redemptionfactory" of little importance, literature as a safety valve . . .The most burning question day and night is: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough to put an end to thisstate of affairs? And if not, how can one escape it?SWithin this cultural crisis Jung conceived of undertaking anextended process of self-experimentation, which resulted in LiberNovus, a work of psychology in a literary form.We stand today on the other side of a divide between psychologyand literature. To consider Liber Novus today is to take up a workthat could have emerged only before these separations had beenfirmly established. Its study helps us understand how the divideoccurred. But first, we may ask,Who was C. G. Jung?Jung was born in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, in 1875. His familymoved to Laufen by the Rhine Falls when he was six monthsold. He was the oldest child and had one sister. His father was apastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Toward the end of his life,Jung wrote a memoir entitled "From the Earliest Experiences ofMy Life," which was subsequently included in Memories, Dreams,Rifl'ections in a heavily edited form.6 Jung narrated the significantevents that led to his psychological vocation. The memoir, withits focus on significant childhood dreams, visions, and fantasies,can be viewed as an introduction to Liber Novus.In the first dream, he found himself in a meadow with astone-lined hole in the ground. Finding some stairs, he descendedinto it, and found himself in a chamber. Here there was a goldenthrone with what appeared to be a tree trunk of skin and flesh,with an eye on the top. He then heard his mother's voice exclaimthat this was the "man-eater," He was unsure whether she meantthat this figure actually devoured children or was identical withChrist. This profoundly affected his image of Christ. Years later,he realized that this figure was a penis and, later still, that it wasin fact a ritual phallus, and that the setting was an undergroundtemple. He came to see this dream as an initiation "in the secretsof the earth."7In his childhood, Jung experienced a number of visualhallucinations. He also appears to have had the capacity to evokeimages voluntarily In a seminar in 1935, he recalled a portrait ofhis maternal grandmother which he would look at as a boy untilhe "saw" his grandfather descending the stairs.8One sunny day; when Jung was twelve, he was traversing theMtinsterplatz in Basel, admiring the sun shining on the newlyrestored glazed roof tiles of the cathedral. He then felt theapproach of a terrible, sinful thought, which he pushed away Hewas in a state of anguish for several days. Finally; after convincinghimself that it was God who wanted him to think this thought,just as it had been God who had wanted Adam and Eve to sin, helet himself contemplate it, and saw God on his throne unleashingan almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof andsmashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss andrelief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it wasan experience of the "direct living God, who stands omnipotentand free above the Bible and Church."9 He felt alone before God,and that his real responsibility commenced then. He realized thatit was precisely such a direct, immediate experience of the livingGod, who stands outside Church and Bible, that his father lacked.This sense of election led to a final disillusionment with theChurch on the occasion of his First Communion. He had beenled to believe that this would be a great experience. Instead,nothing. He concluded: "For me, it was an absence of God and noreligion. Church was a place to which I no longer could go. Therewas no life there, but death."

Jung's voracious reading started at this time, and he wasparticularly struck by Goethe's Faust. He was struck by the factthat in Mephistopheles, Goethe took the figure of the devilseriously In philosophy, he was impressed by Schopenhauer,who acknowledged the existence of evil and gave voice to thesufferings and miseries of the world.Jung also had a sense of living in two centuries, and felt a strongnostalgia for the eighteenth century His sense of duality took theform of two alternating personalities, which he dubbed NO.1and 2. NO.1 was the Basel schoolboy, who read novels, and NO.2pursued religious reflections in solitude, in a state of communionwith nature and the cosmos. He inhabited "God's world." Thispersonality felt most real. Personality NO.1 wanted to be free of themelancholy and isolation of personality NO.2. When personalityNO.2 entered, it felt as if a long dead yet perpetually presentspirit had entered the room. NO.2 had no definable character. Hewas connected to history, particularly with the Middle Ages. ForNO.2, NO. I, with his failings and ineptitudes, was someone tobe put up with. This interplay ran throughout Jung's life. As hesaw it, we are all like this-part of us lives in the present and theother part is connected to the centuries.As the time drew near for him to choose a career, the conflictbetween the two personalities intensified. NO.1 wanted to pursue science, NO.2, the humanities. Jung then had two criticaldreams. In the first, he was walking in a dark wood along theRhine. He came upon a burial mound and began to dig, untilhe discovered the remains of prehistoric animals. This dreamawakened his desire to learn more about nature. In the seconddream, he was in a wood and there were watercourses. Hefound a circular pool surrounded by dense undergrowth. In thepool, he saw a beautiful creature, a large radiolarian. After thesedreams, he settled for science. To solve the question of how toearn a living, he decided to study medicine. He then had anotherdream. He was in an unknown place, surrounded by fog, makingslow headway against the wind. He was protecting a small lightfrom going out. He saw a large black figure threateningly close.He awoke, and realized that the figure was the shadow cast fromthe light. He thought that in the dream, NO.1 was himself bearingthe light, and NO.2 followed like a shadow. He took this as a signthat he should go forward with NO. I, and not look back to theworld of NO.2.In his university days, the interplay between these personalitiescontinued. In addition to his medical studies, Jung pursued anintensive program of extracurricular reading, in particular theworks of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, II and writerson spiritualism. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke zarathustra made a greatimpression on him. He felt that his own personality NO.2corresponded to Zarathustra, and he feared that his personalityNO.2 was similarly morbid. I2 He participated in a student debatingsociety, the Zofingia society, and presented lectures on thesesubjects. Spiritualism particularly interested him, as the spiritualistsappeared to be attempting to use scientific means to explore thesupernatural, and prove the immortality of the soul.

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed theemergence of modern spiritualism, which spread across Europeand America. Through spiritualism, the cultivation of tranceswith the attendant phenomena of trance speech, glossolalia,automatic writing, and crystal vision-became widespread. Thephenomena of spiritualism attracted the interest of leadingscientists such as Crookes, Zollner, and Wallace. It also attractedthe interest of psychologists, including Freud, Ferenczi, Bleuler,James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing,Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and FlournoyDuring his university days in Basel, Jung and his fellow studentstook part in seances. In 1896, they engaged in a long seriesof sittings with his cousin Helene Preiswerk, who appeared tohave mediumistic abilities. Jung found that during the trances,she would become different personalities, and that he could callup these personalities by suggestion. Dead relatives appeared,and she became completely transformed into these figures. Sheunfolded stories of her previous incarnations and articulated amystical cosmology, represented in a mandala. 13 Her spiritualisticrevelations carried on until she was caught attempting to fakephysical apparitions, and the seances were discontinued.On reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Text-Book of Psychiatryin 1899, Jung realized that his vocation lay in psychiatry, whichrepresented a fusion of the interests of his two personalities.He underwent something like a conversion to a natural scientificframework. After his medical studies, he took up a post as anassistant physician at Burgholzli hospital at the end of 1900.The Burgholzli was a progressive university clinic, under thedirectorship of Eugen Bleuler. At the end of the nineteenthcentury, numerous figures attempted to found a new scientificpsychology It was held that by turning psychology into a sciencethrough introducing scientific methods, all prior forms of humanunderstanding would be revolutionized. The new psychology washeralded as promising nothing less than the completion of thescientific revolution. Thanks to Bleuler, and his predecessor AugusteForel, psychological research and hypnosis played prominent rolesat the Burgholzli.Jung's medical dissertation focused on the psychogenesis ofspiritualistic phenomena, in the form of an analysis of his seanceswith Helene Preiswerk.14 While his initial interest in her case appearedto be in the possible veracity of her spiritualistic manifestations, inthe interim, he had studied the works of Frederic Myers, WilliamJames, and, in particular, Theodore Flournoy At the end of 1899,Flournoy had published a study of a medium, whom he calledHelene Smith, which became a best seller.lsWhat was novel aboutFlournoy's study was that it approached her case purely fromthe psychological angle, as a means of illuminating the study ofsubliminal consciousness. A critical shift had taken place throughthe work of Flournoy, Frederick Myers, and William James.They argued that regardless of whether the alleged spiritualisticexperiences were valid, such experiences enabled far-reachinginsight into the constitution of the subliminal, and hence intohuman psychology as a whole. Through them, mediums became important subjects of the new psychology. With this shift, themethods used by the mediums-such as automatic writing,trance speech, and crystal vision -were appropriated by thepsychologists, and became prominent experimental researchtools. In psychotherapy; Pierre Janet and Morton Prince usedautomatic writing and crystal gazing as methods for revealinghidden memories and subconscious fixed ideas. Automaticwriting brought to light subpersonalities, and enabled dialogueswith them to be held. I6 For Janet and Prince, the goal of holdingsuch practices was to reintegrate the personality.Jung was so tal