Hermann Hesse and the Psychology of C.G. Jung

“It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …”

Hermann Hesse and the psychology of C.G. Jung

By Günter Baumann (paper given at the 9th International Hesse Colloquium in Calw, 1997)

Hermann Hesse’s involvement with the psychology of C.G. Jung begins in spring of 1916 when the writer has a nervous breakdown and subsequently undergoes a course of
psychotherapy with J.B. Lang, a member of C.G. Jung’s staff. Analysis commences while the patient is still in the “Sonnmatt” sanatorium near Lucerne, yet Hesse seems to have considered it to be so fruitful that he decides, after his discharge, to travel from his home in Berne to see Lang in Lucerne once a week. It is thus that he comes to have 72 three-hour analytical sessions, i.e. two hundred hours of therapy. In autumn of 1917, Hesse meets C.G. Jung for the very first time at a hotel in Berne, and absorbs himself in a gripping discussion on the subject of Jung’s latest psychological ideas and theories. Interestingly, Hesse at the time reacted to Jung with the characteristic ambivalence that was later to increasingly become the determining feature of his relationship both to the man and to depth psychology.

After the meeting, he noted in his diary: “Yesterday, evening, Dr. Jung telephoned me from Zurich … and invited me to the hotel for dinner. I accepted, and was with him until around eleven. My opinion of him changed several times during the course of this first meeting, his confidence having appealed to me very early on but then having put me off, yet my impression on the whole was a very positive one.” At the same time, Hesse begins to read Jung’s writings and pronounces his early works, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (today: Symbols of Transformation) to be “ingenious.” The strong impression Jung made on him is no doubt the reason why Hesse sought therapeutic assistance from the master himself during the next crisis in his life, his divorce from his first wife and the writer’s block he suffered from during the writing of Siddhartha. In the summer of 1921, there thus ensued a sequence of analysis extending over a period of several weeks in Jung’s apartment in Küsnacht. Hesse’s letters from this period testify to a virtually euphoric sense of enthusiasm over both the personality and the analytical abilities of his therapist. “Here with Jung, I am currently, while going through a difficult, and often almost unbearable, period of my life, experiencing the shock of analysis … It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …. All I can say is that Dr. Jung is conducting my analysis with extraordinary skill - ingenuity, even.” And, after completing the analysis, he summarizes: “I would have liked to continue psychoanalysis with Jung. In terms of both intellect and character, he is a magnificent, lively, brilliant man. I have a lot to thank him for, and am pleased that I was able to spend a while with him.

When Hesse’s second marriage breaks up in the mid-1920s, he approaches Lang once again and meets him between December 1925 and March 1926 for analytical sessions conducted in a spirit of friendship while he was writing Steppenwolf. During this most difficult crisis in Hesse’s life - he evidently spent a long time contemplating suicide - Lang would appear to have become not only a friend and therapeutic adviser but also one of the most important poles and points of reference for Hesse during this “Steppenwolf winter.” Later, however, the roles in this relationship seem to have been reversed. From around 1927, Hesse becomes the friend and helper of the severely pathological Lang, and was able to repay a large part of the help he himself had received. In the course of his third marriage, Hesse’s life finally stabilized, obviating the need for any further recourse to psychotherapeutic assistance. Despite this, however, he and Lang remained lifelong friends.

Why was it that Hesse developed a long and close involvement with Jungian psychology? Upon closer examination of the respective lives of the writer and psychologist, one may say that, in terms of spiritual and personal relations, these two men’s paths seemed almost destined to intersect at some point. There are many reasons for this, some of them mutually interdependent. Striking in the first instance are certain biographic elements that they had in common. Both came from decidedly religious families of the Protestant persuasion: Jung was the son of a minister, Hesse the son of a missionary. Both had a strict moral and religious upbringing and training in matters of conscience, and were seriously traumatized as a result.

Hermann Hesse described his upbringing in, for example, the story Kinderseele, or the introduction to Demian, yet fails to mention that the uncomprehending parents, in their maniacal religious zeal to break the will of the unruly son at all cost, drove him so far that he ended up in a mental asylum and attempted to take his own life. Very similar, albeit not quite so dramatic, was the childhood of C.G. Jung. In his autobiography, he writes - without, amazingly, any real insight into the significance of this for his own life - the deep feelings of guilt and the inferiority complex he suffered from as a boy: “I also sensed my inferiority … I am a devil or a swine, I thought, something depraved. The greater my feelings of guilt became, the more incomprehensible God’s mercy appeared to me. I never felt certain of myself. When my mother once said ‘You are a good boy,’ I just couldn’t believe it. Me a good boy? That was something new to me. I always thought I was a dissolute and inferior being.”

The moral sense of inferiority arising from the religious and moralistic upbringing in the parental home are, in my view, what form the common foundation for the psychological development of Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung. Both of them might well have been quite literally torn asunder in this spiritual and mental torture chamber, yet it is characteristic that their will to live and assert themselves was strong enough to transform these destructive impulses into a source of creativity, enabling these to be ultimately channelled not into madness and suicide but into a highly productive mental constitution, which one could term the “German Rectory Syndrome”: the linking of a quite exceptional intelligence and moral sensitivity to deep feelings of guilt and inferiority. This, in turn, gives rise - once again, in both men - not only to the constant striving to achieve something extraordinary in life to compensate for the trauma of early childhood but also a quite remarkable receptiveness to the very same theory of redemption - to wit, the Christian teaching of original sin and forgiveness. St Paul’s anthropology and theology of humankind’s unredeemed enslavement to evil, and his “nevertheless” justification through God’s mercy becomes - for Hesse and Jung, and for many other tortured souls before and after them - the “Gateway to Paradise.”

In my book Der archetypische Heilsweg, I sought to demonstrate that Hesse and Jung, in their central life experiences also their interpretation of life, follow a basic pattern that extends from Jesus through St Paul and St Augustine to Martin Luther. In his psychological terminology, Jung later calls St Paul’s concept of “original sin” the “shadow,” a morally inferior opponent of the ego, and the redeeming experience of God’s mercy is termed the manifestation of the wholeness of the self. In my view, this teaching was, for Hesse and Jung, and for their religious forerunners from Jesus to Luther, the sole way to save their souls in spite of their hapless childhood. Naturally, this also explains why Hesse so readily embraced Jung’s teaching of the shadow and the “and yet-wholeness” of the individual, reproducing it in his work. To this one must add the psychotherapeutic aspect. In three decisive crisis situations in his life, Hesse seeks, as outlined above, comfort and succour in Jungian analysis. He would therefore appear to have been confronted with a plausible and fruitful pattern of interpretation for his psychic problems, something which is - given his biographical background - only too easy to understand. Jung’s thoughts and teachings grip Hesse to such an extent that he resolves to use them not only for his own personal healing but also in his literary work. He therefore goes on to write his three major novels Demian, Siddhartha, and Der Steppenwolf, successively written works that were closely linked to Jungian psychotherapy, and in which Hesse uses his experiences of psychotherapy, and the impression he gained from reading to give motivational and compositional structure to his own writings. If, however, one is to understand Hesse’s receptiveness to Jungian thought, there is a third factor that also has to be borne in mind, and that concerns aspects relating to the psychology of religion. In Jung’s psychology, Hesse also finds a set of instruments enabling him - in a similar way to Jung himself - to interpret the religious fundament of his life in new, contemporary and stimulating manner, and to harness this for his literary work.

Jung’s teaching furnishes him with the key to the central message of his works from Demian on: the identity of self-awareness and awareness of God. Yet Hesse would, in Jung’s psychology of religion, appear to have found merely confirmation and legitimation of his own religious experiences and awareness, rather than having obtained any new inspiration. He had been prepared for this through his own religious upbringing in the parental home, and his reading of religious classics from the Bible through to the wisdoms of Buddha and Confucius, and the Upanishads and the Tao Teh Ching. Jung’s teachings echoed his own religious views and thoughts, systematizing, legitimizing and supplementing them in fascinating manner, and thus helping him to break free of conventional religious view of the world.

“It shakes you to the very core and is painful. But it helps …”