CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

INTRODUCTION
practising doctor, having to deal directly with suffering and therefore
susceptible people, establishes contact with an Eastern system
of healing! 3
This grand analogy encompassed what Jung saw as the epochal political
and cultural significance of the impact of Eastern thought upon Western
psychology, and set the stage for his encounter with Kundalini yoga.
In the sixties, Jung was adopted as a guru by the new age movement.
Not least among the reasons for this was his role in promoting the study,
aiding the dissemination, and providing modern psychological elucidations
of Eastern thought. For journeyers to the East, he was adopted as a
forefather. At the same time, these interests of Jung together with their
appropriation by the counterculture were seen by many as confirmation
of the mystical obscurantism of his psychology.
YOGA AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
The emergence of depth psychology was historically paralleled by the
translation and widespread dissemination of the texts of yoga. 4 Both
were topical, exotic novelties. Newly arrived gurus and yogins vied with
psychotherapists over a similar clientele who sought other counsel than
was provided by Western philosophy, religion, and medicine. Hence the
comparison between the two was not to be unexpected (not least by the
potential customers). While a great deal had already been written comparing
Eastern and Western thought, 5 the advent of the new depth psy-
3 “Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam,” in CW, vol. 15, §90; translation modified. Elsewhere
Jung contended that the violence of colonial imperialism presented the West with an imperative
to understand Eastern thought: “The European invasion of the East was an act of
violence on a grand scale. It has left us with the duty—noblesse oblige—of understanding
the spirit of the East.” “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” in CW, vol. 13,
§84; translation modified. Where indicated, for the sake of literalness and accuracy, I have
modified the translations from the CW. For a prolegomena to the consideration of Hull’s
translations, see my “Reading Jung Backwards? The Correspondence between Michael
Fordham and Richard Hull Concerning ‘The Type Problem in Poetry’ in Jung’s Psychological
Types,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 55 (1994): 110–27.
4 For an overview of the introduction of yoga in the West, see Georg Feuerstein, “East
Comes West: An Historical Perspective,” in Feuerstein, Sacred Paths (Burdett, N.Y., 1991).
On the introduction of Eastern thought in general, see Eastern Spirituality in America: Selected
Writings, edited by Robert Elwood (New York, 1987). For a model case study, see Peter
Bishop, Dreams of Power: Tibetan Buddhism, the Western Imagination and Depth Psychology (London,
1992).
5 See especially Raymond Schwab’s monumental study The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s
Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, translated by G. Patterson-Black and V. Renning
(New York, 1984).
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