CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

INTRODUCTION
chologies heralded a new and more promising yardstick for comparison.
For the depth psychologies sought to liberate themselves from the stultifying
limitations of Western thought to develop maps of inner experience
grounded in the transformative potential of therapeutic practices.
A similar alignment of “theory” and “practice” seemed to be embodied
in the yogic texts that moreover had developed independently of the
bindings of Western thought. Further, the initiatory structure adopted
by institutions of psychotherapy brought its social organization into
proximity with that of yoga. Hence an opportunity for a new form of
comparative psychology opened up.
As early as 1912, inTransformation and Symbols of the Libido, Jung provided
psychological interpretations of passages in the Upanishads and the
Rig Veda. 6 While this opened the possibility of a comparison between the
practice of analysis and that of yoga, possibly the first explicit comparison
was made by F. I. Winter in “The Yoga System and Psychoanalysis.” 7
He contrasted psychoanalysis, as depicted in the work of Freud and
Jung, with Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Before Jung himself took up the subject,
his work was already being compared to yoga—and the “new paths
in psychology” that he sought to open up since leaving the auspices of
the International Psychoanalytical Association promised to be the most
fertile crossroads between Eastern and Western approaches.
An account of Jung’s encounter with Eastern thought would be incomplete
without mention of Count Hermann Keyserling and his
School of Wisdom at Darmstadt, which provided a collegiate environment
for Jung’s explorations. Keyserling dealt with yoga in his The Travel
Diary of a Philosopher, which was a much-acclaimed work. He contended
that the new psychology actually represented a rediscovery of what was
already known by the ancient Indians: “Indian wisdom is the profoundest
which exists. ...Thefurtherweget,themoreclosely do we approach
the views of the Indians. Psychological research confirms, step by step,
the assertions contained . . . within the old Indian science of the soul.” 8
6 Gopi Krishna later criticized Jung’s interpretation of a Vedic hymn concerning the producion
of fire through the rubbing of sticks in which Jung saw ‘unequivocal coitus symbolism’
(See Psychology of the Unconscious, translated by Beatrice Hinkle, CW, supplement B,
§§243–45), stating that “the terms used clearly point to the fire produced by Kundalini.”
Kundalini for the New Age: Selected Writings of Gopi Krishna, edited by Gene Kieffer (New York,
1988), 67.
7 F. I. Winter, “The Yoga System and Psychoanalysis,” Quest 10 (1918–19): 182–96,
315–35. Jung had a set of this journal from 1910 to 1924 and from 1929 to 1930 in his
library.
8 Count Hermann Keyserling, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, translated by J. H. Reece
(New York, 1925), 255–56. On Keyserling’s encounter with India, see Anne Marie Bouisson-Maas,
Hermann Keyserling et L’Inde (Paris, 1978).
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