CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

INTRODUCTION
My five years’ experience in India has widened and deepened my
religious views in a way I had never expected. I went to India as a
missionary in the ordinary sense, but I came back from India a
missionary in a different sense. I learned that we have only the
right to state, to testify to what is in us, and not expect others to
be converted to our point of view, much less to try to convert
them. 56
Together with his pastorate, Hauer undertook studies in comparative
religion. This included a spell at the University of Oxford. In 1921 he
abandoned the former and took up a post as a university lecturer at
Tübingen. In 1927 he became a professor of Indian studies and comparative
religion and published widely on these topics. It was Hauer’s
talk “Der Yoga im Lichte der Psychotherapie” (Yoga in the light of psychotherapy)
that drew the attention of Jung. Hauer commenced by
stating:
I know possibly enough about it to recognize that yoga, seen as a
whole, is a striking parallel to Western psychotherapy (although
fundamental differences lie there) but—this I noticed soon—I lack
the detailed knowledge and, above all, the crucial experiment to
compare the individual parts of yoga with the different orientations
of Western psychotherapy with its special methods. 57
In the remainder of his talk he gave a factual account of yoga and left the
comparison between the two to his audience. Hauer presented himself
as an Indologist seeking psychotherapists with whom he could have a
dialogue concerning the similarities and differences between yoga and
psychotherapy. It was Jung who took up the invitation.
Opinions concerning Hauer vary considerably among scholars. Zimmer
recalled:
My personal contact with Jung started in 1932. At that time, another
Indic scholar, most unreliable as a scholar and as a character as well,
but endowed with a demoniac, erratic vitality made up of primitive
resistances and ambitions, drew the attention of doctor-psychiatristpsychologists
to the subject of yoga. Now, after his long collaboration
with Richard Wilhelm on Chinese wisdom, Jung was ready to
56 The World’s Religions against War. The Proceedings of the Preliminary Conference Held at Geneva,
September 1928, to Make Arrangements for a Universal Religious Peace Conference (New
York, 1928), 60.
57 Hauer, “Der Yoga im Lichte der Psychotherapie,” 1; my translation.
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