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."
