a cal divan

 Gràcies a Déu, sóc Jung, no un junguià.

«Si m'interessava la seva vida social, em fascinava la seva vida personal. No he conegut mai ningú que en la seva vida el sexe hi tingui un paper tan important com en ell. En Boy no ho creia pas. Una vegada em va comentar que, segons la seva opinió, Freud estava boig pel seu costum de reduir-ho tot al sexe. Jo no vaig intentar defensar Freud; en aquella època estava molt més interessat pel vell i fantàstic duc dels racons obscurs que es diu C.G. Jung, però havia llegit força Freud i recordava el seu manament de no argumentar a favor de la psicoanàlisi amb persones que l'odiaven clarament.»

Robertson Davies. El cinquè en joc. Traducció de Carles Miró. Libros del Asteroide, 2007. P. 252-253.

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INTERVIEWER

Another influence on your work that I know you’ve been asked a great deal about is that of Jung. Before you read Jung, you read Freud, and there are critics who say that your early work is influenced by Freud, that you can see the influence of him in the pages. Tell us about Freud first and then we’ll get to Jung. How did you go from one to the other?

DAVIES

Ah, you see, when I first went to university in Canada, we had a very fine professor of psychology. He was very keen on Freud and knew very little of Jung, and he lectured us about Freud and encouraged us to read Freud, and I did. I found Freud extraordinarily fascinating and refreshing because he seemed to find answers to questions that I had asked, and to confirm things that I had dimly suspected. In that way he was enormously helpful and enlarging to a very young man. But as time went on, I discovered that Freud’s attitude toward life was what is called in the lingo of psychoanalysis “reductive.” Everything is brought down to something quite small. It is as though we were all still children, whatever age we might have reached: children weeping in the darkness for some fancied trouble of the past, or some denial in love, or misery of some sort. You can get enough of that. As I read Freud and about Freud, I discovered that there were very few people who discussed Freud without taking a fearful swipe at somebody called C. G. Jung. And I wondered, Why do they hate Jung so much? I must have a look. And so I began to read Jung and immediately became enchanted by him. I discovered that Jung was a man with whom I had far more basic sympathy than with Freud. Jung had, like myself, a country childhood. He grew up among country people, and farms, and farm animals, and quite simple people who worked on the land— instead of very cultivated Viennese neurotics. So his outlook on life was much more like the one to which I had been accustomed. Of course there was the basic fact that Freud was Jewish, and the Viennese Jewish culture gave his thought a cast that I could understand and sympathize with but not enter into. Jung was Swiss and Protestant, and I could understand his sort of worldview, and the ethical background of his thinking, more readily. Also, his disposition to regard myth and legend as feeding life and springing from life, as well as being a constant source of reference and refreshment in the living of life, seemed to me to be wonderfully enriching. I became a great devotee of Jung without ever rejecting or pooh-poohing Sigmund Freud, who is one of the great liberators of the human mind.

INTERVIEWER

And without in fact undergoing any analysis?

DAVIES

Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t because of the advice Dr. Jung himself gave to Laurens van der Post who went to him and said that he wished to be analyzed. Jung said, “Why do you want to be analyzed?” and van der Post said, “Well, because it is one of the great experiences of our culture in our time, and I wish to share it.” Jung said, “Oh my friend, don’t talk like that. When something in your life becomes wholly intolerable, come to me and I perhaps will analyze you. But don’t undergo this experience simply to find out what it is like. It is too demanding, too exhausting.” And though he didn’t say it, it is also too hard on the bystanders. This is true. I’m sure that there are people in this audience who have been associated with someone undergoing analysis. It’s rough on the standersby. So Jung simply talked with van der Post most productively and enrichingly. That is why I would never undergo a Jungian analysis. Nothing is killing me, though I am not utterly free of neurosis and foolishness.

 The Paris Review. «Robertson Davies, The Art of Fiction No. 107». Entrevistat per Elisabeth Sifton.