An Answer to Answer to Job

An analysis of Jung's unresolved pathology

as revealed in this late work.

MA in Psychotherapy and Counselling

Year Two Autumn Term 1996

? 1998

An Answer to Answer to Job

Carl Jung's great contributions to the understanding of human psychology were based on his own inner process. He himself attested 'Philosophical criticism has helped me to see that every psychology - my own included - has the character of a subjective confession' (in Stevens, 1990: 25).

As a pioneer however it would not be reasonable to suppose that Jung resolved all the issues of his own pathology. In this essay I propose to analyse the unresolved residue of pathology in Jung's psyche using as my theoretical base the psychodynamic Object Relations theory developed by W.R.D. Fairbairn and enlarged and expounded by Harry Guntrip. I shall use as the focus of my analysis the short, late work Answer to Job (Jung, 1958, hereinafter referenced, for brevity, as Job) published in Jung's seventy-seventh year. It is my contention that the pressure of the psyche towards healing and wholeness, one of Jung's own major insights (Stevens, 1990) formed the unconscious motivation for this work and that the nature of the problem can be perceived in the literary structure of the piece. To do this, it is necessary to ignore the writer's conscious intent and the theological and psychological insights that were his concern and instead to view the book as if it were the story of a dream. Jung was committed to the value of dream analysis in the understanding of the unconscious, but only when the context of the dreamer's life was fully taken into account (Jung, 1966). At the end of his life Jung placed his own process, as he had come to understand it, in the public domain when he cooperated with Amelia Jaff? in the production of his autobiography Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung, 1967, hereinafter referenced as MDR). This will serve to provide the context for my analysis of the 'dream'. Before commencing this, however, I will provide a summary of the theory to be used.

Object Relations Theory (Guntrip, 1961 and 1968)

Fairbairn conceived the infant psyche as a dynamic unitary self or ego in a non-ambiguous relation with its first object the mother in a state of primary dependence. Frustration and deprivation of satisfaction inevitably occur and to defend against these real experiences the infant internalises and splits the object into good, accepted, and bad, rejected object. The bad object is further split in two, reflecting the exciting but frustrating aspect of mother, and the hostile rejecting aspect. In repressing these bad objects the ego must also split. A part of it, which Fairbairn called the libidinal ego, attached to the exciting object in a relationship of unsatisfied longing, is repressed with its object. Similarly the rejected object is repressed in a hostile relationship with an anti-libidinal ego. The good object, named by Fairbairn the ideal object, is projected back onto the real mother and to this relates the remaining portion of the ego, the central ego. The repressed part egos and bad objects exist as dynamic structures within the psyche and this ongoing structural conflict weakens the ego and is projected onto and played out in subsequent experiences. The more seriously inappropriate the real relationship of mother to infant, the more will the infant ego withdraw from it into what can only be an equally terrifying internal world. Guntrip in his studies of this schizoid condition added to Fairbairn's formulation a final defence. The libidinal ego, persecuted by the anti-libidinal ego as well as the exciting bad object splits again and, leaving a depleted portion of itself still struggling for survival retreats as the regressed ego into a phantasy recreation of the womb in the deep unconscious to await the possibility of re-birth.

Others, for example Stevens (1994), have diagnosed Jung as schizoid, and he indeed experienced himself, from childhood, as having two personalities. However he specifically denied that this had anything to do 'with a "split" or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense' (MDR: 62) and later came to understand it as a manifestation of the self and the ego (Stevens, 1994). I take the more catholic, and essentially more Jungian view of, not either/or, but both/and.

Overview of Subject and Method

Jung, in the first paragraphs of Answer to Job, in which he states his concern with how a modern Christian can respond to the 'divine darkness' (Job: 365) revealed in the biblical narrative gives a description of the likely reaction in terms which, with the substitution of the word 'mother' for the word 'Deity' could form a concise and accurate definition of the essence of object relations theory.

..... the suffering and discord in the Deity ..... give rise to an equally ill-considered outburst of affect, and a smouldering resentment that may be compared to a slowly healing wound. And just as there is a secret tie between the wound and the weapon, so the affect corresponds to the violence of the deed that caused it. (Job: 366).

To see the patterns of schizoid splitting and conflict in the work it is only necessary to summarise the action of the plot. In doing so it becomes clear that the 'dream' falls into two parts. Act one has as its principal character a righteous man, certainly in the second half of life, much reduced by suffering, engaged in a verbal conflict with a jealous, insecure, demanding and overwhelmingly angry God to whom at the last he can only submit in all but his inner awareness. This conflict was instigated and fuelled by God's dark son, Satan. In act two the protagonist is a young hero, sinless and obedient in a state of loving, but somewhat cautious subjection to an all good, but still possibly unpredictable, deity. Satan has been banished from the scene but is still felt to be lurking in the wings. The hero is indeed abandoned by his parent God to a horrific death, albeit a temporary one, and the action moves on to a nightmare of torments and disintegration which nevertheless holds out the promise of a new birth and the healing of splits. It is easy to identify here a depleted central ego, a libidinal ego and satanic anti-libidinal ego, a split object, and the hope of the regressed ego, but this is too glib. Jung affirms the passionately emotional subjectivity of his approach to the problem of Job. He worked at the archetypal transpersonal level. I must prove my interpretation at the pre-personal level.

To do so I turn to the context of Jung's life story and immediately a real dream stands out as showing a similar structure to Answer to Job, the dream of the customs inspector. This dream was also in two parts with an elderly man as principal figure in part one and a hero figure in part two. It becomes clear that I will do best to adopt Jung's own advice that 'basic ideas and themes can be recognised much better in a dream-series' (Jung, 1966: 150) and by following his method of 'a careful and conscious illumination of the interconnected associations objectively grouped round particular images' (Jung, 1966: 148).

The Dream of the Customs Inspector (MDR: 186-189)

In the first part of this dream set on the Swiss border an elderly man dressed as an Imperial Austrian customs official, his face looking 'peevish, rather melancholic and vexed' (186), his form 'stooped' (186) and 'shadowy' (189) walks past the observing dreamer but is said by others present to be a ghost 'one of those who still couldn't die properly' (187).

Jung had this dream at a time when he was outwardly very much engaged with Freud and his theories, but was inwardly becoming increasingly sceptical as he developed his own ideas. He immediately identified the customs official as a representation of the older man, consciously still admired and deferred to as a father figure. The border he recognised as indicating the divide between conscious and unconscious but also that between his ideas and Freud's. He accepted this part of the dream as compensatory, advising a more critical attitude to his mentor. Indeed from my theoretical perspective the customs official could well be a representation of the central ego of that time, depleted by the repression of the dreamer's own ideas together with the affects that their non-acceptability would generate.

Part two of this dream, numinous and colourful in contrast to part one, and which required much time and contemplation before Jung could assign meaning to it, showed the dreamer an Italian city resembling Basel under a bright summer sun. Unregarded by the crowds streaming home for lunch, a twelfth century knight crusader in chain mail, red cross emblazoned on white surcoat and basinet helmet covering head and face, strode uphill towards the dreamer, who was informed that this apparition appeared regularly between noon and one o'clock and had done so for centuries. Unlike the shadowy  BOOKMARK  customs official the knight was full of life, as too the vivid hot light that enveloped the city contrasted with the subdued evening time of the border scene.

Jung eventually associated the twelfth century knight with the quest for the Holy Grail which he believed began around that time and in which he himself became passionately interested when he first read the stories at age fifteen. He identified the world of the quest as his world, at a deep level, in which he too was seeking some great unknown that would signify truth, the schizoid search for meaning. Stevens (1995) goes so far in his interpretation of this dream as to list the vessel, the Grail, as the first of the archetypal images that appear in it. But the older Jung in affirming his original association was ignoring his own dictum, boldly stated in opposition to Freud's views, that the images in dreams are precisely what they appear to be, exactly as when 'if sugar appears in the urine, then the urine contains sugar, and not albumen' (Jung, 1966: 143). The Grail does not appear, neither does the pure Galahad figure of Arthurian legend that I hypothesise Jung would have preferred to see. The dream showed 'the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is ..... and not as he would like it to be' (Jung, 1966: 142). It showed a crusader, and it is inconceivable that a man of Jung's erudition was not aware of the brutal aggressions of the real crusaders, or that a principal aim in the twelfth century was the possession and protection of the Holy Sepulchre.

I do not argue with Jung's view that the dream presaged and counselled his break with Freud and his subsequent independent pursuit of his own theories. I do suggest that an unbiased analysis of this dream points towards two long-established complexes that, ignored by the conscious ego, refused to die and obstinately repeated their call for attention.

If I apply to this dream the principals that I have found valuable with my own clients, such as that light and life in a figure signify the spontaneity of the natural child and that numbers in dreams can usefully be taken to refer to age, then the second scene is replete with information. The knight stands forth as the vigorous omnipotent baby in the first year of life, not lying helpless in his basinet or cradle but carrying it triumphantly on his head as a protection. The white surcoat reveals the innocence of infancy, the red cross and chain mail the latent aggression and concomitant ego defences. The figure's goal is the tomb/womb that holds the promise of resurrection/rebirth. Naming the knight as the libidinal ego suggests that the customs official is not only the depleted central ego of c.1910/11 but also represents the encapsulated central ego of the small child, guarding the border the knight cannot cross. The number twelve could indicate that an early major split in Jung's psyche, made visible in this dream, was repeated or activated in some way at age twelve, and indeed the memoirs reveal that two significant psychological events occurred in that year. The first shows why the crusader/baby needed particular protection for his head.

Jung was sent to the Gymnasium in Basel at the age of eleven and his description of his experiences make painfully obvious the psychological pressure he suffered as a result of this entry into the 'great world' (MDR: 40). In the summer of his twelfth year, at noon in the cathedral square Jung was pushed by a classmate so violently that he fell, struck his head, and nearly lost consciousness. His immediate thought was that he need not go to school anymore but his reason for feigning unconsciousness was to obtain revenge over the other boy. Following this incident Jung suffered fainting fits whenever school attendance loomed and as a result was free to indulge his inclination to draw 'battle pictures and furious scenes of war, of old castles that were being assaulted or burned, or ..... page upon page of caricatures' (MDR: 46-7). A comment made by his father and overheard by Jung, as to the hopelessness of his son's future as he foresaw it if the condition could not be cured, effected what was being despaired of. By an effort of will Jung forced himself back to school work and resisted the fainting fits until they stopped. The fainting points to fear, the fundamental schizoid affect and indeed Jung was conscious of his 'fear of failure' and 'sense of smallness' (MDR: 45). Object relations theory would recognise here that fear of an overwhelming outer reality had impacted on inherent ego-weakness, repeated an earlier split and caused a libidinal withdrawal into the unsafe refuge of the internal world of bad objects, with its sadistic hostility being recorded in images. Key words, Basel, noon, summer, head, stand out to link this episode with the key dream of the crusader knight.

The Fantasy of God on his Throne (MDR: 52-59)

This second major event of Jung's twelfth year also developed over time, and again began in the cathedral square at noon. The schoolboy Carl, seeing the beauty of the sun gilding the newly tiled roof of the great church, was moved to thoughts of God, the creator of all the beauty before him, seated on a golden throne high above the blue sky, when suddenly 'came a great hole in my thoughts and a choking sensation' (MDR: 52), and he knew that something terrible was about to erupt in his mind. He struggled against this unknown but appalling thought for days, resisting the possibility of confiding in his mother both from a reluctance to burden 'the poor dear' (MDR: 53) as well as the need any communication would entail, of thinking to the end the blasphemous thought. He first likened such a sin to murder, but quickly rejected that idea in favour of the sin against the Holy Ghost. Worn out by the internal conflict he woke one night to find the horror almost articulated and wrestled a solution for himself out of his knowledge of the Bible - that God had deliberately arranged for Adam and Eve to sin and was therefore also testing him, Carl, to see if he would obey even a command to commit the ultimate sin. With this he could allow the fantasy to manifest.

I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on his golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder. (MDR: 56)

At once he felt the bliss of release. This was felt by the boy to be an experience of grace. It became for him a secret so powerful, a special revelation from God, that it set him apart from others who could not and did not wish to understand. It created him as the solitary that he remained in essence, all his life.

The older Jung did not re-examine the meaning of this vision. Stevens (1990) remarks that a post-Freudian interpretation would see it as a pre-pubescent boy's moral difficulty with his developing sexuality, his first 'wet' dream, and goes on to affirm Jung's deeply transpersonal exposition.

Again I do not dispute this, but I do also see a representation of an omnipotent baby on his potty, using his motion as a destructive weapon to 'murder' his mother. Young Carl, raised in a family of clergymen must have heard the term 'Mater Ecclesia' (MDR: 32) and perhaps also that the cathedral was the mother church of the diocese. He makes the first direct association to my chosen focus when he records that, in his search for further understanding of his vision, the conventional interpretation of Job in his father's books prevented him from finding 'consolation in it, especially in chapter 9, verses 30-31: "Though I wash myself with snow water ..... yet shalt thou plunge me in the mire"' (MDR: 59). These phrases, and the whole tenor of the solution he devises for his dilemma, suggest a reflection of the double-bind facing the infant whose mother's reaction to his messiness has taught him that defecation is bad, when that same mother demands that he perform that very same bad action to order.

This seminal experience and image now serves as a bridge for my analysis between the work of Jung's old age and the infancy that is the concern of Object Relations theory. The golden throne is the feature that carries the span back to the earliest dream in Jung's memory and therefore the initial dream of my series.

The Dream of the Man-Eater (MDR: 27-29)

This was the dream of a three year old child, but was recorded, it must be remembered, by a man in his eighties.

The record tells how, allowing his curiosity to overcome his fears, the little Carl descends a subterranean stairway reached through a dark hole in the ground of the familiar meadow in which he found himself at the start of his dream. Pulling aside a green brocade curtain he discovers, in an impressive vaulted chamber about thirty feet in length, a huge naked fleshy column, twelve to fifteen feet high, with a single unwavering eye gazing upward from the top of its hairless, faceless head. It stands like a tree trunk on a magnificent golden throne surrounded by 'an aura of brightness'. A red carpet leads towards the throne from the round arched doorway, where the little boy is held motionless by fear. He hears his mother's voice calling from outside and above, 'Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!' (MDR: 27).

This dream stayed vividly with Jung for decades, until he came to amplify it as representing an ithyphallic god in  BOOKMARK  an underground temple reached through an open grave, with the curtain symbolising the meadow, the fecund earth. However, as a child he equated the fearful unrecognisable dream image with the Jesuit of his father's overheard anxieties, from whom, as he thought, he had once fled. In actuality as he later realised, his three-year-old self had hidden from a passing parish priest wearing a wide hat and black soutane. 'Women's clothes' (MDR: 26) his child mind had called them. For the little boy it was all confused with the Lord Jesus of the prayer his mother made him say every night.

Spread out thy wings Lord Jesus mild,

And take to thee thy chick, thy child.

"If Satan would devour it

No harm shall overpower it,"

So let the angels sing! (MDR: 24-25)

Stevens (1990) suggests that she taught this to her son to comfort his fears, but this does not seem to me to be implicit in Jung's recount. Little Carl, avoiding fully understanding that 'chick' meant 'child', meant himself, found comfort in the idea that Jesus would take and eat the chicks like a 'bitter medicine' (MDR: 25) to prevent Satan getting his way with them. One can recognise this as the meagre comfort an emotionally deprived child will construct out of whatever is available, and also oral fantasies like those of Klein's (1975) six-year-old paranoid-schizoid patient Erna.

My own interpretation of this dream would take the aura of light as signifying original potential, or true self to use Winnicott's term (Guntrip, 1968). Behind the green curtain of envy I see an amalgam of the tree of life and source of life in one image representing enthroned the omnipotent baby, but reduced to an immobile object by the repression of anger. The infant has already learned that its anger will be 'walked over' by its environment, so that it can only be hinted at in the colour of the carpet.

I detect a memory buried in this dream. The vaulted roof, and the round entrance arch, could be images derived from the hood of the pram left up over baby Carl, lying gazing upward at golden sunlight filtering through a curtain of green leaves out of a blue sky. This first memory of waking under a shady tree to the wonder of a summer's day, Jung records, caused 'a sense of indescribable well-being' (MDR: 21). I perceive a baby left alone too long and too often by his mother, who learnt to draw comfort from the more reliable warmth of natural beauty, and to split away from his rage at recurring abandonment. The known facts (Stevens, 1990) that tend to support this view of Jung's early mothering are the depressive illness that afflicted Frau Jung, and the death of her first son at a few days old, which occurred two years before Carl was born. The family moved house when their second baby was six months old, a significant time in the formation of maternal bonds (Bowlby, 1984) and this event must have added to the young mother's stress. In the year of the dream and the 'Jesuit', the three-year-old child was already sensing the tensions in his parents' marriage which culminated in a major distressing disruption for him. Emilie Jung was absent in hospital for several months. I speculate that the 'Jesuit' evoked for the boy a terrifying unconscious fantasy of the black, deserting, angry bad mother.

Jung the analyst was of the opinion that 'the initial dreams which appear at the very outset of the treatment, often bring to light the essential aetiological factor in the most unmistakable way' (Jung, 1966: 140) and this dream, that initiated the therapeutic process that was his life story, bears this out. It clearly shows that by age three a powerful complex had already been constellated in the personal unconscious of the little boy. From this image alone, even without all the information Jung provides concerning the difficulties in his parents' marriage, it can be deduced that his mother was frightened of her husband's sexuality and had conveyed her anxieties to her son, perhaps by the way she handled him. Jung in anecdotes from his clinical work has left telling examples of the prospective veracity of dreams when their message is not heeded (Jung, 1966) and his own sexual adventures and misadventures in adult life (Stevens, 1990) demonstrate the point. Jung broke with Freud, and definitely rejected his theories of sexual libido (MDR) at the very time when he was forcing Emma, the mother of his five children, to accept his new young mistress, Toni Wolff, as a fixture in their lives (Stevens, 1990). A dream, late in 1912, portrayed the husband's inner psychic reality.

The Dream of the White Bird (MDR: 195-196)

In this dream Jung found himself in a setting of great splendour. He was seated on a gold Renaissance chair in a loggia high on a castle tower, surveying the distant view. His children were seated with him round a fine table made of green stone. A white bird, perhaps a dove, alighted on the table and Jung was concerned that the children should not frighten it away. Suddenly the bird became a golden-haired little girl of some eight years, who ran about playing with the others, but returned to the dreamer to throw her arms round his neck before transforming again. As a dove once more she spoke solemn words to inform him that she could only become a human being 'in the first hours of the night ..... while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead' (MDR: 195), and flew away into the blue.

Jung knew that this dream carried some significant message from his unconscious, but could not find the meaning. This is not surprising since the image shows him fully identified with the aspect of his shadow that he never faced. He himself is now the destructive man-eater enthroned in a position of power gazing outward high above the world, the living proofs of his potency around him, the meadow and brocade curtain condensed into a fine possession, the stone table. Now he takes care not to frighten the symbol of infant innocence. The child anima figure, whose visits are restricted, seems a clear reference to Toni Wolff - fifteen years Jung's junior - on whose account he was, at that time, creating much painful discord within his family (Stevens, 1990). However, I also see the child as representing 'mother', who can only be his when father is otherwise engaged, officiating at funerals for example as in Jung's early memories. The 'first hours of the night' are perhaps a more accurate reference to the first year of life than the 'between noon and one o'clock' of the knight crusader dream.

The dream of the white bird heralded the start of Jung's mid-life crisis, when again the upwelling of material from his unconscious threatened to shatter his ego. In the dreams examined so far the issue of death was raised only indirectly but in the penultimate dream of my series death actually occurred and Jung finally experienced himself as the killer.

The Dream of Siegfried (MDR: 204-205)

This dream was a turning point in Jung's journey through his inner chaos and he dates it, 18 December 1913. The setting was a desolate mountainous region. Accompanied by a brown-skinned savage, armed and in ambush, Jung waited before dawn knowing he must kill the hero.

Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead. (MDR: 204)

Jung turned to flee, filled with horror and fear. Then a sudden deluge of rain obliterated all trace of the murder. He knew he was safe but an intolerable guilt remained.

He awoke, and his efforts to return to sleep were frustrated by the compulsion to understand the dream, which reached such a pitch that Jung feared he would have to repeat the dream action and turn his loaded revolver on himself if he failed to find the meaning. He found it first in the collective, in the condition of the German nation, soon to go to war. Then he was able to acknowledge that Siegfried was himself and affirm the compassion and grief he had felt after the killing. He divined the message to be that he must abandon his heroic persona, give up his ego's cherished attitudes.

This dream shows unambiguously the deepest psychic reality. Jung does violence to himself by repressing the fury, and other spontaneous affects, that spring from his infantile, true, original self. He named the small savage who initiated the murder as the primitive shadow. I name it as the anti-libidinal ego of the infant who learnt to kill his unmet needs to avoid the pain. The only colour in this dream is brown, the colour, unnamed, of the turd that destroyed the cathedral/mother, the terrible sin for which Jung had rejected the label murder. I suggest that the positive effect of this dream which Jung records resulted from his identification with the killer in himself and his experiencing deeply some of the repressed emotions, in particular guilt. Depleted by this abreaction the complex could be sent back into the unconscious, symbolised by the rain, on the strength of a partial insight. But it was not resolved.

Answer to Job

And so I come to the central matter of my argument, the last 'dream'.

Jung begins his book with a character sketch of Yahweh, as he perceives him to have been experienced by the Hebrew people up to the time of Job,

..... a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and  BOOKMARK  suffered precisely from this lack of moderation. He himself admitted that he was eaten up with rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him. Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness. (Job: 365)

My contention, that this is an account of the infant Carl's experience of his mother, does not at first sight appear to accord well with Jung's own declaration that his mother was 'a very good mother to me. She had a hearty animal warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companiable and pleasant' (MDR: 65). Close reading of the memoirs, however, reveals that Jung supplies no childhood memory to uphold this statement. All the reported episodes of what could be termed maternal care involve others, principally his father. He it was who carried the child in his arms singing to him or held him when he suffered a choking fit. The first memory of an interaction with his mother, which I suggest can be as significant as a first dream, shows a mother who 'holds me back and sternly forbids me' (MDR: 22). Although this was obviously an appropriate injunction at the time, since Carl wanted to see a drowned boy, his mother made no further effort to protect him so that he was able to get out and see the blood from the body running in an open drain. The little boy was not yet four. This vignette displays a stern, forbidding, but also somewhat absent mother, and a son drawn towards death at an early age. Jung refers his distrust of the word love and his sense of the unreliability of women to his mother's long stay in hospital, but this first memory suggests the inconsistency in mothering that I have already suggested could be expected from a depressed woman.

At this point it will be enlightening to take note of one or two facts concerning Frau Emilie Jung. She was the youngest child of a notable but eccentric theologian who 'had visions and held conversations with the dead' (Stevens, 1994: 2). To prevent the devil looking over his shoulder while he wrote his sermons, this father compelled his daughter to protect him by sitting at his back, thus reversing the normal parent child roles. Emilie escaped this duty only with her marriage. If I characterise her, from this information, as the offspring of a controlling dependent parent, I would expect her to be a controlling dependent wife and mother, with unmet needs and much buried anger striving unconsciously, for expression.

Answer to Job certainly presents a picture of a controlling and dependent God, a deity of 'incalculable moods and devastating attacks of wrath' (Job: 369). That 'the Creator needs conscious man' (Job: 373) to become conscious of himself is an on-going theme of the work and that man's greater consciousness gives him 'his slight moral superiority over the more unconscious God' (Job: 373) is also stressed. This is, of course, the reverse of the roles that classical theology allocates to God and his creatures and it is a reversal that is clearly documented by Jung as featuring in his relationship with his mother. From childhood she had 'confided her troubles' (MDR: 69) to him, rather than to his father, treating him like an adult and on at least one occasion alarming him to such a degree that he attempted to take action. Fortunately circumstances frustrated this attempt since his mother's subsequent account of the same issue revealed how much she had exaggerated the first time. This episode demonstrates that unreliability was an inherent characteristic of Frau Jung not merely the consequence of illness and suggests a woman dominated by her emotions, just like the God of the initial definition. The moral role reversal forced on the schoolboy is explicitly stated as such by Jung when, in reference to the conflicts he witnessed at home, he writes that 'I fell into the role of superior arbitrator who willy-nilly had to judge his parents' (MDR: 40).

The controlling nature of the God with whom Jung is engaged is made manifest by contrasting him with the Greek Zeus who had no plans for humanity. 'Yahweh, however, could get inordinately excited about man as a species and men as individuals if they did not behave as he desired or expected' (Job: 370). All this because, as I noted above 'he needed them as they needed him, urgently and personally' (Job: 370). The need 'continually to be praised as just' reveals

a personality who can only convince himself that he exists through his relation to an object ..... It is as if he existed only by reason of the fact that he has an object which assures him that he is really there. (Job: 372).

Again Jung provides an impeccably object relational definition of the bond tying God to Israel and he goes on to reveal in his account of the human response the reaction of the little boy he once was. Yahweh, in his move to ensure his needs were met by selecting for himself a

"chosen people" had burdened them from the start with a heavy obligation. As usually happens with such mortgages, they quite understandably tried to circumvent it as much as possible. (Job: 374).

Jung's earliest memory, recounted previously, is not the only one relevant to this issue. He describes in some detail how, as a schoolboy, his mother humiliated him by shouting advice and admonitions after him, for all the neighbours to hear, when he left the house to attend some social engagement, and how he would, in his turn, disobey her injunctions to convey his parents' regards to his host (MDR). It is worth noting here, since it is usually assumed the God evokes a father projection, that Jung specifically records that 'my dear and generous father ..... never tyrannised over me' (MDR: 73) and that he often let him go his own way. Jung says of his lonely early childhood that he 'could not endure being watched or judged while I played' (MDR: 33) and this hints at a controlling mother in the background.

Having linked the character of Yahweh with the picture of Jung's mother that is revealed in his childhood memories, I now turn to a consideration of the other actor in the drama. Job's distinguishing attributes of moral and intellectual superiority, arising from a submissive, long-suffering but necessarily perceptive innocence can be recognised as an unconscious self-portrait by the writer from the most cursory comparison with the early chapters of Jung's memoirs. There is however one key memory which encapsulates my whole thesis. The incident occurred when Jung was six and was being shunned by the three well-dressed, well-behaved children of some neighbours from the city. Little Carl thought them ridiculous but his mother took quite a different view. '"Now look at those nice children, so well brought up and polite, but you behave like a little lout"' (MDR: 66). Annoyed and humiliated by constant critical comparisons Jung gave the other boy a beating and was in his turn tearfully harangued by his mother with more force and at greater length than he could ever remember. Until then he had been feeling fully satisfied with his aggressive action, as being justified and appropriate. Jung tells us that 'Deeply awed by my mother's excitement, I withdrew penitently to my table' (MDR: 66) to play. That the penitence was not genuine appears from his description of how, as he played, he heard his mother talking to herself over her knitting and understood some of her words to signify that her opinion of the three children in fact matched his own and that he could disregard her strictures. He knew however that he must keep perfectly still and silent, for if he had attempted to challenge her with the truth that he had overheard she would have denied it with the same vehemence as before, saying something like '"You horrid boy, how dare you pretend such a thing about your mother!"' (MDR: 67). The older Jung, commenting upon this memory, recognised that he must have had previous experiences of the same nature. Jung provides this particular story to illustrate what he perceived to be his mother's second, uncanny and frightening, personality, who, with a penetrating word could stun him into silence.

When we first encounter Job in Jung's treatise he is in exactly this situation.

'Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?

I lay my hand on my mouth.' (Job: 367).

The parallels between the Job portrayed by Jung and the little boy in the memory are not difficult to discern. Each knows himself innocent. Each knows himself to be the victim of injustice, and is correct in that assessment, for surely it is unjust for a mother responsible for his upbringing to criticise her son for being badly brought up. Both are aware that the one causing their distress could recognise their own responsibility if they chose and that they will not do so. Therefore both know that they must conceal their more insightful knowledge about their more powerful persecutor and apply the 'therapeutic measure of unresisting acceptance' (Job: 383) under the overwhelming tirades to which each is subjected. Jung's writing throbs with anger against God on Job's behalf, the anger Job himself does not feel, the anger towards mother that the little boy was already well schooled in repressing. That this anger originates in his mother is clearly illustrated by this key memory.

Jung sees in the God who 'pays so little attention to Job's real situation' (Job: 378) a deity who is principally concerned with himself. The little boy, indeed even the older man, cannot articulate this truth about the needy and therefore self-orientated mother, that she is more anxious about what the neighbours think of  BOOKMARK  her, that like Job's comforters 'they have not spoken of me what is right'. (Job: 384) This self-centredness is revealed in the imagined response to a challenge from her son.

Under Jung's account of the devastating ordeal of the Job 'who sits in ashes and scratches his sores' (Job: 378) pleading for the presence of the vindicator to hear his complaint, I hear the experience of the three year old Carl, scratching at the eczema that was one of the symptoms of his distress at his mother's absence (MDR), crying for her return, and unable to cope with her emotions at their eventual reunion. Bowlby (1984) records that such reunions are most difficult when the relationship was already problematic before the separation, as I have previously indicated was the case. This is affirmed in the 'dream' under consideration by the space given to a discussion of Yarweh's betrayal, long before the time of Job, of his covenant with David. Jung uses a very schizoid turn of phrase when he says that the contract instituted by Yarweh to tie to himself 'this indispensable object' the chosen people 'had gone to pieces' (Job: 374). This hints at an earlier experience of fragmentation due to abandonment.

It is at this point that a more detailed exposition of Fairbairn's tripartite pattern of splitting evident in Jung's writing can be undertaken, one that will not be too glib. Jung approves of Job's recognition that the God is one, that he believes that the God who abandons him to torment is the same God to whom he can appeal for vindication, a God with a dual nature. The central ego of a child of three has indeed normally achieved Klein's depressive position (Guntrip, 1961) and long since integrated good and bad mother into one. That Jung's own achievement of this developmental stage was problematic has already been touched on. For him his mother always had two personalities. However in his description of Yarweh's behaviour Jung makes reference repeatedly to his omniscience in such a way as almost to personify it. The three way split in the God of this story, quite separate from the author's concern with the conscious and unconscious of his deity, is clearly discernible at the point when the plot moves to the issue of incarnation. Though a move forward in time historically, it is a regressive direction, I contend, psychologically.

It is only the careful and far-sighted preparations for Christ's birth which show us that omniscience has begun to have a noticeable effect on Yarweh's actions... In all this, as we have said, we discern the helpful hand of Sophia (Job: 403).

In the omniscience which up to this time Yarweh had failed to consult I perceive a very weak ideal object. For the little Carl, missing his mother, there was only a father, knowledgeable and kind but who 'meant reliability and - powerlessness' (MDR: 23) to embody this object. Yarweh is clearly the rejecting object, influenced by Satan, the persecuting anti-libidinal ego, and 'hiding him...in his own bosom' (Job: 381), thus indicating the identification of one with the other. The Job being persecuted by these two is the repressed libidinal ego in relation to the central ego of the author, who, in his old age, was attempting unconsciously to undo this repression. Sophia, I suggest, represents the exciting object and her role requires further detailed comparative analysis.

During his mother's absence in hospital three-year-old Carl was cared for by the maid, and the older Jung recounts a deeply intimate memory of being held by her. 'It was as though she belonged...only to me, as though she were connected in some way with other mysterious things I could not understand...of having known her always' (MDR: 23). The understanding that I derive from this description is that she must often have tended baby Carl, especially when his mother was indisposed. The memory of the maid in fact forms a telling contrast to the only recollection Jung had of his mother as a young woman, in which she was wearing a black dress printed with little green crescents, and when, in slipping away from her, he injured himself. It seems likely that baby Carl had the difficulty of two external mother figures embodying exciting and rejecting objects respectively. Jung recognised that the maid had influenced the development of his anima.

The figure of Sophia does not appear in the book of Job but this did not inhibit Jung from assigning her a significant role in his work. He contrasts her 'love of mankind' (Job: 396) with Yarweh's 'perfectionist intention which excludes that kind of relatedness we know as "Eros"' (Job: 395), a parallel perhaps to gentle maid and nagging mother. He notes that 'Job longs for wisdom' (Job: 396) picking out unerringly the one verse, Job 28:12, that seems to me to echo the infant's cry for his nurse, 'But where shall wisdom be found'.

The character that Jung ascribes to Sophia is remarkably sexualised. He likens her to the bride in the Song of Songs, incorporating much erotic imagery. He links her to the "Indian Shakti" (Job: 387), a female figure often shown in sculpture in explicit sexual congress with a god. Kauffman (1980) in his commentary on Jung's thesis suggests that he makes it appear at one point as if Yarweh has had an affair with Sophia, and indeed the issue of faithfulness, unfaithfulness, and the problem of having two wives takes up considerable space in part one of this 'dream'. The sub-plot woven around Sophia includes Adam and Eve and Cain and Able, the latter a good example of a libidinal, anti-libidinal pair, and Jung makes a strong point about repeating patterns. In particular he notes that Adam, who according to legend was married first to Lilith, had 'two wives, just like his heavenly prototype. Just as Yarweh is legitimately united with his wife Israel, but has a feminine pneuma as his intimate playmate' (Job: 393). The parallel with Jung's own marital situation is obvious and leads me to ask of the record he left, was he too repeating a pattern, one seen but not comprehended in early childhood?

In answer, firstly, I note the erotic element in Jung's description of the maid, dwelling on 'her hairline, her throat, with its darkly pigmented skin, and her ear' (MDR: 23). Like Stevens (1990) I consider that the nine year gap between Carl and his younger sister, together with the conflicts in the home previously referred to, suggests a minimum of sexual activity within his parents' marriage. Little Carl felt oppressed both by his father's irritability and moodiness, and by his mother's 'invalidism' (MDR: 37). Jung describes a suffocating atmosphere in the house, especially at night when strange things seemed to happen. His parents slept apart and he shared his father's room. This was at the time that he suffered choking fits, the time that he was starting school. The sense I receive from all these fragments is of a passively aggressive wife, controlling and frustrating her husband by means of 'illness' and it seems more than possible that Jung senior had turned to the maid for sexual release at some point. I see a replay of the mother's girlhood role in her child's being used, when he slept in his father's room, as a protective barrier, though whether at the father's wish, to prevent another (or a first) fall into temptation, or at the mother's instigation to control her husband's feared and rejected sexuality, I could not say. I only note again that Yarweh was eaten up with jealousy and rage, and that the phrase 'man-eater' must have been overheard somewhere by little Carl. Like real dreams Answer to Job shows condensation in its imagery. So, because Yarweh had forgotten Sophia 'Her place was taken by...the chosen people who were thus forced into the feminine role' (Job: 395). In describing the marriage with Israel as a masculine affair Jung might have been influenced by the residue of little Carl's anxieties on being put in his mother's place in his father's room, so that Israel images both son and mother.

The chief condensation that I must elucidate is the combination within the image of Yarweh of both rejecting object, mother, and the angry baby feeling rejected. The central ego of three year old Carl was beset by difficulties on two fronts, externally because of his mother's long absence, internally by the repressed infantile rage from earlier abandonments threatening to erupt into consciousness. It is clear from the memoirs that it was Jung, not his mother, who was liable very occasionally to outbursts of violence. Here and there the descriptions of Yarweh's demonstrations of power have the flavour of infantile tantrums. The 'almighty exhibition of thunder and lightning' (Job: 379) makes it appear that 'he had another powerful opponent...who was better worth challenging' (Job: 380) and 'a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions' (Job: 394).

This raging baby is present only by his looming absence in part two of the 'dream'. About this part my remarks will be of a general nature and brief since I have covered some of the ground already. As I take the figure of Christ to be a representation of the baby in the first year of life, the libidinal ego in relation to the central ego of the three year old child, there are no more memories to support my analysis. Jung does not appear to me to be as closely involved or identified with Christ as he is with Job, there is not the same resentment on his behalf, instead there are some quite critical reflections. Christ's love of humanity, which Jung almost credits to Mary whom he equates with Sophia, is said by Jung to be 'limited to a not inconsiderable degree' (Job: 407). He is irascible, emotional, and  BOOKMARK  lacking in self-reflection, milder echoes of the criticisms levelled at God. Far more severe is the pronouncement that he is not adequately human. He is 'a hero and half-god in the classical sense...not a creaturely human being' (Job: 430) and therefore cannot definitively carry out his function of mediator between God and humanity 'there still exists a factor of uncertainty' (Job: 431). Underlying all this I perceive the unconscious judgment on the all-good adapted baby that Jung once was, the hero-baby Siegfried that he killed, as Christ had to be sacrificed, so that further developmental adaptations could ensure survival. That baby, split away from its anger and pain, was not the fully human true self. In the same way the all-good deity that God had tried to become could not be trusted and Jung points to the final petition in the Lord's prayer as proof that Jesus, despite his protestations of faith in his father, knew this. Just so the baby could not trust his depressed mother. I will again quote, with appropriate substitutions, one of Jung's pithy summations that reveals the infancy dynamic of little Carl. 'God/Mother with his/her good intentions, begot a good and helpful son and this created an image of himself/herself as the good father/mother' (Job: 432). Jung goes on to note the 'fearful dissociation' God had got himself into 'where...did his darkness go' (Job: 433) and answers the question with what I should perhaps have designated part three, a long examination of the Apocalypse.

This biblical text is manifestly psychotic in form and through his masterly, conscious treatment of it Jung, I suggest, was again working on his deeply buried unintegrated chaotic earliest infantile experiences. One theme that Jung elaborates is that of the marriage of the mother/Jerusalem/Sophia/Mary with 'her son-lover' (Job: 442) and this is continued in the discussion of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, bodily reunited with her bridegroom son in heaven. I have already noted how Frau Jung turned to her son instead of her husband. Jung wrote 'After my father's death I moved into his room, and took his place inside the family' (MDR: 177). He was groomed, I think, by his mother to be her husband-son.

The issue of a second birth, of 'The son who is born of these heavenly nuptials' (Job: 439) is another important theme. This theme of new birth shows the influence of the regressed ego, which made its presence felt throughout Jung's life in his many dream references to death and in early childhood, as he records, produced 'an unconscious suicidal urge or...a fatal resistance to life in this world' (MDR: 24). It is my contention that the exciting object, Sophia/Mary, is preferentially linked to the figure of the maid, so that the happy reunion in heaven may reveal the unconscious wish of the little child to return to her gentle care. Jung becomes passionately critical of the Protestant reaction to the promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption. His references to brother and sister churches remind me that there were other significant adults in little Carl's life, specifically aunts, as well as several male clerical relatives. How did he experience his parents interacting with them? In his defence of the dogma is there a hint of a small boy resenting the 'cheap aspersions' (Job: 467) and hostile condescending behaviour directed against his love object by his uncles, which again he would see but not understand? But this is becoming too speculative and it is now appropriate to draw to an end.

Conclusion

Kaufmann (1980) in his chapter on Answer to Job sees the work as revealing, though its Jewish father God who could do no right, and the Christ son who could do no wrong, another re-working of what he claimed to be Jung's unfinished business with Freud. He professed to have been surprised to have found this. I will not be so disingenuous. It was Kaufmann's chapter that alerted me to the fact that I would find the evidence for Jung's basic schizoid splitting patterning Job. For Kaufmann the incorporation of material on the Assumption showed the basis of Jung's work to be his unresolved Oedipal complex, but I doubt this.

The Oedipal triangle I feel is often used as what I see to be a glib interpretation. My work with clients has shown me that other triangles, formed with mother and grandmother for example, or mother and uncle, or mother and sibling, can be more dominant in the psychopathology. Working from object relations theory it is not the sexual but the relational issue that takes priority. The evidence seems to me to show that Jung's first triangle may have been formed with mother and maid. If there was cause for the infantile hatred of his father that Kaufmann suggests it would be for failing to be an adequate rival who could separate him from mother's control. Stevens considers that Jung found the strong father who could 'liberate him from thralldom to the maternal feminine' (Stevens, 1990: 162) in Freud. I perceive that below this first level of interpretation Jung was locked into a repeat of his early childhood experiences with Freud as the 'controlling mother'. When he broke with Freud Emma was there to take his place as 'an irritating constraint on his freedom' (Stevens, 1990: 162) the rejecting object, with Toni Wolff, his exciting object, completing the pattern of his conflict-ridden childhood home. If there is truth in my hypothesis concerning Jung senior and the maid, the need not to know this truth would provide a powerful resistance to therapeutic work on infancy issues and a strong unconscious motivation to look forwards for meaning and healing, such as Jung displays.

In writing this essay I have used Answer to Job and Memories, Dreams, Reflections as if they were a major dream and the subsequent work upon it in therapy. My justification for this approach comes from Jung himself. Jaff? records in her introduction to their collaborative effort,

After a period of inner turbulence, long-submerged images of his childhood rose to the surface of his mind. He sensed their connection with ideas in the works he had written in his old age, but could not grasp it clearly (MDR:8).

Kaufmann quotes a letter from Jung to Jaff? concerning Answer to Job 'The motive for my book was an increasingly urgent feeling of responsibility which in the end I could no longer withstand.' (Kaufmann, 1980: 414). In this I perceive that right to the end the pressure from within his psyche to heal its earliest wounds was still driving Jung's individuation process.

References

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Guntrip, H. (1968) Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self. London: The Hogarth Press
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