The Inkblots
Page 39
Hermann was born: HRA 1:1.
Ulrich did well: WSM, quoting Anna and Ulrich’s transcripts. Ulrich taught at the elementary school (ages seven to twelve) and Realschule (ages twelve to fourteen on the academic track leading to Gymnasium, for ages twelve to sixteen, which would then be followed by entry into a profession).
Schaffhausen is a small: Population 11,795 in 1880, roughly triple that today.
“On the banks”: Schaffhausen und der Rheinfall, Europäische Wanderbilder 18 (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1881), 3.
“the spray fell thickly on us”: Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (London: Edward Moxon, 1844), 1:51–52
“A heavy mountain”: Schaffhausen und der Rheinfall, 28.
The house was roomier: This section from Anna R; WSM, citing interviews with Anna from 1960; Ellenberger, 175–77.
“could look at something”: WSI Fanny Sauter.
“I can still see this modest man”: Schwerz.
a small compilation: Feldblumen: Gedichte für Herz und Gemüth (Arbon: G. Rüdlinger, 1879), an anthology of local verse of a kind common at the time, with eight of the twenty-seven poems by Ulrich.
a hundred-page “Outline”: HRA 1:7.
symptoms more severe: WSI Regineli. It is unclear what the disease was—in WSM, Wolfgang Schwarz conjectures Parkinson’s or “a kind of encephalitis.”
When Ulrich died: Ulrich’s obituary attests: “He was not only a draftsman but also a philosopher, devoting much of his time to detailed consideration of the highest questions….He had a true artist’s spirit and would have probably found the greatest satisfaction in purely artistic work but did not have the means to pursue a general education and take study trips; he felt all too strongly bound by considerations of his family’s material well-being. Despite his short time in school, self-study gave him a thorough base of knowledge and linked it to proficient creative ability….The only thing Rorschach lacked was true self-assurance and artistic confidence, the ability to be nimble and sure in his outward demeanor; he did not know how to bring his knowledge and ability to fruition.” Ulrich was “always ready to appreciate others’ accomplishments; he was much too modest to recognize his own worth” (Schaffhauser Nachrichten, June 9, 1903).
“I am afraid that”: To Anna, August 31, 1911.
“I think back”: To Anna, January 31, 1910.
“the Schaffhausen mind-set”: To Anna, January 24, 1909.
Chapter 2: Klex
Swiss-German fraternities: WSM; WSI Theodor “Schlot” Müller and Kurt Bachtold; 100 Jahre Scaphusia: 1858–1958, edited by the same Kurt Bachtold (Schaffhausen, 1958); 125 Jahre Scaphusia (Schaffhausen, 1983); the Scaphusia log of its activities and 1903 scrapbook (HRA 1:2).
Rorschach attended: This section: Anna R; Schwerz; WSI Regineli and former schoolmates.
a toothache: CE, 133.
“Women’s Emancipation”: HRA 1:2:1; see Blum/Witschi, 60.
In one picture: This picture shows Herbert Haug, a fellow Scaphusia member at the Schaffhausen Gymnasium, looking at a picture of a young woman while a black dog stares spookily at the viewer. Beneath the picture is a poem, which likewise suggests Haug’s dreamy melancholy. He would drown a few years later, probably a suicide. (To Anna, October 31, 1906, and WSM.)
Ernst Haeckel: Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2–4; Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 342. Haeckel also developed a wave theory of inheritance through the protoplasm, which would decisively influence Nietzsche’s formulation of the will to power: “that life arose from the periodic vibrations stored within the minute material structures of the protoplasm…a thoroughly mechanical approach to heredity” (Robert Michael Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39.3 [2008]: 403–4 and notes).
An aspiring landscape painter: Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, “Ernst Haeckel: The Artist in the Scientist,” in Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 19.
Darwin praised Haeckel: Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 1, 262.
visual vocabulary for Art Nouveau: Olaf Breidbach, “Brief Instructions to Viewing Haeckel’s Pictures,” in Haeckel, Art Forms, 15.
household showpiece: The book was “brought out at every possible opportunity, presented, examined, even admired” by children and grandfathers alike (Richard P. Hartmann, preface to Haeckel, Art Forms, 7).
the ultimate atheistic science: Richards, Tragic Sense of Life, 385. He points out that biologists today have less faith in a personal God than scientists in any other fields: 5.5 percent, as opposed to 39.3 percent of elite scientists in general and 86 percent of American citizens, 94 percent if belief in a “higher power” counts. A survey from 1914 shows the same pattern.
“Your misgivings”: From Haeckel, October 22, 1902.
several people: Anna R, 73; Olga R, 88; Morgenthaler, “Hermann Rorschach,” in PD, 9; Ellenberger, 177. “This bold step of turning to a famous man for advice seems characteristic of Rorschach”: L, 25n1. “It seems doubtful Rorschach would have put the entire choice of his future profession in the hands of a stranger….Most of Rorschach’s actions as revealed by his correspondence seem deliberate and premeditated”: WSM. In 1962, the Ernst Haeckel House in Jena, Germany, told Schwarz that no letter from Rorschach to Haeckel could be found.
Chapter 3: I Want to Read People
graduating from high school: Rorschach graduated fourth in his class and was disappointed in his results, but his teacher told him he hadn’t spoken up enough—Rorschach’s friend Walter Im Hof, an outgoing good talker and future lawyer, had outperformed the quietly good listener and future psychiatrist (WSI Walter Im Hof; transcript, HRA 1:1).
French lessons: WSM.
straight to Paris: Anna to Wolfgang Schwarz, response to queries, ca. 1960, WSA.
“nowhere stupider”: To Anna, February 18, 1906.
private diary: HRA 1:6:4.
“Everyone knows” and other quotes: To family, August 13, 1904.
“They like to talk”: To Anna, May 26, 1908.
the Dukhobors: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador, 2002), 307; Rosamund Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 271; Andrew Donskov, Sergej Tolstoy and the Doukhobors (Ottawa: Slavic Research Group, University of Ottawa, 1998), 4–5; V. O. Pashchenko and T. V. Nagorna, “Tolstoy and the Doukhobors: Main Stages of Relations in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century” (2006), Doukhobor Genealogy Website, www.doukhobor.org/Pashchenko-Nagorna.html, last accessed August 2016.
In 1895, Tolstoy called: An 1899 visitor found that though Tolstoy “scorn[ed] discipleship” more than anyone, a group nicknamed “the College of Cardinals” had gathered around him: Vladimir Chertkov, Pavel Biryukov, and Ivan Tregubov (James Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World [London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1923], 2:70; cf. Chertkov, Biryukov, and Tregubov’s pamphlet Appeal for Help [London, 1897]). All three were soon kicked out of the country; Tregubov would return in 1905, where he fomented resistance before the 1917 Revolution and served in the Commissariat of Agriculture afterward, continuing to try to protect the Dukhobors’ interests (Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005], 200). He survived under Stalin until 1931.
In his diary (HRA 1:6:4), Rorschach first mentions Tregubov in a political context: “Dijon Socialist Workers Party. Evening meeting at Tréguboff (Doukhobor).” Following quotes: To Anna, April 14, 1909, January 21, 1907; Anna R, 73.
apparently mastering: Olga R, 88–89; Ellenberger, 197.
“I want to know”: Anna R, 73.
“I never again want to read just books”: To Anna, February 19, 1906.
; go to university: Matriculation October 20, 1904, registration number 15174.
showed up in Zurich: This section: Schwerz; to family, October 23, 1904; visit to Weinplatz, November 2012.
“went to two art exhibits”: To Anna, October 22, 1904.
an extra in the student theater: Recalled by his son, Wadim (Blum/Witschi, 85).
the Künstlergütli: Details from Baedeker’s Switzerland (1905 and 1907).
Rorschach took the lead: a recollection from Walter von Wyss, in Ellenberger, 211.
“I was the only one”: To Anna, May 23, 1906.
“the large number of revolutionary-minded young foreigners”: Including Herzen, Bakunin, Plekhanov, Radek, Kropotkin, Karl Liebknecht, and a young Benito Mussolini (Peter Loewenberg, “The Creation of a Scientific Community: The Burghölzli,” in Fantasy and Reality in History [New York: Oxford, 1995], 50–51).
the debates in Little Russia: “Es wurde heiß debattiert und kalt gesessen,” quoted in Verena Stadler-Labhart, “Universität Zürich,” in Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Kristine von Soden, BilderLeseBuch (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1995), 58.
university students: Stadler-Labhart, “Universität Zürich,” 56, 63n2; Blum/Witschi, 74; Universität Zürich, “Geschichte,” n.d., accessed July 8, 2016, www.uzh.ch/about/portrait/history.html.
“It was simply unthinkable”: Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 76. Emma, despite having served as her father’s assistant for years, was sent to Paris for a year to be an upper-class au pair for her father’s business friends and to pursue appropriate cultural interests in her spare time. Cf. Stadler-Labhart, “Universität Zürich,” 56–57; John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (New York: Knopf, 1993), 34.
“semi-Asian invaders”: Stadler-Labhart, “Universität Zürich”; Blum/Witschi, 62–63.
“the Christmas angel”: Christchindli, a little girl with a bell who flies to every house and delivers presents.
presumably his looks: Rorschach’s roommate, Schwerz, who preserved the anecdote fifty years later, left such attractions out of his account, writing only that the “artistically inclined aesthete Rorschach” was interested in the Russian beauty and that up in their room it was “Tolstoy’s letter [that] was admired by all.” No letter from Tolstoy survives, but an autographed photograph of him was one of Rorschach’s prized possessions.
Some truly were revolutionaries…others were “thoroughly bourgeois”: Schwerz.
Sabina Spielrein: Bair, Jung, 89–91; Kerr, Most Dangerous Method; Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997). Spielrein and Rorschach likely met, since they had the same adviser, he hung out with Russians, and Spielrein “attended classes daily, was punctual everywhere, and felt honor bound to participate fully” (Loewenberg, “Creation,” 73, quoting Jung).
Olga Vasilyevna Shtempelin: Штемпелин. The German spelling, “Stempelin,” which has an initial Sht- sound, has often been brought over into English, where it wrongly suggests a St- pronunciation.
In 1910, Olga signed her middle name “Vil’gemovna” on a notarized document giving her consent to be married; in Hermann’s correspondence with Swiss authorities about the formalities of his marriage, he likewise gave it as “Wilhelmowna” (I thank Rita Signer for this information). However, in the family tree Rorschach made later and many other Swiss documents, her middle name is given as “Wassiljewna.”
a perk: According to Hermann and Olga’s daughter Elisabeth (Blum/Witschi, 73–74 and 126n139).
“My Russian friends”: To Anna, September 2, 1906. His letters mention her by name for the first time in 1908.
“Dear Count Tolstoy”: HRA 2:1:15:25. Translated and included here by the kind permission of Yuri Kudinov of the State Leo Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.
far from alone: The book has not yet been written about the influence of Russian culture in the West before World War I. Russian novels and plays were astonishing readers from Woolf to Hamsun to Freud; Russian ballet was the toast of Paris; the country’s physical immensity and combination of spiritual depth and political backwardness inspired awe and anxiety across the continent; “Tolstoyans” spread through Europe, opening vegetarian restaurants and preaching Christian brotherhood. The long list of indispensable novels on the subject begins with Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, set in Russia and Switzerland around 1907.
Chapter 4: Extraordinary Discoveries and Warring Worlds
The professor’s compact silhouette: Description by Auguste Forel, quoted in Rolf Mösli, Eugen Bleuler: Pionier der Psychiatrie (Zurich: Römerhof-Verlag, 2012), 20–21; Bair, Jung, 58; see note on this page for Eugen Bleuler.
Another lecturer: Bair, Jung, 97–98; see note on this page for Carl Jung.
Zurich in the first decade: The best single source on the rise of modern psychiatry, helpfully centered on Zurich, is Kerr’s masterful A Most Dangerous Method (a.k.a. A Dangerous Method), whose twenty-two-page “Bibliographical Essay” is a library in itself. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970), is still the most detailed, in-depth study. George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) is a good, more recent general history.
“medicine in Chekhov’s day”: Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001), 116.
351 copies: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (John Wiley, 1961), xx. In contrast, Théodore Flournoy’s major work on the unconscious, also published in late 1899, went into a third edition within three months and received rave reviews throughout Europe and America in both academic journals and the popular press (From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995], xxvii–xxxi). For a revisionist take on the “legend” that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was largely ignored, see Ellenberger, Discovery, 783–84.
“better known locally for the brothel”: Kerr, Dangerous Method, 40.
Eugen Bleuler: Ellenberger, Discovery; Bair, Jung; Kerr, Most Dangerous Method; Makari, Revolution in Mind; Mösli, Eugen Bleuler; Daniel Hell, Christian Scharfetter, and Arnulf Möller, Eugen Bleuler, Leben und Werk (Bern: Huber, 2001); Christian Scharfetter, ed., Eugen Bleuler, 1857–1939 (Zurich: Juris Druck, 2001); Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler, “Ich bin zuversichtlich, wir erobern bald die Psychiatrie”: Briefwechsel, 1904–1937, ed. Michael Schröter (Basel: Schwabe, 2012; hereafter cited as “F/B”). Bleuler has usually been described as somewhat overbearing and insufferable, mostly because that was how Jung saw him (though Kerr, Most Dangerous Method, 43, is more balanced). As more material on Bleuler is published, this view is starting to seem slanted.
“We know now”: Quoted in Loewenburg, “Creation,” 47, emended.
“The great mass”: Kraepelin’s textbook Einführung in die psychiatrische Klinik, 4th ed. 1921, quoted in Christian Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus: Aufsätze zur Psychiatriegeschichte (Bern: Huber, 2005), 145. Müller goes on: “What is it about this quote from the great, uncontested master of psychiatry that bothers me? Is it the style, the word choice? The brutality with which he labels a reality that to him was completely objective? This quote highlights the powerful transformation that has come to pass in our relation to human suffering as a whole. We have become more sensitive.”
six to eight hundred patients: Mösli says 655 patients (Eugen Bleuler, 114), Makari “over eight hundred” (Revolution in Mind, 183).
as an adjective: Eugen Bleuler, “The Prognosis of Dementia Praecox,” in The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept: Translations of Seminal European Contributions on Schizophrenia, ed. John Cutting and Michael Shepherd (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 59. One recent writer says that simply eliminating the term dementia played no small role in giving sufferers and their families hope for a cure (Daniel Hell, “Herkunft, Kindheit
und Jugend,” in Mösli, Eugen Bleuler, 25–26).
One of Bleuler’s assistants: Abraham Arden Brill, quoted in Mösli, Eugen Bleuler, 153.
“The way they looked at the patient”: Brill quoted in Loewenberg, “Creation,” 65–66.
Carl Jung: The literature on Jung is enormous and blazing with controversies; Sonu Shamdasani’s Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (London: Kamac, 2005) is a book about controversies about biographies of Jung. Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method is the best place to start; for an encapsulation of Jung’s personality it is hard to beat the paragraph beginning: “It is important to emphasize the almost Rabelaisian nature of [Jung’s] gifts” (53). See also Bair, Jung; Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
“complexes”: As Jung explained in 1934: “The word ‘complex’ in its psychological sense has passed into common speech both in German and in English. Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us” (Collected Works of C. G. Jung [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960–90], 8:95–96).
“unprecedented and extraordinary”: Kerr, Most Dangerous Method, 59; Makari calls it a “bombshell” (Revolution in Mind, 193).
Independent of Freud: At least in Jung’s self-interested retelling—Jung had in fact read The Interpretation of Dreams by 1900.
“that was how”: Bleuler in 1910, quoted by Michael Schröter, introduction to F/B, 16.
“opened up a new world”: Ibid., 15.
“Dear Honored Colleague!”: F/B, letter 2B.
asking for tips: “Although I realized on first reading that your book on dreams was correct, I only rarely succeed in interpreting one of my own dreams…My colleagues, as well as my wife, a born psychologist, cannot crack the nut. So you will surely forgive me if I turn to the Master himself.” Freud obliged, and Bleuler sent more. On November 5, 1905, sitting at his typewriter, he followed Freud’s instructions and tried to free-write: “Will anything come out?…In my associations, too, only old things come up. Doesn’t that contradict Freud’s theory in a way, in his sense. The principle is undoubtedly correct. Do all the details apply in every case? Don’t individual differences matter?…It’s stupid for me to have doubts, with my limited experience. But it’s also stupid that I can interpret my dreams so rarely. Stalemate. (Distracted by the sound of the rain, thoughts of upcoming visitors.)”