320. Conflict (VI)

The historian Robert Conquest formulated three laws of politics; the third law stated that it is always best to assume that institutions are controlled by their enemies, and this sounds paranoid—until you observe how actual life operates. Take an example from psychology, the fate of the C.G. Jung Institute in Switzerland, founded by the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung to propagate his work. In short order, not long after Jung’s death, the institute’s director came to be Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, a man who claimed to admire Jung’s work and yet personally disliked Jung and his disciples.

Pause for a moment and consider if a man, particularly in a field such as psychology, who personally dislikes someone should become the director of an institute that was putatively responsible for that man’s legacy—Conquest’s law strikes again, the C.G. Jung Institute quickly ended up being run by a man who actively disliked Jung and, by extension, his work and legacy. We are too quick to think that a person can separate their rational and personal opinions; but if you do not like someone, the chances you will agree with their intellectual work is low; and this must be especially true in psychology, especially in psychoanalysis—Jung’s life was his work, to personally dislike Jung was also to repudiate his work.

The pictures above show Guggenbühl-Craig, old and young. When I first saw his picture as an old man I immediately thought, “Goat, an old goat.” The goat is, of course, a symbol for Satan or the Devil. Indeed, I later found a book of conversations with Guggenbühl-Craig that featured a horned devil on the front cover about to consume a small child or baby—its title: The Emptied Soul. Hence a person always tells us exactly what they are. I feel that the second picture, when he is younger, even more clearly shows an insincere and unpleasant man; not somebody you would trust with your legacy. As it turned out, Guggenbühl-Craig had a problem with fathers.

He deliberately changed his name, made it double-barrelled, when he married so as to take his wife’s name—his wife was Scottish, not Swiss, an indication that he repudiated both parents. He took her name, so he claimed, to differentiate himself from his father. In contemporary Internet parlance, he was a “cuck”; an archetype that we could explain to old Jung as being a man who is overly subservient to feminine imperatives to the point that he undermines his own interests.

Later in life, Guggenbühl-Craig produced a book called The Old Fool; he claimed that the idea that old men have wisdom is a delusion. Again, he wanted to murder his father: this time he murdered Jung, whose idea of the senex or wise old man was crucial to his work. Guggenbühl-Craig repudiated wisdom, masculinity, and old age—presumably because he had little masculine authority or wisdom himself. Indeed, from the start he refused to be trained or to receive a diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute—refused to bend and serve—and yet he ended up as the institute’s director, he was a usurper; he had not earned the crown, those who cannot follow can never lead.

So we have here a microcosm that reproduces Conquest’s laws, even without any explicit political content. Essentially, a weak man who hates masculine authority evinces an interest in Jungian psychology, possibly in a quest for a substitute father, but he arrogantly refuses to submit to what he purports to be interested in; eventually, he takes over the very organisation itself and figuratively “murders” his father, just as he did when he rejected his surname, by subverting the teaching of Jung’s ideas. Any bureaucratic organisation is susceptible to such drift, since bureaucracy inherently destroys responsibility. Hence it is a good bet that when you turn up to learn anything—from medicine to woodwork—the official institution dedicated to the transmission of that knowledge teaches almost the opposite to what was intended; and so real knowledge is occult.