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MRobert Moretti, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst in private practice in Chicago and Evanston. He is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Medical School and former director of a graduate program in health psychology.

The Monthly Aspectarian: I usually start out by letting people tell their story. How did you become a Jungian analyst and get into specifically talking about Jung’s life and work?

Robert Moretti: Early in my graduate career, I actually thought I would pursue a career in research and was involved in psychopharmacology. Then I realized I really wanted to work with patients and got into clinical psychology. I have always experienced this conflict, between two completely opposing parts of myself, a very rational scientific side and another side that is much more feeling oriented and attuned to things that are not so scientific. The only way I could bring these two sides together effectively, in truth, was to pursue being a Jungian analyst. It’s one of the few psychotherapeutic modalities that I think takes good account of these more elusive parts of our personalities, the more mystical, spiritual sides.

TMA: One of the hardest things about life on earth is that if you’re looking north, you’re not looking south. It makes me crazy.

RM: Yes, it’s hard to take account of both at once. So what happened was that during a moment in my graduate career when things were particularly angst-ridden for me, I entered Jungian analysis and was very impressed with the work with the unconscious that my analyst did with me. I got a great deal out of it, and was moved by a particular dream to confirm a notion that perhaps I ought to train as a Jungian analyst. The dream ended up sealing it for me. I hadn’t been sure that I should pursue it; I sometimes thought it was a little too loosey-goosey for me, I was afraid that it wasn’t scientific enough. There were those two sides of me at war.

TMA: Who would expect a Jungian to pay attention to dreams? [laughs]

RM: Just the Jungian analyst, I guess. But the symbol of the dream was instructive. In the dream, I was putting on a priest’s robes. I knew I didn’t want to be a priest, but I knew that the priest’s robes in the dream symbolized for me the role of an analyst—somebody I thought of as having a wisdom that went beyond the rational.

TMA: So you went through the trainings.

RM: I trained here at the Jung Center. I’ve been based in Chicago my whole life. I attended the University of Chicago and then got my Ph.D. at Loyola University. Then I got my diploma from the Jung Center. So I’m a local boy.

TMA: Talk a little about his life, how did Jung become who he was?

RM: I think Jung’s earliest experiences in life were probably the most formative in leading him beyond Freud. Most people recognize that Jung was associated with Freud from about 1906 until 1912. Early in his childhood, he had some experiences which your interested readers can enjoy reading about in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Suffice it to say that these were experiences that he considered as direct experiences of something God-like in himself. I don’t mean that he thought that he was God. It was his experience of something independent of his own conscious will, that existed within himself, that had what he called “great, luminous power,” a strange and mysterious energy. These experiences were very convincing to him, even growing up in a household where his father was a pastor and he also had eight uncles that were pastors.

These personal experiences of something God-like were, to him, far more important than institutional religion. He had very little truck with what most people would call institutional religion. What he despised about it was dogma. The idea that you were supposed to believe in something just because you were supposed to believe in it. His father was a pastor who experienced religious doubts but continued to preach before his congregation every week. The idea that his father could be such a hypocrite was appalling to him. He felt very strongly that people should not adhere to a dogma but should invest in things that made sense to them. In the movie that is part of my presentation, he’s asked whether he believes in God, it’s a very poignant point in the film, and he hesitates for some seconds and says, “I don’t need to believe, I know.” That’s pretty much all he will say about it. Later in the film he says he can’t understand this idea of belief, of subscribing to something just because they say so. His strong feeling was that we should consider as true those things which speak to us personally.

TMA: These early experiences, did he describe them? Was it a hearing of the still small voice?

RM: Something like that, I’m hesitant to get into a description of the actual experiences because they’re based on dreams and the dreams are fairly complicated. I think he wasn’t necessarily sure what they meant. I think they remained mysterious to him throughout his life. But he knew that they were powerful and he knew that they had shaped him. When he goes on to develop his idea of the unconscious, when he has become a psychoanalyst and even before he develops his own system of analytic psychology, he is convinced that there is a core in the personality which he calls the self, which is that small still voice but I think that he would think of it in more powerful terms than that. That it is a will in a sense that is trying to direct our lives in a particular direction, often at odds which what we would consciously choose to do ourselves.

TMA: It’s interesting that that’s really where all of the religions eventually lead, to that very same place.

RM: I think that that’s true. I think that’s maybe what’s fascinating to me about Jung and I suspect that other people have that fascination with him too, that these thoughts that are almost timeless because they’ve been a part of the world’s faith for so long, can be understood in psychological terms in Jung’s analytical psychology.

TMA: The perennial wisdom.

RM: It is like that, yeah, it shares a lot with that.

TMA: His relationship with Freud was complicated…

RM: Jung had a poor relationship with his own father. When he ran into Freud, the connection was very strong, I think for a particular reason, both men had independently through their own research understood that there were powerful unconscious energies that influence human behavior and play a role in psychological disturbance. They had that in common, but also when Jung met Freud he was meeting a man eighteen years older than himself, so therefore he was a potential father figure and a man who very deeply believed what he was saying. Freud was deeply attached to his theory of psychoanalysis, and didn’t have the conflicts about it that his own father had about religion. I think it’s pretty clear that Freud became a father figure to Jung. They openly spoke about the idea that it was a father son relationship in many ways.

TMA: Jung was to be Freud’s successor.

RM: Yes, Freud said to him in a letter, I designate you as my crown prince and successor. That would have been fine if Jung could have toed the line and espoused the theory as Freud saw it…

TMA: He didn’t go and think for him self did he? [laughter]

RM: There’s a problem with people who are extremely bright. They tend to want to think for themselves. It’s interesting you go back to the early writings of Jung. Even before he’s much associated with Freud, he expresses his reservations of Freud’s psychoanalysis. His major reservation is that he doesn’t think everything can be explained because of sexual dynamics; there are other things that are just as important. He put those reservations aside the years he associated with Freud, but after five or six years those doubts came back and he began to go in his own direction. Freud was not very happy about it.

As much as Freud tried to hold onto him, and I will say that Freud bent over backwards almost to try to accommodate Jung up to a certain point, it seems pretty clear that something in Jung knew that he needed to break away and develop his own system.

TMA: Or he would never be himself.

RM: He never would become his own man. He would remain a son. For somebody who has the stature of mind that he had, you can’t remain somebody’s son, being a parrot of what they have to say. So, thank goodness for all of us, he did break away and develop something that went beyond Freud’s psychoanalysis.

TMA: So Freud and his cohorts behaved badly towards Jung for a while?

RM: After they broke, there was a good amount of badmouthing that took place with some of the people in the Freudian camp writing about Jung as being schizophrenic or a mystic, as if that was such a terrible thing. That question comes up in my presentation sometimes, wasn’t Jung just a mystic? I often ask people if they know what the definition of a mystic is, and usually they don’t. They usually just think that it’s someone who thinks in a misty or fuzzy way. I like to remind them that a mystic is someone who has experienced the interconnectedness of being. That’s an extremely powerful experience. Once you’ve had it, it changes your life forever. It’s not something that is so far away from what modern theoretical physicists believe. Everything is related.

TMA: It’s so interesting to watch the quantum guys come full circle on this.

RM: It’s extremely exciting. I sometimes tell people that I think we have to distinguish between what’s called everyday science and what quantum science has to say. We still live very much in a world that we define in a Newtonian way with regard to physics.

TMA: A mechanistic universe.

RM: Right, simple cause and effect. We do that because it’s easier to function that way. It does explain a lot and it helps us to predict things very well. But it doesn’t give us a complete understanding like quantum science does.

TMA: It’s hard to weigh and measure a mystical experience.

RM: This is the difficulty. If you’re determined to be a scientist and you can’t weigh and measure it, then it’s not part of your world. Unfortunately, we’re kind of victims in our culture of science has become that scientism.

TMA: A fundamentalist science.

RM: A belief that science can explain everything, and of course, it can’t. Science can only explain what it can measure and these experiences we’re talking about as mystical clearly aren’t capable of being examined adequately by science. That doesn’t mean they’re not real.

TMA: So Jung more or less graduates from his Freud period.

RM: After the break, he has a really intense period of six years where he at times is close to falling apart emotionally, and very depressed. I don’t think that he expected to be abandoned so completely by Freud’s followers. He continued his work in Zurich with his own followers, but he was having a very difficult time. He talks about it as his confrontation with the unconscious. In more mythical terms you can think about it as the night sea journey when he was forced really to immerse himself in the contents of his own unconscious. In the process, he risked going mad, but he didn’t have any choice. In the process of doing so, he ended up believing that he discovered everything that he wrote about for the rest of his life. That period was so formative for him.

TMA: Talk a little bit about the various mystical things that he went into after that.

RM: Like all of us, Jung has contradictory aspects of his personality, which is one of the things that he points out so well for us. We are all a bundle of contradictions, of opposing forces. He tries very hard for much of his life to stay close to being a scientist. He wants to be seen as a scientist. He talks about himself as an empiricist. At the same time, he’s increasingly open to these experiences that come from a mysterious place that, as you said, can’t be weighed or measured. One experience that he has late in life, which I think is very powerful for him, is when he has a near death experience. He had a blood clot that, when he was ordered to treat it with bed rest, apparently migrated and caused a heart blockage. He went into a deep coma and was near death. He had some visions there that to him led him to feel more strongly than ever that he had been on the right track. Again he talks about these in Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

His vision in his near-death experience is that he’s leaving the surface of the earth and he’s thousands of miles up in the sky and can see the planet below him. Floating in the sky is a temple with a door that is surrounded by flames. He knows he’s supposed to enter that door, and when he does pass through it, the meaning of his life will be given to him and he will meet all of his dead relatives. But before he passes through, he feels a shedding of his personal identity, which he says is very painful but necessary, and so he’s not resisting it. At the last minute, before he goes in, an image of his doctor appears in the sky and he’s wondering, what’s this guy doing here? The doctor says, you have to come back to Earth. He’s thinking, what is this guy doing up here, is he going to die, too? At that moment, Jung wakes up and finds himself back in his physical body and is very depressed by it, feeling very confined. He said that it was like living in a box and he didn’t get over that feeling for months. He’s concerned about his personal doctor and he tried to talk to him about it. The man reacts like he’s being spoken to in gibberish.

TMA: He doesn’t want to hear any of that.

RM: No, and two weeks later, this 37 year old young physician contracts a serious infection and dies of septicemia. Jung felt that he learned through all of this that the psyche was not limited to time and space. It could obtain knowledge, although we have no way of rationally explaining how the psyche would get such knowledge. But if, in fact, it’s not confined to the physical body, it’s not confined to the present moment, the psyche potentially has access to lots of other information. He felt that was true, and now there’s a whole cadre of people working on Ph.D.s who are discussing this idea of the non-locality of consciousness. Even though we want to define consciousness as existing within our body, there really is evidence that it’s not limited to that.

TMA: Talk a little about your lectures.

RM: If people have a thought that they might want to come and learn something about Jung, I would say this: consider Jung as somebody not just interested in one’s personal history and how that influences later behavior. That’s Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung felt that it’s as if there is a 2 million year old man living in each of us. There are very deep instinctual, or as he called them, archetypal layers to the psyche that push us in certain directions. A lot of times we experience a conflict or a war between what our conscious, rational mind is encouraging us to do and what these deep archetypal patterns are pushing us to do. This is a struggle that needs to be decided. We have to come to a conclusion which way to go, and it’s not always clear which way is best. It can get very complicated. In addition to that, here is a man that grants that the spiritual instinct in human beings is just as strong and just as important as the sexual instinct. Any number of people don’t want to identify themselves as members of an institutional church, but a very high percentage of people will tell you that they consider themselves spiritual. This is a system in which individuals can work out their own understanding of their spiritual inclinations, as well as learning to understand themselves psychologically.

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