Did Jung believe in reincarnation?

Roger Woolger

In the years between 1920 and 1940 Jung immersed himself in many classic Indian, Chinese, and Buddhist texts on Yoga and meditation. Tentatively he began to introduce some of the concepts from these writings into his matur­ing vision of a psychology that would eventually encom­pass both the personal and the transpersonal levels of the psyche. Most notable is his proposal of the archetype of the Self, the transcendent image of the divine that lives within everyone. The introduction of this term was in­spired by the Hindu concept of the atman, translated variously as the “eternal Self,” the “Higher Self,” or the “Oversoul” by other writers. The concept of the Self is first elaborated in Jung’s work Psychological Types (1921).

From 1932 to 1940 Jung gave regular seminars at the Zürich Federal Polytechnic (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule). In 1933, as well as elaborating on his own psychological ideas, Jung lectured on Kundalini Yoga and later, in 1938-39, he discussed a number of Eastern texts, including the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, generally consid­ered the written foundation of all Yogic teaching. These lectures contain many of his reflections on karma, the klesas, and the samskaras, as well as the difficulties of translating these alien terms into Western equivalents. In the first of the Kundalini lectures Jung is reported to have said:

The mirid in a child . . . is by no means a tabula rasa. There is a rich world of archetypal images in the unconscious mind and the archetypes are conditions, laws or categories of cre­ative fantasy, and therefore might be called the psychological equivalent of the samskara.’

He added that he thought the Eastern mind would per­ceive this doctrine quite differently and left it at that. His caution was repeated in his commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, referred to several times in this book:

We may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we under­stand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so on.

Despite these extremely close rapprochements be­tween Jung’s theory of archetypes and Yoga’s conception of samskaras, the bridge between an Eastern and a West­ern psychology was never quite built. Jung continued to insist that the archetypes had no content, that they were formative principles only, dry riverbeds with no river. His was a theory of samskaras without the vasanas and klesas, which is to say, without specific memory traces. As he put it in the same commentary;

So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal or pre-uterine memories, but there are undoubtedly inher­ited archetypes which, are, however, devoid of content, be­cause, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences.³

By 1942 Jung had modified his position somewhat, rec­ognizing what he called “a karmic factor” within an ar­chetype and stating that it expresses itself in mythological images:

We mentioned earlier that the unconscious contains, as it were, two layers: the personal and the collective. The per­sonal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out, because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the ar­chetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out be­cause they are forms not personally experienced. When, on the other hand, psychic energy regresses, going beyond even the period of early infancy, and breaks into the legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images are awakened: these are the archetypes. An interior spiritual world whose exis­tence we never suspected opens out and displays contents which seem to stand in sharpest contrast to all our former ideas.

In what seems to have been an afterthought, Jung writes in a footnote to this passage:

The reader will note the admixture here of a new element in the idea of the archetypes, not previously mentioned. This admixture is not a piece of unintentional obscurantism, but a deliberate extension of the archetype by means of the karmic factor, which is so very important in Indian philosophy. The karma aspect is essential to a deeper understanding of the nature of an archetype.

Nevertheless, there still remains a big difference between past life memories and archetypal or mythological images. Nor does Jung ever explain how this “karmic factor” in an archetype operates. Jung does not seem to have accepted actual past life memories until the last decade of his life. Even then his statements were extremely cautious. A colleague whom he had trained, Erlo van Waveren, brought him a series of dreams interwoven with clear past life memories. During their sessions, Jung apparently opened up a lot to Van Waveren about his own experience. As Van Waveren re­ports it:

In our conversation, he was as open, frank, and revelatory as he would ever be with me. Our discussion then was at such an intimate level that the next day he requested Mrs. Jung to speak to me at the Jung Institute and tell me not to talk to anyone about our conversation. In our Western world, East­ern concepts are often sooner accepted when presented in a more or less scientific light. Professor Jung was a past master at that. Whenever he spoke to me about an incarnation, it was referred to as an ancestor; “ancestral components;’ “psychic ancestors,” “ancestral souls” are all expressions which Profes­sor Jung used to express the idea of metamorphosis . . .’

Jung’s scientific reserve is also to be found in his posthu­mously published autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Re­flections, dictated shortly before his death in 1961. In it he writes that he personally had come across no empirical evidence of personal rebirth, but then he adds:

Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance. But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison. Since this observation is subjec­tive and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further. I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion·

This, then, is the final evidence of Jung’s memoirs. But is it? It is well known in Jungian circles that large seg­ments of Memories, Dreams, Reflections were excised by members of his family as being embarrassing to the family name; every single reference to his close collaborator Toni Wolff was removed before publication, for example.

Was Jung’s growing belief in reincarnation also embar­rassing in some way? Apparently, it was, according to a colleague of mine. This colleague visited Zürich recently and called upon one of Jung’s daughters in order to inter­view her specifically about Jung’s past life beliefs. She told him that her father had written quite a lot about the subject in his autobiography, but that it had all been changed by his Zürich editors.

“How do you know?” my colleague asked.

‘In answer to his question she led him into another room and showed him a glass case containing the manuscript of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. She then proceeded to show him where certain words and passages had been altered by the editors to tone down the specific reincarna­tional content. Apparently, Jung’s family and editors had put pressure on Jung to make these changes out of some fear that he might appear senile to the public.

What of Jung’s own past life experiences? Again, there is no clear published evidence, but I am led to wonder if the famous Personality No.2 he writes of in his memoirs is not a past life fragment. Here is how Jung described his authoritative second self, which emerged when he was twelve years old:

…to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons, One of them was the school­boy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with . . . an old man who lived in the eigh­teenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps.’

The boy Jung had actually seen such an antique car­riage from the Black Forest once and the sight of it had aroused in him the thought “That’s it! Sure enough, that comes from my times.” It sounds as though seeing the carriage triggered an eighteenth-century memory frag­ment in Jung. Interestingly, in a crucial dream of a multi­storied house that Jung had in adulthood (which also con­tains the seed of the idea of the historical layers of the collective unconscious) the upper story was “a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style.” This could easily describe an ‘eighteenth-century house. The lower story dates from the fifteenth! sixteenth century in the dream.

If there is a single eighteenth-century personality who came close to obsessing Jung it was Goethe. The parallels between Jung’s and Goethe’s interests are not hard to see. Both were scientists and ‘ visionaries, both immersed themselves in alchemy, the problem of evil, and the eter­nal feminine; the contents of parts I and II of Faust paral­lel exactly Jung’s personal and archetypal levels of the unconscious.

Naturally Jung was absorbed in reading Goethe as a child. But could Jung also have had a past life personality fragment of the deceased Goethe in him? There is no way of knowing, of course, but there was a family story that Jung’s grandfather may have been one of Goethe’s “natu­ral,” i.e. illegitimate, offspring·

And if Jung had part of Goethe in him from the eigh­teenth century, what did he have from the fifteenth! six­teenth-century layer of his psyche referred to in his dream? I would suspect a fragment of the great Swiss alchemist and healer Paracelsus.

I had always kept such highly speculative thoughts to myself, but several years ago I was fortunate to meet with Erlo van Waveren himself and learned that he too had arrived independently at similar conclusions regarding Goethe and Paracelsus.

Could it be that larger personalities like Jung whom we honor with the term “genius” are able to reabsorb and pass on the psychically inherited remnants of certain creative spirits from previous ages? This would explain not only the extraordinary breadth of vision that belongs to a genius such as Jung’s but also the inner torment that he and others like him have suffered in order to remain whole and not go the way of “the divided self”‘ that succumbs to madness. It is not a path that we should necessarily envy, but one whose fruits put us infinitely in the debt of those who have trodden it.