The Unquiet Ghosts of Jung’s Abandoned Women: What Do We Owe Helene, Sabina, and Toni?

Abstract

Running parallel to the story of Jung’s life is a shadow narrative involving a string of women who played crucial roles in the birth of analytical psychology. The most important of these were Helene Preiswerk, Sabina Spielrein, and Toni Wolff, each of whom served as a guide for Jung as he explored the strange new territory of the unconscious. Each lived outside the norms of conventional society, was abandoned by Jung, and ultimately came to a tragic end. The dark feminine or creative animus within these women was at first deeply alluring to Jung, but when it no longer served his purposes, he ultimately rejected it—and them. In doing so, he committed a crime against the laws of love as well as against the Divine Feminine. As our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of trauma grows, we see that elements repressed in the unconscious often return via the agency of unquiet ghosts or unresolved family and ancestral complexes. Like the wrathful furies of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the unquiet spirits of our female ancestors seek revenge in order to balance the scales of justice. If the person who committed the crime is no longer living, the revenge will fall upon his or her descendants. Thus, for many of us contemporary women who inherit the mantle of Jungian psychology, the unquiet ghosts haunting our psyches may include not just our own personal grandmothers, but the women Jung himself rejected, our spiritual grandmothers, as it were.