Learning from the Patient: Jung’s Scarab at the Window

 

We might call the most famous story of synchronicity in Jung’s biography The Scarab at the Window. Jung had virtually despaired in his treatment of a patient who had left two previous therapists when she started telling him a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. At that instant, Jung noticed a green-gold flying beetle at his window. It was a rose chafer, the closest thing to a scarab you will find in Europe. He caught the beetle and presented it to his patient, saying, “Here is your scarab”. This took him and his patient out of their stuck place, and the analysis went forward (Jung, 1973 p. 22). I wrote about the importance of this episode in Jung's practice and theory of synchronicity here. 

We now know the name and background of Jung’s patient, thanks to Vicente de Moura (2014), a curator at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Her maiden name was Madeleine Quarles van Ufford; her aristocratic family called her Maggy. In Zürich she met her future husband, Adam Reichstein; he was the brother of the Nobel Prize winner Tadeus Reichstein. She was in therapy with Jung for five years in the early 1920s. She stayed in contact withn Jung and his circle after, joining the Psychological Club. Died in 1975.

She spent her infancy in Batavia (modern-day Indonesia) and carried for Jung some of the mystery of the East. We know, from Jung’s lengthy description of her case (without the name) in “The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy”, a paper only published after his death, that she had a vivid dream and fantasy life, and extraordinary psychosomatic symptoms that Jung could not initially understand (Jung, 1985, pp. 327-337).

Jung noted in ‘Concerning Mandala Symbolism’, (1950) where one of Reichstein’s mandalas is published, that she ‘… was born in the Dutch East Indies, where she sucked up the peculiar local demonology with the mother’s milk of her native ayah’.

What analysts call transference and counter-transference seem to have come into play. However something from a deeper order of events is also poking through. Is it possible that in choosing the dream she shared, Jung’s patient had picked up on his own recent reading and archetypal preoccupations? I have experienced and reported cases where my students picked up what I was reading overnight in dreams they shared with me the next morning. On one such occasion three students shared dreams at the breakfast table that matched three key passages in a ethnographic account of the Cayuga Rites of Midwinter that I had been reading between 3 and 4 am.

In the case of Maggy, it seems like the patient was taking the lead, that Jung was following her into mythic territory she already inhabited. Maggy’s dreams drove him East until he discovered Kundalini yoga in The Serpent Power. Only then did he feel he was starting to understand her, “Learning from the Patient”, as in the title of de Moura’s article. In November 1932 Jung gave a series of 4 lectures on Kundalini yoga. These lectures from Jung are known in literature as the Yoga-Kundalini Seminars.

Jung wrote that the case of Maggy and the Scarab at the Window was unique in his experience. of synchronicity. But de Moura observes that "this kind of event, which is an example for what Jung called synchronicity, was by no means the only one in her treatment."

In a letter to Jung probably send in 1930, Maggy described this remarkable sequence, suggesting astral visitations:

I came to you to tell a very impressive dream: I dreamt that I rested in bed and your spirit appeared to me. He bowed down to me and kissed me. In this kiss your spirit from the afterlife holds something very vital for me, which would set in an improvement of my condition.

With this dream I went to see you. As I told you the dream, you said to me what had happened to you. Before I came, you had a patient with you. Suddenly you got without any reason an irresistible urge to send the patient away. As this urge became too powerful, you really sent the patient away. When you were alone, it compelled you to go to the bookshelf, to get any book.

You read inside the book the story of an ill man, to whom the spirit of his beloved appeared. Beside her was the phantom of a man, who would have the mission to conduct the woman from the afterlife to the ill man. The similarities of my dream with the story were clear enough. (de Moura 2014, pp. 404-405)

 

References 

de Moura, V. (2014). Learning from the patient: The East, synchronicity and transference in the history of an unknown case of C.G. Jung. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 59, 391-409.

Jung, C. G. (1973). Memories, dreams, reflections. Pantheon Books.

Jung, C. G. (1985). The Practice of Psychotherapy (2nd Ed.). Princeton University Press.

Illustration: Egyptian scarab amulet with bird wings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Yor City.