Therapy instead of a straitjacket: Switzerland was a center of modern psychiatry and Carl Gustav Jung was one of the most important protagonists

A small, rugged mountainous country, suspicious of strangers and simultaneously hostile to monarchies and fascism, established itself as a pioneer of psychiatry in the 19th century. Some of its practitioners felt empathy for their patients instead of simply chaining them up, putting them in straitjackets, and torturing them with ice baths.

Even in Switzerland, no one knows how to treat people with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, bipolar disorder, and severe depression. Psychotropic drugs didn't yet exist, nor did psychotherapy. At the end of the 19th century, Eugen Bleuler, a reform-minded Zurich psychiatrist, took over the management of Zurich's Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of the city below the Forch River. He would run it for almost 30 years, establishing it as the epicenter of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

In his book "Soul Magic," psychologist Steve Ayan rightly refers to the 20th century as a "century of psychology." He also describes the Burghölzli Clinic as a globally pioneering sanatorium that, as early as the end of the 19th century, aspired to be more than a detention center where the mentally ill were often "treated inhumanely or simply left to their own devices."

What gives Eugen Bleuler hope as a reformer: He stumbled upon studies by a Viennese neurologist who not only developed a new therapy that sought to make the human unconscious conscious, so that people would be less at the mercy of it. The then-unknown psychiatrist also claimed that so-called hysteria in women and neuroses in men resulted from the repression of their sexuality. The neurologist's name was Sigmund Freud, and he would shape the 20th century.

In 1896, Eugen Bleuler enthusiastically reviewed Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's "Studies on Hysteria," which Freud noted enthusiastically: "Imagine," he wrote to a friend: a professor of psychiatry from Switzerland had expressed "an astonishing recognition" of his point of view.

Freud, who remained isolated as a Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna and as an innovative psychiatrist in a conservative medical community, felt encouraged by the interest of the young Swiss psychiatrist and began an intensive correspondence with him.

Freud would later describe Switzerland as the first country where his teachings were introduced. Indeed, this country is not lacking in psychiatric and psychological pioneers: Eugen Bleuler, Karl Abraham, Ludwig Binswanger, Walter Morgenthaler, Hermann Rorschach, the Geneva developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, the ethnopsychoanalyst Paul Parin, and many others.

One Swiss psychiatrist in particular would achieve world fame. At the turn of the century, when Freud's seminal book "The Interpretation of Dreams" was published, Eugen Bleuler hired a brilliant young intern. His name was Carl Gustav Jung, the son of a pastor from Thurgau, well-read and highly educated, a giant with unshakable self-confidence and a claim to power far beyond his homeland.

On July 26, Jung would have turned 150. To mark the occasion, the National Museum is presenting an exhibition about him and psychiatry in Switzerland. The country is "a country of rustic anarchism," says Stefan Zweifel, curator of the exhibition. He also speaks of a "psychography of Switzerland," thus seeing a connection between the narrow-mindedness of the country and the depth of his fantasies.

The exhibition "Soul Landscapes: CG Jung and the Discovery of the Psyche in Switzerland" showcases the history of Swiss psychiatry. Its impressive diversity of forms includes paintings and drawings, photographs, films, books, diaries, sculptures, and more. The calligraphic beauty of the writings is striking, as are the haunting images of patients, in which psychiatry is reflected in art, as demonstrated by the works of Friedrich Glauser and Robert Walser. Another highlight is the life of Adolf Wölfli, a boy in indentured to service, who, out of his psychosis, created a complex visual oeuvre that shaped Art Brut and influenced the Surrealists.

At the center of the exhibition is Jung's so-called "Red Book," in which the psychiatrist recorded dreams and fantasies over decades and painted images of great luminosity. CG Jung never became a good writer; his scientific prose reads dull, his terminology remains cumbersome, and his spiritual approach sounds whispery.

In this respect, Sigmund Freud remains far superior as a stylist, able to express his entire metatheory in simple, powerful German words. This is probably one reason why his terms such as defense, repression, lapse, ego and id, return of the repressed, and defense are still used today, even by therapists who have little familiarity with psychoanalysis.

Initially, Jung reacted with fascination to Freud's views; when the two met for the first time in Vienna, they talked nonstop for thirteen hours. Subsequently, Freud hoped to make Jung his crown prince and to limit psychoanalysis to more than just its Jewish followers. But the ambitious crown prince proved to be a rebel, interpreting libido as a life force beyond the sexual. This, in turn, was not tolerated by the patriarchal Freud, who tolerated no dissent within his movement. Thus, a rift between the two developed in 1913.

Subsequently, Jung became increasingly interested in the spiritual, something the rationalist Freud abhorred. At the same time, Jung unhesitatingly had affairs with his patients, among them Sabina Spielrein, who later became a gifted analyst. This behavior, too, remained alien to Freud, who demanded and maintained strict abstinence from psychoanalysts.

Jung, however, is far more open to the nonverbal than Freud, as evidenced by his interest in images, both his own and those of his patients. The magnificent exhibition at the Landesmuseum visualizes this interest in many ways. Jung's fascination with the pictorial also explains why his teachings are so popular with artists. While Freud always translates dreams into texts and then interprets them as such, Jung responds more openly to the floating ambivalence of dreams, fantasies, and free associations. He calls his process "amplification," which allows the analyst to infer elements of the collective unconscious and Jung's theory of archetypes from dreams.

"CG Jung was also the first psychiatrist," says Elizabeth Leuenberger of the Jung Institute in Küsnacht, "to recognize his patients' delusions as messages." He was also interested in the mandalas of Indian culture and in indigenous peoples like the Hopi. He traveled the world, while Freud surveyed the human psyche from his practice.

Jung's openness to the nonverbal and psychosis sounds modern, yet the pastor's son remains culturally conservative and politically reactionary. "I hate modern art," he writes, going so far as to diagnose a "schizoid symptom complex" in the paintings of Pablo Picasso and James Joyce's novel "Ulysses."

Jung's interpretation of Picasso's paintings is tinged with disgust. He seeks "the ugly, the sick, the grotesque, the incomprehensible, the banal" in these pictures. Jung's formulations of modern art echo the Nazis' derision of so-called "degenerate art."

It's therefore not surprising that Jung, with several anti-Semitic writings, lent himself to German fascism; the exhibition at the Landesmuseum shows how far he took this. Jung saw Hitler's Germanic ideology as confirmation of his own doctrine of archetypes and the collective unconscious. His adaptation was also connected to his desire to emancipate himself from the Jew Freud, whose rejection he would never overcome.

Historian Jakob Tanner says that CG Jung went so far in his glorification of Adolf Hitler that he called him a shaman in an interview with the "New York Times." "Yes, I slipped up," Jung said after the war, blaming Germany for National Socialism. However, the Swiss psychiatrist was just as unwilling to make a sincere admission of guilt as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

And yet, CG Jung, and many others in Switzerland, distinguished themselves with an openness to the irrational. This openness has a lot to do with Switzerland, says ethnopsychoanalyst Mario Erdheim, citing the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Romantic pioneer of the Enlightenment. "One could say of him that he was a dreamer who stood by his dreams. For him, they had a reality that he incorporated into his conception of education. In this, he was far ahead of his time."

The fact that Switzerland has developed such a modern psychiatry and allowed such anarchic movements as Dadaism in Zurich, which, like many modern movements, profited from French and German refugees, has to do with this openness. The Protestantism of Zwingli and Calvin also promoted the radical self-examination that psychoanalysis was supposed to enable.

The country benefited from being spared two world wars, attracting anarchic and rebellious men and women from abroad during these years. Swiss psychiatry also benefited from the fact that, thanks to the Basel pharmaceutical industry, Switzerland attracted many experts who engaged in research and psychiatry in the country. One can view the whole thing dialectically: A narrow country produces broad ideas.

The exhibition "Soul Landscapes: CG Jung and the Discovery of the Psyche in Switzerland" at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich runs from October 17 to February 15.