For many years, the banner of the Society for Psychical Research’s website displayed a quotation by Carl Jung: “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” Although no reference was provided, it was a natural assumption that it came from an SPR publication. Numerous online sources attribute it to a paper he delivered to the SPR in 1919 which was printed as ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits’. Jung did give an address to the SPR under that title. The Council report in the October 1919 issue of the SPR’s Journal recorded that:
“The 159th General Meeting of the Society
was held in the Robert Barnes Hall of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole
Street, London, W., on Friday, July 4th, 1919, at 5.30 p.m.; DR. T. W. MITCHELL
in the chair.
“Dr. C. G. JUNG (of Zürich) read a paper
on ‘The Psychological Foundations of the Belief in Spirits’, which, it is
hoped, will be published later in the Proceedings.”
When it appeared in Part 79 of Proceedings in May 1920, the title had
been slightly amended to ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits’,
rather than ‘the belief’. The words “I
shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot
explain as a fraud,” though, do not appear in that text, or indeed anywhere in
the SPR’s Proceedings or Journal.
In fact, its only appearance in the Lexscien online library, which
contains the publications of other organisations in addition to the SPR’s, is
in a 1999 Journal of Scientific
Exploration article by Ivor Grattan-Guinness, citing “Collected Works, Vol.
8, 317” as the source.
A glance at Volume 8 of Jung’s Collected Works, readily available in an
online edition, reveals the quotation in an essay bearing the same title as
that found in the SPR’s Proceedings. However, the Collected Works essay
shows marked differences to the version in Proceedings. Fortunately, it also appears in a 2008
compilation of Jung’s writings on the paranormal, Psychology and the Occult, and the editors shed valuable light on
the evolution of the paper:
“Originally translated by H. G. Baynes
from a German manuscript and published in Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research (London), XXXI (1920), having been
read at a general meeting of the Society on July 4, 1919. This translation was
republished in Contributions to
Analytical Psychology (London and New York, 1928). The German original was
first published as ‘Die psychologischen Grundlagen des Geisterglaubens’, in Uber die Energetik der Seek (Psychologische Abhandlungen, II; Zürich,
1928), and was revised and expanded in Uber
psychische Energetik und das Wesen der Traume (Zürich, 1948). The latter
version is here translated, but the Baynes translation has also been
consulted.—EDITORS.”
The translation matches that in the Collected Works, as the acknowledgements
state: “‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits’ and ‘The Soul and
Death’ extracted from Volume 8, The
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd edn © 1969 by Princeton
University Press.” The lengthy paragraph
containing the “fashionable stupidity” sentence has a footnote indicating the
bulk of it was added to the 1948 edition, and the sentence is part of the new
material. It is therefore incorrect to
say it was included in Jung’s address to the SPR; it only appeared in the
expanded 1948 version.
This issue has cropped up a number of
times in enquiries sent to the SPR.
Unsurprisingly, confusion occurs when those consulting its Proceedings cannot locate the
quotation. For those puzzled by the
omission in Jung’s SPR paper, I hope this note will help.
The remaining puzzle is why this
particular sentence appeared so prominently on the SPR website for so
long. It was a reductive
characterisation even in 1919, and psychology has advanced considerably since
then. There can have been few people in
recent years, however fierce their scepticism, prepared to argue that all
phenomena they cannot explain must be fraudulent. Its continued presence on the website was
unnecessary; worse, it felt defensive.
One obvious explanation for its inclusion is
that it highlighted the fact that such an eminent figure was connected to the
SPR (Jung had joined in 1917), and having his name displayed so prominently
bolstered the Society’s credentials. Perhaps
so, but it would have been preferable to have used a more positive sentence,
and one actually present in the SPR’s publications, thereby avoiding subsequent
puzzlement.
References
Grattan-Guinness, I. (1999) ‘Real
communication? Report on a SORRAT letter-writing experiment’, Journal of Scientific Exploration,
13(2), pp. 231–256.
Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research
(1919) ‘General meeting’, 19(358), October, p. 95.
Jung, C.G. (1921) ‘The psychological
foundations of belief in spirits’, Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research, 31 (Part 79, May 1920), pp. 75–93.
Jung, C.G. (1948) ‘Die psychologischen
Grundlagen des Geisterglaubens’, in Über
psychische Energetik und das Wesen der Träume. Zürich: Rascher.
Jung, C.G. (1969) ‘The psychological
foundations of belief in spirits’, in Adler, G. and Hull, R.F.C. (eds.) The collected works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8:
The structure and dynamics of the psyche. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, pp. 390–411.
Jung, C.G. (2008) ‘The psychological
foundations of belief in spirits’, in Psychology
and the occult. London: Routledge, pp. 128–149.
The portrait is an AI-generated depiction of what Jung looked like in 1919.
