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Psychology’s Dream

Courtroom
of the
First published 2016 by Spring Journal Books

Published 2020 by Routledge


2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa


business

© 2020 Greg Mogenson

The right of Greg Mogenson to be identified as author of this work has


been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced


or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or


registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-43932-3 (hbk)


ISBN: 978-0-367-43933-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00654-1 (ebk)
Psychology’s Dream

Courtroom
of the

Greg Mogenson
Dedication

For Rita—colleague, companion, wife and friend


PERMISSIONS

The author and publishers wish to gratefully thank the following for
granting permission to quote from their work:

Excerpts from The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), by G.


W. F. Hegel, translated by T. F Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris,
Copyright © 1991, T. F Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris.
Republished by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Excerpts from The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings by C.
G. Jung, edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard
Adler, translated by R. F. C Hull, Copyright © 1989 in Britain, Routledge.
Excerpts from The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings by C.
G. Jung, edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard
Adler, translated by R. F. C Hull, Copyright © 1976, PUP. Republished
by permission of Princeton University Press. Permission conveyed
through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Excerpts from C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2: 1951-1961 by C. G.
Jung, edited by Dr Gerhard Adler, translated by R. F. C Hull, Copyright
© 1975, PUP. Republished by permission of Princeton University Press.
Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Excerpts from Civilization in Transition by C. G. Jung, edited by
Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated
by R. F. C Hull, Copyright © 1976 in Britain, Routledge.
Excerpts from Civilization in Transition by C. G. Jung, edited by
Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated
by R. F. C Hull, Copyright © 1970 PUP. Republished by permission of
Princeton University Press. Permission conveyed through Copyright
Clearance Center, Inc.
Excerpts from Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
by Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter,
Copyright © 1997, CUP. Republished by permission of Cambridge
University Press.
“All Deaths” from Poems by Hermann Hesse, selected and
translated by James Wright. Copyright © 1970 by James Wright.
Republished by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
From Poems by Hermann Hesse. Published by Jonathan Cape.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited © 1971.
A

I
worked on this book off and on for about ten years. During that
time I had the pleasure of presenting material from its pages to
various Jungian societies and institutes—in Buffalo, Detroit,
Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. A talk based upon
what is now the first and second chapters was given in 2012 at the
inaugural conference of the International Society for Psychology as
the Discipline of Interiority in Berlin, Germany. And I also worked
with material from the book in seminars I gave to small groups of
colleagues and trainees in my home office in London, Ontario. Much
appreciated is the encouragement and inspiration that I gleaned from
these various opportunities and experiences. Additionally, I have
also benefited from the support of my closest colleagues. Wolfgang
Giegerich was kept apprised of my ideas as I was developing them
and I thank him for his generous feedback all along the way. Privy
to insider information, my wife Rita—to whom I warmly dedicate
this book—was also a great help, serving me up from time to time
to the themes I was exploring with her characteristic panache. And
there have been as well my ISPDI colleagues—Santo Tarantino,
John Hoedl, Pamela Power, Peter White, John Robertson, Colleen
Hendrick El-Bejjani, Michael Caplan, Daniel Anderson, Marco
Heleno Barreto, Samina Salahuddin, Jennifer Sandoval, John Knapp
and Michael Whan. Along with the gratitude I want also to express
to my long-time publisher and friend, Nancy Cater, I thank them all
for their support through the years and for the experience of working
together in the common cause of achieving a psychology “with soul”
that is credible for our time.
Sources and
Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used for frequently cited sources:

CP: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, 5 vols, Joan Riviere, trans.


(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1950). Cited by volume and page number.
SLL: Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous
Notion of Psychology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998).
Cited by page number.
CEP: Wolfgang Giegerich, The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang
Giegerich, 6 vols. (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005-
2013). Cited by volume and page number.
CW: C. G. Jung, Collected Works, 20 vols. Herbert Read, Michael
Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire, eds., R. F. C.
Hull, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-1979).
Cited by volume and paragraph number.
MDR: C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Aniela Jaffé, ed.,
Richard & Clara Winston, trans. (New York: Vintage Books,
1965). Cited by page number.
Letters: C. G. Jung, Letters, 2 vols. Gerhard Adler, ed. Bollingen Series
XCV: 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Cited by
date, addressee, volume, and page number.
Table of Contents

Dedication�������������������������������������������������������������������v
Acknowledgements�������������������������������������������������� vii
Sources and Abbreviations��������������������������������������� ix
Table of Contents���������������������������������������������������� xi
Introduction������������������������������������������������������������� 13
Chapter One
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung
The Trials of Analysis��������������������������������������������� 23
Chapter Two
Before the Bar of the Notion�������������������������������� 53
Chapter Three
Speculative Judgment���������������������������������������������� 75
Chapter Four
From Onslaught to the Witness Box
Repercussions to Truth:
Psychology as Counsel for the Defence����������������� 107
Chapter Five
Criminality and Psychology�������������������������������� 141
Chapter Six
Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
In the Light of the Logic of Crime������������������������ 155
Chapter Seven
Crime and Truth���������������������������������������������������� 169
Chapter Eight
Once More the Shine on Binder’s Head�������������� 195
In Lieu of an Afterword��������������������������������������� 209
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������ 217
About the Author�������������������������������������������������� 227
Introduction

P
sychology and the law have long maintained a collegial relation
with one another as adjacent disciplines. In the judicial system,
for example, psychologists and psychiatrists are regularly called
upon to give evidence concerning the mental status of accused and
convicted persons. But what about the reverse of this relation? What
contribution has “the law” made to the work of analysts and their
patients in the consulting room? And what insights may be gleaned
from putting psychology itself on trial?
In a memoir in which he looks back upon more than fifty
years of psychotherapeutic practice, C. G. Jung tells of his having
been “constantly impressed by the way the human psyche reacts
to a crime committed unconsciously.”1 Extending this insight the
great psychologist even goes so far as to compare the individuation
process to “an endless inner trial in which [each person] is his
own counsel and ruthless examiner ...”2 Detecting in these and
other references what I have come to call “Psychology’s Dream
of the Courtroom,” it will be our task in the chapters that follow
to interpret this “dream” by reflecting upon the figures of the law
and the courtroom that psychology has so frequently drawn upon as
metaphors for its own activities.
Now, of course, interpreting the dreams of its patients has long
been old hat for psychology. But a dream of its own? How is a subject
matter as subtle as this to be approached? In a moment or two we shall
return to this question. But first a few words about how psychology’s
dreaming of the courtroom became a topic for me in the first place.
1
C. G. Jung, MDR, p. 122.
2
Jung, MDR, p. 345.
14 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
For many years it has been my habit to make an early start to the
day. I write for an hour or two as the sun begins to rise, see patients
until noon, and then take a fairly substantial mid-day nap. This I then
typically follow up with an hour of studying. Only after this rather
generous time to myself, do I return to my consulting room work
for the balance of the afternoon. There was a period, however, some
years back in which my study hour was given over to a television
program. Each day after awakening from my nap I would watch an
episode of the original version of the television series Law & Order,
the one that in its earlier years stared the Canadian actor, Michael
Moriarty as the prosecutor, Ben Stone, and later, Sam Waterston, as
the prosecutor, Jack McCoy.
Many of my readers, I am sure, will know of this show. Produced
in the United States, but shown the world over in many languages,
it ran for twenty seasons.3 And even, now, in re-run it is said, there
is an episode of Law & Order being re-broadcast in some country
somewhere every minute of every day.4 And this is to say nothing of
the many other shows of the same or a similar ilk.
Now the episode of this series that first laid claim to my interest,
even as it inspired me psychologically, was one in which a judge was
on trial for crimes originating with his harassment of a female court
employee with whom he was having an affair. In an effort to bind this
woman to him, this judge-turned-criminal had threatened to kidnap
and harm her children if she were to break-off their relationship. It was
this, when it finally came out, that brought the police into the matter
and led to his indictment.5
What struck me as impressive about this particular episode was
a courtroom scene in which what is officially called an “Allocution
Hearing” is depicted. As there was strong evidence against the
defendant, but only enough for a likely, but not a certain conviction,
a plea bargain was offered. The defendant would be given a reduced
sentence if he admitted to his crime. And so it came to pass that in open
court, and before a truer judge than he, the defendant was asked by the
prosecutor to give a full account of his offensive conduct. Amiably
and with a beseeching tone the defendant began his testimony with

3
Created by Dick Wolf and produced by Wolf and Joseph Stern, the series ran from
September 13, 1990 to May 24, 2010.
4
I want to thank Dr. Pamela Power for this amusing information.
5
Law & Order, Season 4, episode 14, “Censure,” first aired February 2, 1994.
Introduction 15
caveats and disclaimers. As recalled from my memory, their exchange
went something like this:
“You’ve got to understand, I really loved her. She meant
the world to me, I …”
“Sir,” interrupted the prosecutor, “you must tell us what
you did, the details of your crime.”
“Yes, but you have to understand that I really loved her, I
wanted no harm.”
Back and forth it went, the defendant beating around the bush,
presenting his feelings as excuses, until finally the prosecutor,
trembling with consternation, cautioned him severely,
“Sir, … Sir, for the last time, for the very last time, tell the
court what you did.”
Hearing the prosecutor’s vexed tone the defendant realizes that the
plea bargain will be off the table if he doesn’t comply with its terms
and say what he did. And so, with a lowered contenance, he begins to
tell of how he had disguised himself, stalked his girlfriend’s children,
and taken pictures of them which he then mailed to her with a distorted
voice recording suggesting they could easily be kidnapped. Watching
this, the culminating moment of his testimony, I noticed that what
he had done, the abhorrent nature of his crime, only came to be
truly fathomed by him as he nakedly described the deeds that it had
involved. It was as if I was witnessing an essential part of his cure, if
I may already put it that way.
How fascinating, I thought! Psychoanalysis has long been known
as the talking cure. How interesting to consider what the talking cure
might learn from court proceedings such as the allocution hearing
which I have just described. And so it was that I got my first inkling of
what has since become a preoccupying theme for some years now: the
courtroom as the other of psychology, psychotherapy, and analysis.
But what does it mean, the courtroom as the other of psychology?
After watching—I should really say, “studying”—a good number of
Law & Order episodes, I had a simple, yet pertinent dream. I dreamt
that I had found the lost wallet of the Executive Assistant District
Attorney Jack McCoy, as played by Sam Waterston. Shortly after this,
and concurrent with my decision that I would give myself seriously
over to the topic of the courtroom as the other of psychotherapy and
analysis, I had another dream featuring the same character. In this
16 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
dream Jack McCoy swiftly strode up to me and asked excitedly if
I was Greg Mogenson. When I confirmed that I was, he then shook
my hand firmly as if with this gesture he was heartily imparting
something to me. Clearly, my encounter with the Law & Order show,
like my encounters with the figure of Jack McCoy in my dreams, was
a fateful and inspiring one. I had, as psychologist, been called to the
bar, as it were.
Now, to get at what such inspiring encounters are generally
about, a passage from Jung may be cited. In a line from his essay,
“The Psychology of the Transference,” Jung states that “… we meet
ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”6
This, surely, was what my interest in the Law & Order show had
involved for me. I had met myself in the figures of Ben Stone and Jack
McCoy. But that was just the half of it. What is more is that inasmuch
as I was watching the show as a psychologist, it was not only me, but
psychology, that met itself in these figures of the law.
There is another quotation from Jung that comes to mind with
respect to this same point. In his Eranos lecture, “Concerning Rebirth,”
the great psychologist writes:
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds
and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche
says, ‘One becomes Two,’ and the greater figure, which one
always was but which remained invisible, appears to the
lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is
truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation
of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will
never understand that the day of judgment of his littleness
has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know
that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one,
has now really come, ‘to lead captivity captive’; that is, to
seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been
confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into
that greater life—a moment of deadliest peril.7
In this passage Jung beautifully describes the challenge that awaits us
at the turning points of life as having to do with our being up to the
figures that we meet ourselves as at such junctures. It could also be
said, that rather than clinging to our self-identicalness in the manner
of a stick in the mud, that the task at such times is one of letting our
self-definition be kicked larger by way of such encounters.
6
Jung, CW 16: 534.
7
Jung, CW 9, i: 217.
Introduction 17
Now as I have already suggested, there are at least two levels,
or two addressees, of this: Me as psychotherapist and Psychology as
such. With regards to the first of these, what this means or implies is
not difficult to surmise. As far as I in my role as psychotherapist am
concerned, the fact that my interest was quickened by such figures of
the other as I found in those Law & Order episodes was most likely
indicative of my own need to integrate a more incisively truth-seeking
and holding-accountable edge to my analytic attitude. Just as in
dreams one sometimes finds a room in one’s psychological house that
one did not know was there, so I had chanced upon the courtroom and
the figures of Ben Stone and Jack McCoy in this show.
But there is also the greater addressee to consider, psychology itself.
Psychology, also, meets its other in the court of law. It, too, must integrate
what this metaphor mediates for it into a larger, more compendious
notion of what it is more deeply about. What this looks like I will return
to presently. I want first to point out how apt it is to characterize the
Jungian tradition of psychology in terms of this figure-of-the-other type
of encounter. We have only to think of the foil for his psychology that
Jung found in alchemy. For, indeed, it was by figuring psychology as
alchemy that Jung came to his specific understanding of psychology.
Why not as well the courtroom and the law?
For insight into the dialectic that such mediating relations involve
we could hardly do better than to turn to the other great psychologist
we shall be hearing from frequently in this book, the Jungian analyst
Wolfgang Giegerich. “Psychology,” writes Giegerich, “… requires
otherness, difference—though not an utterly external other, something
totally irrelevant, but its own internal other.” “Psychology,” he
continues, “must reflect itself in, and base itself on, a true (even if
ultimately internal) other.”8
What Giegerich here describes as psychology’s constituting
need to reflect itself in and base itself upon a true, even if ultimately,
internal other can also be characterized as a kind of soul-making or
psychology-making that proceeds via a mode of self-critique wherein
a subject or subject-matter judges itself by the measure of some
mediating other that it meets itself in or posits itself as. Making much
the same point, the philosopher we shall repeatedly be calling upon
as a witness in the chapters that follow, G. W. F. Hegel, describes
such self-interrogating reflection as a matter of the speculative return
8
Wolfgang Giegerich, CEP V, p. 372.
18 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
from otherness. Writing about the personality, for example, Hegel
avers that its truth resides in the return from its immersion in other
personalities. “In friendship and love I give up my abstract personality
and thereby win it back as concrete.”9 And it is the same I would add
for the character of psychology as a discipline. It, too, comes to know
itself via its unity with and difference from its own other, in these
pages its courtroom other.10
The question, then, that we must constantly bear in mind—
whether we take psychology’s other to be alchemy, the law, or some
other figure—is (and here again I am quoting Giegerich) : “… does
psychological theory do justice to the spirit of its own internal other?
Did what it discovered in the latter really come home to and permeate
the constitution of the former?”11
Bringing these questions home to myself I have to ask: Is my
conception and practice of Jungian analysis up to my having dreamed
of having found the prosecutor, Jack McCoy’s wallet? Or to put
the same question in terms of my other dream, am I, as analyst/
psychologist worthy of his handshake? And then, more importantly,
there is the other addressee of these questions, psychology itself. Is
the theory and practice of psychology up to its courtroom other? Has
the way it represents the courtroom to itself, in the contributions and
references it makes to it, really come home in a meaningful way to its
conception of itself?
Already it is possible to state the main answer to these questions.
Without spoiling anything of what is to come, it can already be said
that the principal insight that psychology brings to bear upon itself by
means of its dreams of the courtroom is that it, too, is to be conceived
of as a notional practice, on the one hand, and as a search for truth,
on the other. Just as the law reflects all the various situations that come
before it in its notion “justice” (for which reason I call it a notional
discipline), so psychology, having been enriched by the notice it has

9
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition, The
Lectures of 1827, Peter C. Hodgson, ed., R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M.
Stewart, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 427-428.
10
It is worth noting in this connection that in his book on the law, The Philosophy
of Right, Hegel opines that “… scarcely any philosophical science is so neglected
and so ill off as the theory of mind, usually called ‘psychology’.” Notice here that
the law—i.e., the philosophy of right—is presented as psychology’s other! G. W. F.
Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 21.
11
Giegerich, CEP V, pp. 372-373.
Introduction 19
taken of this, may be conceived of as doing the same by means of its
notion, “soul.” Regarded in this light, interpretation in psychology is
a matter of discerning whether the phenomena that have come before
it are in accord with the concept that they themselves wittingly or
unwittingly exemplify, even as, the other way around, psychology is
tested in this same regard (i.e., against its concept, “soul”) by way of
the concrete particulars of whatever the interpretive challenge may be
that time and again call it to the fore. And it is precisely here, in this
being weighed against that feather of itself that it meets in its other,
that the dimension of its truth resides.
But what does it mean, dimension of truth? Has whatever
this may once have meant not given way in our times to a more
relativizing sensibility? And having long ago left truth behind, is this
relativizing sensibility not pretty much what psychology is about in
our psychologistic era?
Suffice it to say, with respect to these questions, that it is a
different matter in a court of law. There the meaning of the term is
both clear and consequential. After being solemnly sworn in, each
witness is simply expected, without further ado, to “tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But beneath the niveau
of this humbling demand, psychology12 in our times is more likely
to speak of its “proven techniques” and “evidenced-based” methods.
Like that judge-turned-criminal in the Law & Order episode I
described, it demurs in this way from speaking of the role it has
played in having made the phenomena it testifies about appear as
they have. “You’ve got to understand, I was just making empirical
observations and giving proven recommendations, like any other
clinical science. I had nothing to do with the matter at hand.” And
so it goes. As if defending itself against quackery charges, if against
nothing worse, it insists in an obsequious manner upon its scientific
merit. It is important to realize, however, that as fine as this may
sound, neither the methods it has employed, nor the results that these
are purported to yield, are sufficient to be given out as insights or

12
Sometimes I refer to psychology in the widest sense, sometimes in the specific
sense of the analytic psychotherapies of the depth psychological tradition. In both
cases my preferring to speak of “psychology” rather than of “therapeutic psychology”
or “psychotherapy” has to do with my intention of sublating the difference between
theory and practice. For more on the speculative identity of theory and practice see
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 123;
Giegerich, CEP 1, p. 141; Giegerich, SLL, pp. 277-278.
20 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
truths,13 which is of course why in the law even the most compelling
evidence of this kind, whether it be from psychology or some other
field, does not of itself decide the case, but is only grist for the mill of
a trial process.
The question arises: is this why, like the warders who arrested
Joseph K. in Kafka’s novel, The Trial, those sergeants-at-arms of
our times, Anxiety and Depression, now come upon us for what
increasingly seems like no reason at all? Because the need of “the
soul” for truth is being left out of psychology?
In our day, as is everywhere evident, the question of truth and
the quest for its discernment have largely been eclipsed by more
technological aims. And the same can be said of the discourse
of contemporary culture generally. Not only has entertainment
outstripped learning. In places of higher learning, such as in critical
theory departments and the like, “truth” has become an offensive
term, the apogee of political incorrectness. Indeed, so much is this the
case that those who use the word, even when speaking colloquially,
may find themselves having to wear it like a dunce cap for the rest of
the semester.
But does it have to be this way? Must psychology conform to this
convention, rolling its eyes and clucking its tongue whenever truth is
mentioned? In the chapters that follow I hope to show that it does not.
This, however, is no easy task. Even with the help of those dreams that
place psychology itself in the witness box and subjectivity before the
law. For as Giegerich has observed, any psychology that would have
the discernment of truth (a.k.a., the logic of what is, the soul of the
real) as its constituting concern is now generally regarded as “against
the law,” and “Not just any law [mind you], but against the topmost
or central law governing our society, the law, ‘Thou shall not raise the
question of Truth.’”14
Of course, there are any number of ways that this author could
have made his point. Special about it in our context is the specific
self-mediation that is performed in the way he does make it. Because
it references the law, even as it speaks of psychology, his statement

13
Truths always include the subject within them even as they are discerned via the
cancelling of the difference between subject and object. The empirical stance, by
contrast, tries to keep itself as subject at a distance from its object. To the extent that
seeming to succeed in this it remains unscathed by its subject matter, its findings with
regards to these are without truth.
14
Giegerich, SLL, p. 275.
Introduction 21
may be characterized as yet another instance of psychology’s dream
of the courtroom. And what of the interpretation of this dream? In the
chapters that follow we shall be delving into this question. Here at the
outset, it is enough to simply state that so great and irrepressible is the
soul’s need for truth that its Wayward Successor, as psychology might
be called, has had to meet itself in the figures of the courtroom in order
to face up to this need in our times.
Chapter One

Law & Order meets Freud & Jung


The Trials of Analysis

T
he setting is as solemn as it is austere. Finished in dark oak,
it is like a church without devotional objects or an old library
without books. In the centre of the room a luminous column
extends from a portal in the ceiling to a point on the floor midway
between the gallery and the witness box. Thrown into relief against the
robes of lawyers and magistrates, this churning presence is more like
an abstract expressionist depiction of “truth” than a beam of simple
sunlight. For even as it pours in from above through its window, it
is at the same time sworn in from below, like any other witness, the
precipitate or afterglow of the words and rulings, arguments and
testimonies which are so searchingly examined in this place.
“Hear ye! Hear ye! This court is now in session; The Right
Honourable Judge Merciful Lynch presiding.”
“Does the defendant wish to enter a plea?”
“Yes, your honour: Not Guilty!”
Such are the words with which many a court preceding is begun.
Represented by an attorney, the accused is arraigned, bail negotiated,
and a trial date set. As the consensus gentium, at least in most Western
societies, has deemed it better for a guilty man to go unpunished than
for an innocent man to be falsely convicted, the scales of justice are
tilted slightly in the favour of the accused. The accused, as the saying
24 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
goes, is “innocent until proven guilty.” While the law does require him
to appear in court, and may even drag him there in chains, he does not
have to take the stand, bear witness against himself, or participate in the
process in any way. Of course, the attorney for the accused marshals
a defence on his behalf, and it is in the accused’s interest to help with
this. The greater burden, however, is with the prosecution, who must
prove its case against him. And in the course of this undertaking, many
rules of procedure must be rigorously adhered to, for above all else,
the trial must be a fair trial.
But our interest in this book is not with court proceedings as such;
rather, it is with the psychological analogues of these, the practice of
psychotherapy and the analytic hour.

A Writ of Indictment
To many, I am sure, it will at first seem strange to view
psychotherapy and analysis on the model of a court proceeding. The
courtroom is an ominous and impersonal setting and the process of
discernment that is conducted there tough-minded and coldly rational.
Therapy, by contrast, is usually conceived of as a situation of cosy,
empathetic rapport. While it, too, involves a complex process of
discernment, this process, for the most part, is a tender-hearted one
that takes its models from the nursery, the parent-child relation, or the
relationship between student and teacher, adept and mentor, chela and
guru even. Drawing upon the findings of developmental and clinical
psychology, on the one hand, and the wisdom of spiritual traditions
of many kinds, on the other, therapy approaches the difficulties and
disorders it is asked to treat by promoting such values as Growth,
Development, Relatedness, Well-being, and Wholeness.
Doubtless, there is much merit to these approaches. Each day
in their consulting rooms psychotherapists provide compassionate
support, interested witness, encouragement and perspective to people
suffering from any of what has become a long list of issues and concerns,
symptoms and disorders. Identified by this, its work-a-day focus, the
prevailing view of the profession is that it may be likened to medicine
and dentistry, the difference being that where the doctor and dentist
deal with physical ailments, the psychotherapist’s concern is with
the mental, emotional, and social aspects of his patients’ problems of
living. This conception of the psychotherapeutic enterprise, however,
while factually correct, says nothing of the influence psychotherapy
wields through having disseminated its modes of thought beyond
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 25
its literal confines. Far from being confined within its four walls, a
profession alongside others, psychotherapy in our day has cancelled
the difference between the interior of the actual consulting room and
the world beyond it even as it has changed and in many ways now
defines our sense of what it is to be human. Everyone, it could be said,
is now in therapy, if not literally then logically, insofar as our culture
has become a therapy culture.
But just here the self-contradictoriness of the enterprise begins
to show. Listening to how our patients present their concerns, it often
seems that the prevailing notions of what psychology is have already
determined what they think and feel, speak of and expect. The same,
of course, can be said of the analyst and psychotherapist. Talking with
younger colleagues about professional issues, one immediately senses
that what they think and feel, speak of and expect has also been given
in advance, not only by their training, but a priori from the culture.
With senior colleagues it is only a little different. Lagging behind what
the cure has now become (if only by a talk show or two), they may
feel flummoxed by the informed consumers that they meet with today
in their practices. How is it, they wonder, that the work they have
devoted their lives to has come to seem so phoney?
A passage from Coleridge comes to mind in this connection.
Though written many decades before Freud and the beginnings of
analytic psychotherapy, this passage readily lends itself to being read
in relation to the predicament of psychology that I have just described.
Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet
being at the same time of universal interest, are too often
considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency
of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side
by side, with the most despised and exploded errors.1
Surely the ennui of contemporary psychology is well accounted for
in this line. Just as the truths of any endeavour tend to degenerate into
clichés, so too have psychology’s truths become shop-worn and effete.
Listening to patients, even those who are coming to therapy for the
first time, one is often struck, less by the psychic phenomena that are
being presented, than by the psychologistic (if not to say, psychological)
manner in which these are presented. Far from evincing what Jung could
still rather romantically call the “onslaught of immediate experience
1
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, George Watson, ed. (London: J. M.
Dent, 1956), Chapter IV, p. 49.
26 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
with its terrible ambiguity,”2 the symptoms and concerns of the patient
seem rather to be the thoroughly mediate and already theoretical
expression of those abstractions that psychology and psychoanalysis
have become as the reigning spirits of the age. The same, of course,
can be said of the psychotherapist. Even while attempting to listen with
“evenly-distributed attention”3 and to “not know beforehand,”4 he, too,
in complimentary fashion, has become the purveyor of the more and
more abstract and commodified truths of his profession—what Freud
called “the copper of direct suggestion” having by now long overtaken
the “pure gold of analysis.”5
These reflections on “the state of psychotherapy today” (to
borrow upon and update an essay title of Jung’s) concede much to
those critics whose voices have accompanied the enterprise from its
outset. Where once psychotherapists were liable to feel insulted by
jibes like the one about psychoanalysis being the illness for which it
claims to be the cure,6 their successors in our own time can frequently
be heard to speak in such terms themselves. At first glance this less
defensive stance, this willingness, as it were, to be hoist upon its
own petard, seems to indicate the epistemological sophistication that
therapeutic psychology has obtained as a reflective discipline. With
the next glance, however, these very same qualities, far from being
laudable, appear to be the all-too-facile signs of that decadence that
so often accompanies success.
We may recall in this connection Philip Rieff’s prescient 1966
examination of the newly ascendant therapy culture, The Triumph of the
Therapeutic.7 Beginning with stanzas from Yeats’ poem, “The Second
Coming,” Rieff brilliantly analyses the tension between the “analytic
attitude,” as exemplified by Freud, and the “adapted attitude,” as
exemplified by Jung.8
2
Jung, CW 11: 79.
3
Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho-Analytic Method
of Treatment,” in CP II, p. 324.
4
For a discussion of this stance of Jung’s see his letter to Frau V, 15 December 1933,
Letters 1, pp. 132-133.
5
Sigmund Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy,” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, ed., tr. J.
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-73), pp.167-168.
6
Cf. the famous witticism of Karl Kraus.
7
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York:
Harper & Row, 1966).
8
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 41.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 27
A stalwart alternative to religious faith, with its consoling
symbolisms, the analytic attitude is of a neutral and informative
character, rather than a committed and transformational one, its brand
of cure being brought about through its disillusioning effect upon all
questions of life’s meaning, which it regards as already the signs of
an illness.9 Just as, on the one hand, analysis conducted in this spirit
tends to lower erotic illusions such that id gives way to ego, so too,
on the other, it effects a differentiation with respect to the personal
and cultural super-egos. Where meaning was (this could be the
motto), there individual choice shall be. Released by this, its new anti-
sacramental ethos, from the compulsiveness of the id and the tyranny
of the superego, the patient is free to choose from within the greater
sphere of what has become his own responsibility.
But there is a fly in this ointment. Once cured of meaning the
analyzed patient may be at a loss as to what to choose. As Rieff puts it,
“… without a parallel range of god-terms from which choices may be
derived and ordered, choice itself may become a matter of indifference
or man will become a glutton, choosing everything.”
There is no feeling more desperate than that of being free
to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of
being chosen. … This is one way of stating the difference
between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen.
What men lose when they become as free as gods is
precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages
them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices
seriously. Put in another way this means: Freedom does
not exist without responsibility.10
Returning to the courtroom scene that we began with, we can
already see how that not-guilty plea, which is so often on the lips
of the psychological man of today, may have other, quite unexpected
dimensions. If, for example, freedom does not exist without
responsibility, then freeing oneself from responsibility—the plea of
not-guilty—may be what lands one in the prison of neurosis.
The contrary of the analytic attitude is the adapted attitude.
Sponsoring what Rieff calls “therapies of commitment,” this attitude
is not content to merely liberate its patients from what Freud called
9
As Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte, “The moment a man questions the meaning and
value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.” Cited in Rieff, The
Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 34.
10
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 93.
28 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
the “ideologies of the super-ego”11 so that they can then choose more
freely from among the evaporated remains of former meanings. Rather,
taking the opposite tack, it seeks to replenish meaningful participation
in life, in some quarters, even, to re-enchant the world, by revaluing and
re-visioning the lives of its patients with the values and world-views
that lie latent in dreams, fantasies, symptoms and other productions
of the unconscious. While choice also figures in this conception of
the cure, it feels more ethically weighty than emancipated and free.
For with each decision and determination, what has variously been
called “psychic truth,” “personal myth,” “therapeutic narrative,” and
“symbolic life” is always put at stake.12
But then again, it may not be this way at all! A fly may be in this
ointment, too. For how can an equivocation, such as the one we can
detect in the term “psychic truth,” truly be as the staking of oneself?13
Is it not, rather, the opposite of this, the epithet ‘psychic,’ when
inserted in front of the word ‘truth,’ serving to shield egoic values and
commitments from the contradictions and objections that truly would,
and, indeed may implicitly already have, cast them into doubt?14
11
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Pelican Freud
Library 2, trans. J. Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 99.
12
At an important life juncture, Jung remonstrated with himself as follows: “But in
what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. ‘Do
you live in it?’ I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I
live by. ‘Then do we no longer have any myth?’ ‘No, evidently we no longer have any
myth.’ ‘But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live?’ At this point the
dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a
dead end.” Jung, MDR, p. 171, punctuation modified.
13
In Jung’s inner dialogue cited in the previous note we find the roots of this
equivocation. Immediately upon discerning that “we no longer have any myth”
Jung asks, “but then what is your myth …?” With this contradictory expectation, the
great psychologist dodges the challenge of his modern situation (our being without
myth) and condemns his psychology to a neurotic structure wherein the individual is
encouraged to egoistically fashion a ‘soul’ for himself by taking up the mythic truths
of former times as if they were still indicative of current realities. For a comprehensive
discussion of this topic see Wolfgang Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth
of Man: An essay about the state reached in the history of consciousness and an
analysis of C. G. Jung’s psychology project,” The Journal of Jungian Theory and
Practice, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004, pp. 1-65. Reprinted in CEP IV, pp. 189-283.
14
My critique of psychic truth follows and supplements the thorough-going critique
that Giegerich has given of this notion. See Wolfgang Giegerich, “Jung’s Betrayal of
his Truth: The Adoption of a Kant-based Empiricism and the Rejection of Hegel’s
Speculative Thought,” Harvest: Journal of Jungian Studies 44.1 (1998), pp. 46-64.
Reprinted in CEP VI, pp. 289-322. See also his “Is the Soul ‘Deep?’ Entering and
Following the Logical Movement of Heraclitus’ ‘Fragment 45’,” Spring Journal 64,
Fall & Winter 1998, pp. 31-2. Reprinted in CEP IV, pp. 131-163.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 29
A handy subterfuge, this. Perturbed by unwelcome insights, we
find that we can hold out against them a little longer by re-casting
our illusions as perspectives, our feelings as numinous certainties, our
will-to-believe as some new-age god. And when this wears thin, or a
touch more sophistication is wanted, there are still those other terms
we mentioned—personal myth, therapeutic narrative, and symbolic
life. As fashionable poses which one can vogue about in, these as-if
companions of the concept of psychic truth show the extent to which
concern for real truth has become a matter of indifference. As Rieff
remarks, “psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can
feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his
own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.”15
How apt, Rieff’s having begun his critique with those stanzas
from “The Second Coming”! Indeed, without parsing the difference
between the analytic and the adapted attitudes any further, a connection
can readily be drawn between this author’s portrayal of psychological
man and that line from the poem that refers to “the best [as] lack[ing]
all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”16 Freed
from determinate meaning as from the tyranny of former god-terms,
psychological man, “that hedger against his own bets,” fancifully lays
claim to any and all gods. Fashioning these into his own designer brand
of truth, he seeks to assuage a cynical piety that would rather be deceived
than be denied. This ‘truth,’ however, that his ego psychologistically
has is not the truth that his real I truly exists as. For, whereas the first
mentioned of these is like a thing that can be carried around in one’s
purse, the later is nothing less than the existing conception (to use
with Giegerich the Hegelian expression) which arises from our being
exposed to what is. Or putting this distinction in terms of our courtroom
scenario, we could say that psychic truth is like the alibi with which the
accused hopes to defend his innocence, while truly psychological truth
resides in or is produced through the hermeneutic circle of one’s having
been brought before the bar and made to stand trial.
Psychological Precedents for the Courtroom Analogy
But whence comes this analogy to trials and courtrooms? Is there
precedent for the comparison? A tradition for the metaphor?
Numerous examples of the figurative use of legal terminology
and of the figure of judicial proceedings can be adduced from within
15
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 27.
16
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” lines 7-8.
30 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
the discourse of psychotherapy and analysis. We need only think of
the plenitude of such references that occur in the writings of Freud
and Jung.

Freudian Precedents
As a young man, Freud (to begin with him) had intended to train
as a lawyer. When, however, he later took the decision to abandon the
law in favour of a career in the natural sciences he brought the term
“prozess” or “trial” along with him, as it were, using it as a metaphor
to describe his new-found professional interest. In a letter of that
time to Emil Fluss, for example, the future founder of psychoanalysis
grandly stated that although he no longer aspired to involve himself
in real trials (prozesse), he would, henceforth, be devoting himself to
the “millennial cases of nature” and to the “eternal trials” that were
to be observed there!17
We may be reminded by this, Freud’s earliest use of the trial
metaphor, of his later psychoanalytic insights concerning the role
that the retention of shadowy versions of abandoned object-choices
plays in the formation of the superego. As part of an effort to turn loss
into gain, the subject, according to Freud, identifies with what in the
course of life he or she has had to relinquish and “kicks this upstairs,”
so to speak. In this way a cleavage and gradation is created in the ego
such that the values, ideals, and imperatives that have been formed by
means of this trumped up identification process gain jurisdiction as an
exhortatory and criticizing agency which sits in judgment over the rest
of the ego.18 “We call this agency the superego,” writes Freud, “and
are aware of it in its judicial functions, as our conscience.”19
Interestingly, and by Freud’s own lights, the judicial imagery he
came to employ in describing the structure and dynamics of the psyche
17
Freud’s letter to Emil Fluss, May 1, 1873. Cited by David Caudill, “Law and
Psychoanalysis,” in Anthony Elliot and Jeffery Prager, eds., The Routledge Handbook
of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities (London and New York:
Routledge, 2016), p. 374.
18
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” CP IV, p. 159. Writing with
reference to a process of “identification of the ego with the abandoned object,” Freud
writes: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, so that the latter could
henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the forsaken
object. In this way the loss of the object became transformed into a loss in the ego,
and the conflict between the ego and the loved person transformed into a cleavage
between the criticizing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.”
19
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, J. Strachey, trans. (New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1940), p. 122.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 31
(e.g., his references to “our internal police force,”20 “psychic trials,”21 “the
judging activity of conscience,”22 etc.) can be attributed in part to his own
experience of this process with respect to his youthful interest in the law.
Though Freud had resolutely negated that career path, the de-literalized
version of its concept which he retained—the trial metaphor—became
a part of his superego, its values and imperatives playing an important
role in mediating his later transition “from medicine to psychology.”23
“I have never really been a doctor in the proper sense,” declared
Freud looking back upon over four decades of medical activity. “I
became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original
purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long
and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path.”24
Throughout the whole of his long career, Freud was a reluctant physician.
The life of a doctor treating patients seemed to him rather limiting with
respect to his scientific ambitions. Having longed since the outset of
his professional life for what he called “philosophical knowledge,”25
he was not happy that the necessities of earning a living had forced
him to settle upon such a practical occupation. However, circling back,
negating the negation, the court analogy supervened such that he could
push off from physical medicine to become the founder of a field of
endeavour in which the “eternal trials” he had hoped to partake in upon
leaving the law (i.e., the primary research and theoretical work of a
natural scientist) could finally be convened: psychoanalysis.
A compelling irony lends credence to this account. This has to
do with the fact that the words cited above, in which Freud distances
himself from his identity as a medical doctor, were written in the
context of an actual trial!
20
Sigmund Freud, “My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus,” CP, V, p. 298.
21
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Cited by Marie-
Dominique Trapet, “Law and Psychoanalysis,” International Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (August 2, 2016). http://www.encyclo-
pedia.com/doc/1G2-3435300802.html
22
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, p. 91.
23
Letter to Wilhem Fliess, April 2, 1896. Jeffery Moussaieff Mason, ed., trans,
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 180.
24
Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, J. Strachey, trans. (New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1969), pp. 104-105.
25
Letter to Wilhem Fliess, April 2, 1896: “As a young man I knew no other longing
than for philosophical knowledge, and now I am about to fulfill it as I move from
medicine to psychology.” Mason, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess 1887-1904, p. 180.
32 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
It happened like this. The eminent Viennese psychoanalyst Theodor
Reik, who had himself been a lawyer before becoming an analyst,26
was charged under Austria’s quackery law with practicing medicine
without the credentials of a physician. As a gesture in aid of his
colleague’s defence, Freud wrote a little booklet with the title, “The
Question of Lay Analysis.” Addressing himself in this text to the
figure of an impartial interlocutor (even as he had in fact spoken on
Reik’s behalf to a highly placed official or magistrate), Freud argued
the case for the legitimacy of the non-medically trained analyst while
at the same time making the wider and theoretically more important
point that “psychoanalysis is not a specialized branch of medicine,”27
but rather, a thoroughgoing way of doing psychology.
Now, in making this differentiation, the crux of Freud’s concern
was that medical expediency not be allowed to undermine the character
of analysis as a search for truth. From a medical point of view, the
detailed exploratory work with individual patients that is indispensable
for analysis could only seem impractical and expensive. “Would it
not be more economical,” Freud imagines his physician colleagues
objecting, “to prop up weaknesses from without rather than to rebuild
[the patients] from within?”28 In response to this, Freud avers,
In psycho-analysis there has existed from the very first an
inseparable bond between cure and research. Knowledge
brought therapeutic success. It was impossible to treat a
patient without learning something new; it was impossible
to gain fresh insight without perceiving its beneficent
results. Our analytic procedure is the only one in which
this precious conjunction is assured.29
In a lecture given in 1932, Freud again highlighted the difference
between psychoanalysis and medicine.

26
Reik published a number of important studies relating psychoanalysis to topics
of criminal law. These include The Compulsion to Confess (1925), The Unknown
Murderer (1932) and Myth and Guilt (1957). Ellenberger (in his The Discovery of the
Unconscious, New York, Basic Books, 1970, p. 846) refers to this contribution: “A
lawyer and lay analyst, Reik took up a problem that had puzzled criminologists such
as Anselm Feuerbach and Hans Gross: Why do certain offenders give a confession
unexpectedly when they could save their lives by keeping silent, and how is it that
a criminal will forget an object on the site of his crime that will serve as evidence
against him?”
27
Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, p. 103.
28
Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, p. 109.
29
Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, p. 109.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 33
I have told you that psychoanalysis began as a method
of [medical] treatment; but I did not want to commend
it to your interest as a method of treatment but [rather]
as an account of the truths it contains, an account of
the information it gives us about what concerns human
beings most of all—their own nature—and an account
of the connections it discloses between the most
different activities.30
In the view of its founder, psychoanalysis is less about administering
treatment in a manner consistent with the rest of medicine than with
the discovery of the truths of the human soul. Methodologically, it
achieves this end on a case by case basis by means of a painstaking
process of discerning and laying bare the often strange and unexpected
connections between the most diverse of human activities and
concerns, connections being the very substance of what Freud meant
by soul. And it is in respect to this, its truth-seeking mode of practice,
that psychoanalysis can itself be connected up with or compared to the
hermeneutic approach of judicial science.
Examples abound. We have only to think of Freud’s having
seen through his patients’ medicalized cover-stories of illness to the
unconscious guilt that lurks beneath these, of his view that there is, in
the case of each patient, only one neurosis (so that the cure amounts
to an evidential demonstration of this to the patient through a process
of drawing connections between the various aspects of the symptom
picture),31 of the whole set-up of analysis in terms of a Sherlock
Holmes style drama of crime diction, of its lawyer- and prosecutor-
like work with the patient’s defences, and of Freud’s understanding
of neurotic suffering as a form of self-punishment for unconscious
wishes and impulses that would indeed be criminal if they were to be
acted out. As the neurotic residue of early childhood, these instinctual
urges for incest and murder are the content of our dreams, according
to Freud. Disguised by dream distortion, they are, as he calls them,
the “masked criminals”32 of our nights. And apropos to this, it is
the job of psychoanalysis to bring them before the judgment of the
patient’s consciousness (even as Teiresias did with respect to Oedipus
in that early part of Oedipus Rex that Freud “likened to the work of a
30
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition,
vol. 22 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), p. 156.
31
Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” CP II, p. 351.
32
Sigmund Freud, “Moral Responsibility for the Content of Dreams,” CP V, 155.
34 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
psycho-analysis”33), so that what had before been merely repressed can
be comprehended in the fullness of its truth and sentenced accordingly.
Many further examples of the trial metaphor and courtroom analogy
could be drawn from Freud’s writings.34 None, however, could be more
explicit than those provided in his 1906 paper, “Psycho-Analysis and
the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law.”35 First given as a lecture to
law students in a criminology seminar, the aim of Freud’s address was to
explain what psychology and psychoanalysis can contribute to the new
investigative techniques that were then being developed with the aim of
objectively establishing the trustworthiness of witness statements and the
guilt or innocence of accused persons. Content-wise, his lecture began
with an account of Jung’s work with the Word Association Experiment.
Working in his laboratory at the Burghölzli Cantonal Hospital, Jung had
recently conducted research in which the minute reaction behaviour
of accused persons to stimulus words, some of which were chosen
on the basis of their being indicative of features of the crime which
could only be known to the police and the guilty party, were measured.
Irregular reactions to the crime-related words, according to Jung, could
be regarded as having a measure of evidential value with respect to the
question of guilt and innocence. Underscoring the significance of this
finding in his report, Freud compared it to the kind of questioning that
occurs in court: “You observe that this method of enquiry corresponds
exactly with that adopted by an examining judge who wishes to discover
whether an acknowledged fact of which he is aware is also known to the
accused in the rôle of perpetrator.”36 Of course, the majority of Jung’s
researches in word association had nothing to do with crime, but with
the discovery of unconscious complexes in the mental life of normal
subjects and psychologically disturbed patients—hence the interest his
work held for Freud. The point of commonality between the association
experiment’s psychiatric and forensic use, as Freud pointed out, was
that it led the subject to inadvertently represent, or in Freud’s words, to

33
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 4,
J. Strachey, trans., A. Richards, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 363.
34
Cf. the following of Freud’s papers, “A Dream which bore Testimony,” “Dostoevsky
and Parricide,” the section ‘Criminality from a Sense of Guilt’ in “Some Character-
Types met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” and section B ‘Moral Responsibility for
the Content of Dreams’ in “Some Additional Notes upon Dream-Interpretation.”
35
Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,”
CP II, pp. 13-24.
36
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” CP II, p. 16.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 35
“mentally betray,”37 what he or she had unconsciously (or in the case
of the criminal, wilfully) concealed. And herein lay the connection,
for Freud, to his own work in psychoanalysis. Like Jung’s research
with the word association experiment, and like the judicial process,
psychoanalysis had also to do with “discovering hidden material in the
mind.” Elaborating further Freud then proceeded “to work out,” as he
put it, “an analogy between the criminal and the hysteric.”
In both we are concerned with a secret, with something
hidden. … In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he
knows and hides from you, but in the case of the hysteric
it is a secret hidden from him, a secret he himself does
not know. How is this possible? Now, through laborious
investigations, we know that all these illnesses are the
result of the patient having succeeded in repressing certain
ideas charged with strong feeling, together with the wishes
that arise from them, in such a way that they play no part in
his conscious thoughts, and therefore remain unknown to
him. But from this repressed psychic material (complexes)
are generated the somatic and psychic symptoms, which
plague the patient just as a guilty conscience does. In this
one point, therefore, the difference between the criminal
and the hysterical is fundamental.38
As fundamentally different as the criminal and the hysteric may be,
they are alike in that they harbour a secret. And this secret, it follows,
is the basis of the complimentary comparison between the analyst and
the examining magistrate or judge. As Freud puts it, “The task of the
therapist … is the same as the task of the judge; he must discover the
hidden psychic material. To do this we have invented various methods
of detection, some of which lawyers are now going to imitate.”39
Jung’s Witness
Turning now to Jung, we need only mention his positive
contributions to criminology and the legal sciences in passing since
our interest here, as before in our discussion of Freud, is not in this
applied focus per se, but rather, with establishing precedents for “the
law” and “the courtroom” as metaphors and analogies for the work of
the analyst and patient in the consulting room.
37
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” CP II,
p.17. Adapted here from “mental betrayal.”
38
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” CP II, p. 18.
39
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” CP II, p. 18.
36 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
Based in his early research with the Word Association Experiment,
Jung’s contributions to what he called Tatbestandsdiagnose (i.e., the
diagnosis of facts) began with his 1905 publication (so influential
to Freud as we discussed above), “The Psychological Diagnosis of
Evidence.” This, in its turn, was soon followed by his “New Aspects
of Criminal Psychology” (1908) and “The Association Method”
(1909). In all of these publications case studies were presented in
which reactions that could only have been formed on the basis of the
test subject being aware of undisclosed details of the crime under
investigation were demonstrated.
One of these cases concerned a young man who was suspected
of stealing from his guardian. After administering an association
experiment, Jung found its results to be so convincing that he “told the
subject point-blank that he was a thief.” 40 Though the youth initially
protested his innocence, this immediate defensive reaction soon gave
way to a tearful confession when, moments later, the experimental
findings with respect to his reactions were explained to him.
Another of Jung’s cases had to do with discerning which of
several nurses at the Burghölzli had stolen money from another
nurse’s purse. Here, again, when confronted by Jung with the
diagnostic evidence of her crime, the nurse to whom the experiment
had pointed made a full confession.41
A third case was a hypothetical one.42 For the didactic purpose
of explaining something of his experimental work with associations,
Jung concocted a fictional scenario in which the challenge was to
detect which of a number of hotel employees had pilfered jewellery
from a hotel patron’s bag. Using stimulus words taken from the
crime scene such as ‘gold,’ ‘butterfly,’ ‘bracelet,’ etc. (there had been
a piece of jewellery in the shape of a butterfly), Jung showed, on the
one hand, something of how complexes function, and, on the other,
how the Word Association Experiment may be applied to matters of
criminal investigation.
Now, it is important to note that the thrust of these studies was not
psychiatric in the usual sense. Usually, a psychiatrist’s role in such matters
is limited to providing psychiatric assessments. When asked to examine

40
Jung, “The Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence,” CW 2:769-75. Cited passage is
from para. 773. See also CW 1: 483-4, CW 2: 907, 1331.
41
Jung, “The Association Method,” CW 2: 956-983. See also CW 2: 1332-1344.
42
Jung, “New Aspects of Criminal Psychology,” CW 2: 1319-1330.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 37
a subject suspected of having committed a crime, the psychiatrist gladly
leaves the “who dun it” question to the police and the courts. Staying
within the domain of his expertise, he focuses upon questions pertaining
to the suspect’s mental status and competency while at the same time
providing a diagnosis of any psychiatric disorders, which may be present.
Jung, of course, was no stranger to this work. During his years at
the Burghölzli, he served in precisely this capacity many times, as his
publications on such topics as simulated insanity and hysterical stupor
in a prisoner attest.43 In the cases and research that we are discussing,
however, his focus was entirely different. The “who dun it” question
came back in, so prominently in fact that the usual emphasis upon
the suspect as a person with such and such a psychological profile
was entirely set aside in favour of what Jung called psychological
evidence of crime.44
There is much to ponder with respect to this, let us call it, “finger-
pointing” or “caught red-handed” approach. It might have been
expected that as a psychologist Jung would have at least included
in his results a description of the suspect. The Jung of these studies,
however, was more like one of the sleuths in the detective novels he
liked to read. Like them, his focus was entirely upon the deed that
was committed, the facts of the crime itself. Finding the culprit was
all and enough.
Now the savvy of this approach, if savvy there was, might be
compared to the rejoinder that veteran police officers and lawyers
give when someone naively exclaims of a particular suspect, “why,
he doesn’t look like a murderer.” In response to this the veteran quips
back, “… and just what does a murderer look like?!” Jung, it may
be argued, began with this lesson behind him. He knew, that is to
say, that assessment of the personality, no matter how in-depth and
thoroughgoing, is but a specious abstraction without the actions and
deeds, committed or omitted, through which the person has given
determinate form to the person he is. “Not that you are, but that you
do is the self,” declared Jung in a later formulation; “The self appears
43
For an account of these psychiatric activities see Jung’s papers “A Case of Hysterical
Stupor in a Prisoner in Detention,” “On Simulated Insanity,” “A Medical Opinion on
a Case of Simulated Insanity,” “A Third and Final Opinion of Two Contradictory
Psychiatric Diagnoses”—all in CW 1.
44
Jung’s experiment, in its application to the question of guilt or innocence in the legal
sense, did not yield psychological profiles of the person. They did not, for example,
give a personality profile of a criminal mind. They showed traces of the crime scene
in the memories of the perpetrator.
38 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship.” 45 But still, we
are surprised that Jung could bracket out the history and personality
of the suspect when from the outset of his career he had himself
made many rich and significant contributions to these main areas of
psychological interest.
But bracket he did. Even as late as 1934, which is to say, more than
two decades after he had left hospital psychiatry, Jung again applied
his Tatbestandsdiagnose methodology, this time with respect to an
actual criminal case, the murder trial of Hans Näf, a dental technician
from Mogelsberg. Writing to Jung the Criminal Court of Canton Zürich
had wanted to know if interrogation of the accused by Jung would
produce findings that “would be of considerable significance for the
judge who has to decide on the guilt or innocence of the accused?”46
Though Jung was then involved with very different topics (1934 was
also a year that saw the publication of his “Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious” and “A Study in the Process of Individuation” as well as
the commencement of his English Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra)
he acceded to this request. Supplementing the efforts of the police and
prosecuting attorneys, who gather and interpret evidence recovered from
the scene of the crime, Jung administered an association experiment
which had been specifically designed to detect informational traces of
the crime scene that may have left impressions behind in the suspect’s
psyche. As with the earlier cases in which he applied this methodology,
here again his interest was not with diagnosing his subject in terms of
neurosis, psychosis, or mental competency, but with his subject’s guilt
or innocence in the forensic and judicial sense.
And what were his findings in this respect? In his final report Jung
concluded that “the subject’s psychological situation, as revealed by the
experiment, in no way corresponds to what one would empirically expect
in an innocent person.”47 Noteworthy here is Jung’s rather diminutive
tone. In contrast to the bold accusation he had made on the basis of
association experiment results in the case of the youth who had stolen
from his guardian, his phraseology here was modest and circumspect.
45
C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939,
vol. 2, James L. Jarrett, ed., Bollingen Series XCIX (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988), p. 795.
46
Jung, “On the Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence: The Evidence-Experiment in
the Näf Trial,” CW 2:1357.
47
Jung, “On the Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence: The Evidence-Experiment in
the Näf Trial,” CW 2:1388.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 39
This difference reflects the gravity of the matter at hand and by extension
the limits of the experiment. With the youth, the goal had been to handle
the situation as a family matter, without recourse to the police. But in this
case, it was not a matter of a petty theft, but of a capital crime for which
a man was on trial for his life. In situations of such magnitude Jung
regarded his experimental method as providing no more than “a valuable
addition to the circumstantial evidence.”48 Ultimate “assess[ment of] the
signs of a guilty conscience,” he maintained (in concert with Freud49)
“must be left to the discretion of the judge.”50
Reflecting upon the significance of this early work of Jung’s two
aspects can be distinguished. Outwardly considered, his application of
the Word Association Experiment to issues of criminal investigation
can be credited with having made a lasting contribution to the field of
criminology as a precursor of the polygraph or lie-detector test. Down
to the present day these successor methodologies, though generally not
admissible in court, have been widely used to assess the honesty of
witnesses and accused persons during the course of the investigative
process leading up to charges being laid and trials being undertaken.
The second (and for us more important) aspect of Jung’s diagnosis
of evidence studies has to do with the re-integration or inwardization of
their methodological focus back into the day-to-day work of the analyst
and psychiatrist. Although Jung, as we have discussed, when conducting
these studies set aside the traditional concern of the psychiatrist with
mental status, life history, and psychological make-up in order to
concentrate solely upon the question of truth with respect to the accused
subject’s guilt or innocence, back in the clinic and consulting room it
was another matter. The life situation, biographical history, symptom
picture, dreams and fantasies of the patient came back in, but now
with the difference that all that Jung had learned from his diagnosis of
evidence research could be brought to bear upon them.51
48
Jung, “New Aspects of Criminal Psychology,” CW 2:1330.
49
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law,” CP II, p. 24.
50
Jung, “On the Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence: The Evidence-Experiment in
the Näf Trial,” CW 2:1388.
51
The shift in emphasis here is a precursor to what Giegerich has called “the
psychological difference.” Writing with reference to this most fundamental of
psychological concepts, Giegerich insists that a truly psychological psychology is
predicated upon our “shift[ing] our standpoint away from ‘the human person’ to the
‘soul.’” By this he means “a shift of our standpoint, perspective, or of the idea in
terms of which we study, just as before, the concrete experience of individuals or
peoples.” CEP 1, p. 115.
40 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
Several cases reported by Jung come to mind as being especially
illustrative in this regard. The first of these dates back to his early
days at the Burghölzli.52 A young woman had come under Jung’s care
bearing the diagnosis of schizophrenia. A novice psychiatrist at that
time, Jung did not feel it appropriate to contest the diagnosis, and yet
his own impression was that the woman was suffering from an ordinary
depression. Wishing to clarify his doubts in this regard, Jung administered
Word Association Experiments to the patient and also discussed her
dreams with her. The upshot of this, to the surprise and horror of the
doctor and patient alike, was that a crime was revealed at the root of
her sorrows. A married woman and the mother of two young children,
the patient had recently been bereft of her four year-old daughter. This,
no doubt, was a most important factor in the depression that Jung had
suspected. But there was more to the story. Immediately prior to her
child getting sick, the patient had already become depressed. This mood,
as Jung was to discover, had been precipitated by her having recently
learned that a well-to-do man she had once fancied, but who she had
assumed was beyond her station in life, had been very dismayed when
she married her current husband, the father of her children. Unsettled by
this information, the woman became despondent and, as Jung was able to
discover, while in this state allowed the rural bathwater that she knew to
be infected with typhus to trickle into her daughter’s mouth! It was this,
the young mother’s careless, and yet, darkly purposed action that caused
the daughter to contract the typhoid fever from which she subsequently
died. Though “the young woman was initially not aware that she had
killed her child … she had fallen into a condition that appeared to be the
expression of extreme consciousness of guilt.”53 In his discussion of the
case, Jung attributes his uncovering of his patient’s crime to evidence
he had gleaned from the association experiment. “From the association
test I had seen that she was a murderess, and I had learned many of the
details of her secret.”54
A second case of Jung’s dates from a later period of his career.55
A woman, who would not give her name, requested to be seen by him
in consultation for a single session. Her purpose, as it turned out, was
52
For a discussion of this case see Jung, MDR, pp. 115-117. For an in-depth account
including some of the patient’s reactions to the Word Association Experiment, see
Jung’s “The Tavistock Lectures,” CW 18: 107-108.
53
Jung, MDR, p. 122.
54
Jung, MDR, p. 116.
55
Jung, MDR, p. 122-123.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 41
to confess to a murder she had committed. Some twenty years earlier
this woman had poisoned her best friend. Her motive in this, as she
explained, had been to marry her friend’s husband. Morally speaking,
she had had no qualms. As long as she was not caught, she believed she
could live with her actions. Fate, however, abhorring the vacuity of her
conscience, arranged that she be punished all the same. Shortly after
she married her late friend’s husband, he passed away, though he was a
relatively young man. Their daughter, too, drew away from her as soon
as she was grown. Eventually, there was no contact between the mother
and daughter at all. With her horses and her dogs, it was the same story.
Her relations to them also came to grief. As Jung comments, the turning
away from her of people and animals had been their “silent verdict”56
upon her. Though her crime had not been discovered by the police, and
though she had evaded judicial condemnation, punishment came all the
same in the form of unbearable loneliness.
A third case was that of an intelligent thirty-year-old man who
consulted Jung on account of a compulsion neurosis. Steeped in the
psychoanalytic literature, the patient had previously made a rather
impressive effort at self analysis, the results of which he had laid
out with scientific precision in a very competent and thoroughgoing
written account. Filled with insights into the causes of his neurosis,
this “psychoanalytical autobiography,” as Jung called it, “could have
been published in the Jahrbuch.”57 But why then was he not cured?
Could there be something that he had missed, something he was still
repressing? These were his questions to Jung. Jung, for his part, initially
joined with the patient in his puzzlement at this. Yes, indeed, according
to theory, the patient should be cured. Inquiring further, however, Jung
soon got to the crux of the matter. Struck by references in the patient’s
autobiography to his frequently spending his winters in Nice and his
summers in St. Moritz, Jung wondered if he was the son of wealthy
parents. When the patient replied that no his parents were not rich, Jung
asked if he had then made the money himself to pay for such luxuries.
No, he had not made the money; it had been given to him by a friend, he
said. This friend, it turned out, was a thirty-six year-old spinster school-
teacher, who supported him out of her meagre earnings because she held
out the hope of marrying him, a prospect, however, that was not even
remotely on the patient’s mind. Like a criminal investigator “following
56
Jung, MDR, p. 123.
57
Jung, CW 18: 282.
42 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
the money trail,” Jung’s line of questioning had led him to uncover
what he, in his comments to the patient, characterized as the patient’s
crime. “Do you imagine you have a lawful right to the money jingling in
your pockets?”58 Jung recalls saying to the patient. “The money in your
pocket is the money of the woman you cheat … You are pretending to
yourself that it is not her money, but you live by it, and that is immoral.
That is the cause of your compulsion neurosis. It is a compensation
and a punishment for an immoral attitude.”59 Commenting upon this
case in a later lecture, Jung writes, “He commits a crime and steals the
savings of a lifetime from an honest woman in order to be able to have
a good time. That fellow belongs in gaol, and his compulsion neurosis
provides it for him all right.”60 Of course, the patient was not a criminal
in any actual legal sense. As Jung put it in another context, “… he was
not really criminal, [but] only a so-called intellectual who believed so
much in the power of reason that he thought he could unthink a wrong
he had committed.”61 Nevertheless, psychologically considered, such
unthinking of one’s wrongs is already criminal for, as Jung states, “With
views like that only a criminal can adapt to life.”62
Integrating the Forensic Focus
We can see in the movement across these examples the emergence
of the law metaphor and courtroom analogy in Jung’s psychological
thinking. What had begun within the context of his early diagnosis of
evidence research as an empirical contribution to the adjacent field
of criminology gradually came home to the theory and practice of
psychology itself, at once both enlarging it conceptually and enriching
its speculative powers.63 And with this development, it could be said,

58
Jung, CW 17: 182
59
Jung, CW 18: 282.
60
Jung, CW 18: 284.
61
Jung, CW 17: 183.
62
Jung, CW 17: 183.
63
It is worth stressing that our interest here is not in Jung’s evidence experiment per
se. This early research was conceived in a rather positivistic and unpsychological
spirit. What is important is Jung’s pushing off from the literal focus on crime
detection and his integration of a subtler, de-literalized version of this focus back into
psychological practice. In a similar vein, it is also worth cautioning psychotherapists
against emulating Jung’s tendency to act-out the prosecutor in the cases we have
examined. As analysts and psychotherapists we are not prosecutors. For a corrective
to this stance the reader is directed to another case of Jung’s in which he displays more
mastery with respect to this issue. See CW 18: 515-17.
Law & Order meets Freud & Jung 43
Jung’s analytical stance became psychological in precisely that sense
of the term that is implied when a novel by a Kafka, a Dostoevsky, or
a Kosinski is characterized as a psychological novel.
We may be surprised by this reading of Jung’s work. The image
of Jungian analysis that prevails in our day is almost wholly derived
from analytical psychology’s relations with religion and mythology,
history and alchemy. We quite forget the importance that criminology
and the law held for Jung. But looking back in his autobiography upon
some sixty years of psychiatric and analytical activity, Jung draws
special attention to the contribution that his engagement with these
disciplines had made with respect to his sense of the psychological.
“In my practice,” he writes, “I was constantly impressed by the way
the human psyche reacts to a crime committed unconsciously.”64
Now, the reference here to “a crime committed unconsciously”
was not limited to the legal sense of crime. As we have seen from our
examples, in addition to the actual cases of theft and murder, Jung more
often acted as an analyst and consultant in lesser cases (such as the case
of the thirty year-old-man who lived off his school-teacher girlfriend’s
money), applying the concept of crime in a subtle, metaphorical sense
within what might be called the wider jurisdiction of psychology. And
this was so across the board. Having integrated the “who dun it” focus of
his evidence research into his daily work in the consulting room, a main
theme of any analysis for Jung was that of uncovering what he called
“the statistical criminal”65 that lurks within each of us, but which has
gone fugitive, as it were, in the case of the neurotic. For the individual,
he maintained, “… must know relentlessly how much good he can do,
and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one
as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements of his nature, and
both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish—as he ought—
to live without self-deception or self-delusion.”66
Individuation’s Inner Trial
But what about those other important themes of Jung’s psychology—
the individuation process and the numinous? Jung, as we know, was not
only interested in the disordered or wayward psyche, but in the psyche
of personal growth, self-realization, and spiritual experience. Why,
he even declared in a letter that “the main interest of my work is not
64
Jung, MDR, p. 122.
65
Jung, CW 10: 408; CW 11: 129.
66
Jung, MDR, p. 330.
44 Psychology’s Dream of the Courtroom
concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach
to the numinous,” adding that “the approach to the numinous is the real
therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you
are released from the curse of pathology.”67 So how, then, can what
has been shown in these pages with respect to the law analogy and the
courtroom metaphor be squared with this concern?
In the context of our present reflections, Jung’s references to
individuation and the numinous may put us in mind of the gravitas of
the courtroom. The courtroom, as we noted at the outset, is a solemn
and austere setting. Within its hallowed walls one feels compelled by
an ominous and at the same time invisible presence to observe a strict
code of decorum. And this is doubly so with regards to that courtroom-
at-large that our lives can become when consciousness, “sticking
to its story no matter what,” lags guiltily behind those actions and
happenings that have set new precedents in our lives.
How fitting, then, that Jung should draw upon the same imagery and
evoke the same feeling-tone when discussing that absolute courtroom
that the individuation process can become when the high court of one’s
truth has come to be at cross purposes with laws of one’s outer life and
society. I refer here to a passage from the “Late Thoughts” section of
Jung’s autobiography in which terms of reference that had made their
first appearance so many years before in the form of the evidence
experiment, and that were then de-literalized and refined over many
subsequent years of analytic and psychiatric practice, achieve their
full speculative power.
… if a man faced with a conflict of duties undertakes to deal
with them absolutely on his own responsibility, and before
a judge who sits in judgment on him day and night, he may
well find himself in an isolated position. There is now an
authentic secret in his life which cannot be discussed—if
only because he is involved in an endless inner trial in which
he is his own counsel and ruthless examiner, and no secular
or spiritual judge can restore his easy sleep. If he were not
already sick to death of the decisions of such [outer, i.e.,
external] judges, he would never have found himself in a
conflict. For such a conflict always presupposes a higher
sense of responsibility. It is this very quality which keeps
its possessor from accepting the decision of a collectivity.
In his case the court is transported to the inner world where
the verdict is pronounced behind closed doors.
67
C. G. Jung, letter to P. W. Martin, 20 August 1945, Letters 1, p. 377.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of In Korea with
Marquis Ito
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Title: In Korea with Marquis Ito

Author: George Trumbull Ladd

Release date: February 29, 2024 [eBook #73071]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons,


1908

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN KOREA


WITH MARQUIS ITO ***
IN KOREA
WITH
MARQUIS ITO
Marquis Ito
IN KOREA
WITH
MARQUIS ITO

Part I
A NARRATIVE OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
Part II
A CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL INQUIRY

BY
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D.

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS


NEW YORK: 1908

Copyright, 1908, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published February, 1908
TO THE
DEAR COMPANION
OF ITS EXPERIENCES AND THE
READY SCRIBE OF MUCH OF ITS MANUSCRIPT
THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY
AND AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
PREFACE
The contents and purposes of this volume may be conveniently
classified under three heads; for here are statements of fact,
expressions of opinion, and certain ventures into the realm of
conjecture. The statements of fact are, almost without exception,
made on grounds of personal observation, or on the authority of the
most competent and trustworthy first-hand witnesses. For the earlier
periods of the history of the relations, friendly or hostile, between
Japan and Korea, these authorities are indeed no longer living, and
they cannot be subjected to cross-questioning. But the choice
between the truth they told and the mistakes and falsehoods of a
contradictory character is in most cases not difficult to make. For
events of the present generation the reader will find the statements
of the witnesses quoted, and of the documents cited, to be in general
unimpeachable. I believe, then, that what is claimed to be truth of
fact in this book is as nearly exact and worthy of implicit confidence
as it is ordinarily given to human beings to be in matters pertaining to
the history of human affairs.
In expressing my own opinions as to the truth or untruth of certain
contentions, and as to the merit or demerit of certain transactions, I
have uniformly tried to base these opinions upon the fullest
obtainable knowledge of the facts. In some cases the judgments at
which I have been compelled to arrive contradict those which have
been and still are widely current; in some cases they can scarcely
fail to be interpreted as an impeachment of other writers who have
had either a narrator’s interest only in the same events or even a
more substantial concernment. I have no wish to deny the apologetic
character of this book. But at every point the charge of being
swerved from the truth by prejudice may be met with these replies:
First, very unusual opportunities were afforded the author for
ascertaining the truth; and, second, in almost every case where the
evidence brought forward seems insufficient there is much more of
the same sort of evidence already in his possession, and still more to
be had for the asking. But in these days one must limit the size of
such undertakings. Few readers wish to wade through a long stretch
of shoals in order to reach the firm ground of historical verity.
As to the ventures at conjecture which are sparingly put forth, let
them be rated at their seeming worth, after the facts have been
carefully studied and the opinions weighed, which have called out
these ventures. They are confessedly only entitled to a claim for a
certain degree, higher or lower, of probability. The status of all things
in the Far East—and for the matter of that, all over the civilized world
—is just now so unstable and loaded with uncertainties that no
human insight can penetrate to the centre of the forces at work, and
no human foresight can look far into the future.
The division of the book into two parts may seem at first sight to
injure its unity. Such a division has for its result, as a matter of
course, a somewhat abrupt change in the character of the material
employed and in the style of its handling. The First Part is a narrative
of personal observations and experiences. It gives the results,
however, of a serious study of a complicated situation; and it
pronounces more or less confident judgments upon a number of
subordinate questions involved in the general problem of
establishing satisfactory relations between two nations which are
inseparably bound together—physically, socially, politically—whether
for the weal or for the woe of both. In the Second Part the attempt is
made to submit these judgments to the tests of history. But what is
history? Of no other civilized country than Korea is the truth of the
cynical saying more obvious that much of what has been written as
history is lies, and that most of real history is unwritten. All of which
has tended to make the writer duly appreciate the unspeakable
advantage of having access to authentic information which, for
diplomatic and other sufficient reasons, has not hitherto been made
public.
The underlying literary and logical unity which binds together the
two seemingly diverse Parts of the one book is made clear by stating
in general terms the problem upon which it aims to throw light. This
problem concerns the relations to be established between Japan and
Korea—a question which has for centuries been proposed in various
imperative and even affective ways to both these nations. It is also a
question which has several times disturbed greatly the entire Orient,
and the recent phases of which have come near to upsetting the
expectations and more deliberate plans of the entire civilized world.
To lay the foundations, under greatly and suddenly changed
conditions, of a satisfactory and permanent peace, one of the
greatest statesmen of the Orient is giving—with all his mind and
heart—the later years of his eventful life. I hope that this book may
make its readers know somewhat better what the problem has been
and is; and what Prince Ito, as Japanese Resident-General in Korea,
is trying to accomplish for its solution.
It remains for the Preface only to acknowledge the author’s
obligations. These are so special to one person—namely, Mr. D. W.
Stevens, who has been for some time official “Adviser to the Korean
Council of State and Counsellor to the Resident-General”—that
without his generous and painstaking assistance in varied ways the
Second Part of the book could never have appeared in its present
form. It is hoped that this general acknowledgment will serve to
cover many cases where Mr. Stevens’ name is not especially
mentioned in connection with the text. Grateful acknowledgment is
also made to Mr. Furuya, the private secretary of the Resident-
General, for his painstaking translation from the original Japanese or
Chinese official documents; to Mr. M. Zumoto, editor of the Seoul
Press, for varied information on many subjects; and to Dr. George
Heber Jones for facts and suggestions imparted in conversation and
embodied in writings of his. My obligations to the Resident-General
himself, for the perfectly untrammelled and unprejudiced opportunity,
with its complete freedom to ask all manner of questions, which his
invitation afforded, are, I trust, sufficiently emphasized in the title of
the book. Other debts to writers upon any part of the field are
acknowledged in their proper connections.
George Trumbull Ladd.
Hayama, Japan, September, 1907.
CONTENTS

CONTENTS OF PART I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Invitation 1
II. First Glimpses of Korea 15
III. Life in Seoul 37
IV. Life in Seoul (Continued) 65
V. The Visit To Pyeng-yang 90
VI. Chemulpo and Other Places 112
VII. The Departure 139
VIII. Personal Reminiscences and Impressions 148
CONTENTS OF PART II
IX. The Problem: Historical 179
X. The Problem: Historical (Continued) 222
XI. The Compact 252
XII. Rulers and People 280
XIII. Resources and Finance 300
XIV. Education and the Public Justice 326
XV. Foreigners and Foreign Relations 352
XVI. Wrongs: Real and Fancied 367
XVII. Missions and Missionaries 388
XVIII. July, 1907, and After 414
XIX. The Solution of the Problem 444
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Marquis Ito Frontispiece
TO FACE PAGE
Bird’s-Eye View of the Capital City 22
Going to the Lecture at Independence Hall 52
Water-gate at Pyeng-yang 100
West Gate or “Gate of Generous
Righteousness” 132
Peony Point at Pyeng-yang 184
The Tong-Kwan Tai-Kwol Palace 206
The Ex-Emperor and Present Emperor 284
The Hall of Congratulations 306
Street Scene in Seoul 330
The Stone-Turtle Monument 384
Funeral Procession in Seoul 408
PART I
A NARRATIVE OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
CHAPTER I
THE INVITATION

It was in early August of 1906 that I left New Haven for a third visit
to Japan. Travelling by the way of the Great Lakes through Duluth
and St. Paul, after a stay of two weeks in Seattle, we took the
Japanese ship Aki Maru for Yokohama, where we arrived just before
the port was closed for the night of September 20. Since this ship
was making its first trip after being released from transport service in
conveying the Japanese troops home from Manchuria, and was
manned by officers who had personal experiences of the war to
narrate, the voyage was one of uncommon interest. Captain Yagi
had been in command of the transport ship Kinshu Maru when it was
sunk by the Russians, off the northeastern coast of Korea. He had
then been carried to Vladivostok, and subsequently to Russia, where
he remained in prison until the end of the war. Among the various
narratives to which I listened with interest were the two following;
they are repeated here because they illustrate the code of honor
whose spirit so generally pervaded the army and navy of Japan
during their contest with their formidable enemy. It is in reliance on
the triumph of this code that those who know the nation best are
hopeful of its ability to overcome the difficulties which are being
encountered in the effort to establish a condition favorable to safety,
peace, and prosperity by a Japanese Protectorate over Korea.
At Vladivostok the American Consul pressed upon Captain Yagi a
sum of money sufficient to provide a more suitable supply of food
during his journey by rail to Russia. This kindly offer was respectfully
declined on the sentimental ground that, as an officer of Japan, he
could not honorably receive from a stranger a loan which it was
altogether likely he would never be able to repay. But when still
further urged, although he continued to decline the money, he
begged only the Consul’s card, “lest he might himself forget the
name or die,” and so his Government would be unable to
acknowledge the kindness shown to one of its officers. The card was
given, sent to Tokyo, and—as the Captain supposed—the Consul
was “thanked officially.” The first officer, an Englishman, who had
been in the service of Japan on the Aki Maru, while it was used for
transporting troops to Manchuria and prisoners on its return, told this
equally significant story. His ship had brought to Japan as prisoner
the Russian officer second in command at the battle of Nan-san.
Having been wounded in the foot, the Russian was, after his capture,
carried for a long distance by Japanese soldiers, to whom, when
they reached the hospital tent, he offered a $20 gold-piece. But they
all refused to receive money from a wounded foe. “If it had been
Russian soldiers,” said this officer of his own countrymen, “they
would not only have taken this money but would have gone through
my pockets besides.”
Before leaving home only two official invitations had been
received, namely, to lecture on Education before the teachers in the
Tokyo branch of the Imperial Educational Society; and to give a
course in the Imperial University of Kyoto, on a topic which it was
afterward decided should be the “Philosophy of Religion.” This
university was to open in the following autumn a Department of
Philosophy (such a forward movement having been delayed by the
war with Russia). Almost immediately on our arrival, a multitude of
requests for courses of lectures and public addresses came to the
committee in charge of the arrangements, with the result that the six
months from October 1, 1906, to April 1, 1907, were crowded full of
interesting and enjoyable work. In the intervals of work, however,
there was opportunity left for much valuable social intercourse and
for meeting with men like Togo, Oyama, Noghi, and others in military
and business, as well as educational circles, whose names and
deeds are well known all over the civilized world. But it is not the
narrative of these six months which is before us at the present time,
although doubtless they had a somewhat important influence in
securing the opportunity and providing the preparation for the
subsequent visit to Korea.
The thought of seeing something of the “Hermit Kingdom” (a title,
by the way, which is no longer appropriate) had been in our minds
before leaving America, only as a somewhat remote possibility. Not
long after our arrival in Japan the hint was several times given by an
intimate friend, who is also in the confidence of Marquis Ito, that the
latter intended, on his return in mid-winter from Seoul, to invite us to
be his guests in his Korean residence. It was not, however, until the
afternoon of December 5 that the invitation was first received. This
was at the garden-party given by Marquis Nabeshima on his sixty-
first birthday. It should be explained that every Japanese is born
under one of the twelve signs—corresponding to our signs of the
Zodiac. When five of these periods have been completed the total of
sixty years corresponds with the end of six periods of ten years each
—a reckoning which is, I believe, of Chinese origin. The fortunate
man, therefore, may be said to begin life over again; and presents
such as are ordinarily appropriate only to childhood are entirely in
order on such a festal occasion. While walking in the beautiful
garden, which is of Japanese style but much modified by Italian
ideals, the private secretary of Marquis Ito, Mr. Furuya, came to us
and announced that his chief, who had recently returned from Seoul
to Japan, was near and wished to see me. After an exchange of
friendly greetings almost immediately the Marquis said: “I am
expecting to see you in my own land, which is now Korea”; and when
I jestingly asked, “But is it safe to be in Korea?” (implying some fear
of a Russian invasion under his protectorate) he shook his fist
playfully in the air and answered: “But I will protect you.” To this he
added, pointing to his sword: “You see, I am half-military now.” The
significance of the last remark will be the better understood when it is
remembered that from the days of his young manhood to the present
hour, Ito has always stood for the peaceful policy and the cultivation
of friendly relations between Japan and all the rest of the world. For
this reason he has never been the favorite of the military party; and
he is to-day opposed in his administration of Korean affairs by those
who would apply to them the mailed hand of punishment and
suppression rather than hold out the friendly but firm hand of
guidance and help.
Even after this interview the real purpose of the invitation to visit
Korea was not evident. A week later, however, it was disclosed by a
visit from Mr. Yamada of the Japan Times, who came from Marquis
Ito to present his request more fully and to arrange for a subsequent
extended conference upon the subject. I was then informed, in a
general way, how it was thought by the Resident-General I might be
of help to him and to Japan in solving the difficult problem of
furthering for the Koreans themselves the benefits which the existing
relations of the two countries made it desirable for both to secure.
Complaints of various sorts were constantly being made, not only
against individual Japanese, but also against the Japanese
administration, as unjust and oppressive to the Koreans, and as
selfish and exclusive toward other foreigners than its own
countrymen. Especially had such complaints of late been propagated
by American missionaries, either directly by letters and newspaper
articles, or more indirectly by tales told to travellers who, since they
were only passing a few days in Korea, had neither desire nor
opportunity to investigate their accuracy. In this way, exaggerations
and falsehoods were spread abroad as freely as one-sided or half-
truths. In the office of Resident-General the Marquis greatly desired
to be absolutely just and fair, and to prevent the mistakes, so harmful
both to Korea and to Japan, which followed the Japanese occupation
of Korea at the close of the Chino-Japan war. But it was difficult, and
in most cases impossible, for him even to find out what the
complaints were; they came to the public ear in America and
England before he was able to get any indication of their existence
even. And when his attention was called to them in this roundabout
fashion, further difficulties, almost insuperable, intervened between
him and the authors of these complaints; for in most cases it turned
out that the foreign plaintiffs had no first-hand information regarding
the truth of the Korean stories. They would not themselves take the
pains to investigate the complaints, much less would they go to the
trouble to bring the attention of the Resident-General to the matters
complained of in order that he might use his magisterial authority to
remedy them. In respect to these, and certain other difficulties,
Marquis Ito thought that I might assist his administration if I would
spend some time upon the ground as his guest.
The nature of this invitation put upon me the responsibility of
answering two questions which were by no means altogether easy of
solution; and on which it was, from their very nature, impossible to
get much trustworthy advice. The first of these concerned my own
fitness for so delicate and difficult but altogether unaccustomed
work. The second raised the doubt whether I could in this way be
more useful to Japan and to humanity than by carrying out the
original plan of spending the spring months lecturing in Kiushu. After
consulting with the few friends to whom I could properly mention the
subject, and reflecting that the judgment of His Imperial Majesty, with
whom Marquis Ito would doubtless confer, as well as of the
Resident-General himself, might fairly be considered conclusive, I
accepted the invitation; but it was with mingled feelings of pleasure
and of somewhat painful hesitation as to how I should be able to
succeed.
The illness of Marquis Ito which, though not serious, compelled
him to retire from the exciting life of the capital city to the seaside,
and then to the hills, prevented my meeting him before I left Tokyo
for Kyoto to fulfil my engagements in the latter city. But, by
correspondence with a friend, I was kept informed of the Marquis’
plans for his return to Korea, and thus could govern my
engagements so as to be in the vicinity of some point on his route
thither, at which the meeting with him might take place.
The expected conference followed immediately after our return
from one of the most delightful of the many gratifying experiences
which came to us during our year in Japan. We had taken a trip to
the village of Hiro Mura, where formerly lived Hamaguchi Goryo, the
benevolent patron of his village, whose act of self-sacrifice in burning
his rice straw in order to guide the bewildered villagers to a place of
safety when they were being overwhelmed by a tidal wave in the
darkness of midnight, has been made the theme of one of Lafcadio
Hearn’s interesting tales. Mr. Hearn, it appears, had never visited the
locality; and, indeed, we were assured that we were the first
foreigners who had ever been seen in the village streets. A former
pupil of mine is at the head of a flourishing school patronized by the
Hamaguchi family; and having accepted his invitation, in the name of
the entire region, to visit them and speak to the school and to the
teachers of the Prefecture, the cordial greeting, hospitable
entertainment, and the surpassingly beautiful scenery, afforded a
rich reward for the three or four days of time required. For, as to the
scenery, not the drive around the Bay of Naples or along the

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