The World Broke Up into Splinters, Part One / Henry Abramovitch

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche,18:2 / Spring 2024
Naomi Nir’s Account of Her Analyses with Erich Neumann and Emma Jung,

In the mid-twentieth century, Naomi Nir, an Israeli citizen, was in analysis with two outstanding figures in analytical psychology: Erich Neumann and Emma Jung. She began analysis with Neumann in 1949 following her divorce from her husband, the eminent folklorist Raphael Patai. At the same time, Naomi Nir began to write an intimate and detailed journal describing the torments of her inner life and her experiences in analysis. The journal’s first entry is on December 21, 1948, and the final one is in 1973. The journal, comprising 2655 pages, is typed, 1.5 line spaced, on onion skin paper in English, with occasional handwritten entries in Hebrew, Greek, German, Armenian, and other languages. Entries are dated, and page numbers run sequentially. Some entries run for many pages. Naomi titled her journal Notes, apparently to evoke the metaphor of musical notes—music being one of the very few things that brought her comfort and serenity, and perhaps also to suggest their ephemeral quality. Significantly, Notes included detailed accounts of her analyses with two seminal figures in Jungian psychology: Erich Neumann in Tel Aviv in 1949 and Emma Jung in Switzerland in 1953.

In this, the first of a two-part essay, I will present extracts from Naomi’s Notes during the period she was in analysis with Erich Neumann. In the second part, I will provide selections from her Notes when she was in treatment with Emma Jung. Naomi was very ambivalent about publication of her diary, to which she had devoted so much of her passion and time. Writing on May 22, 1949, she addresses the issue, saying “it contains much material that could be of interest to others, [and] parts of it could be published (somewhat like the examples in Jung’s individuation process) … I was thinking how much it would have given me—half a year ago, or now … to read the growth of a human soul.” Yet, in a letter to her daughter, Daphne, decades later, she writes: “The very thought of publication paralyzes me.” On the one hand, Naomi understood its importance to the Jungian community as a record of her “inner experience” of analyses with two seminal figures. Yet, on the other hand, Naomi made no attempt to publish it but left the lengthy typescript and her original handwritten Notes, with her daughters, Jennifer Schneider and Daphne Patai, with instructions that they were not to read it or attempt to publish it until after her death.

In the essay that follows, I quote extensively from the invaluable material and insights that Naomi’s daughters provided. Extracts from Naomi’s journal provide a unique and intimate picture of a Jungian analysis as well as a moving account by an unknown, somewhat tragic figure in the history of Jungian psychology. The original manuscript as well as much of Naomi’s artwork, including 130 letters from Neumann, are on deposit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Du Bois Library: http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/mums952. It is hoped that this essay will draw attention to Naomi Nir’s Notes, which may be of interest to the Jungian community and beyond.

Background

Naomi Nir, née Tolkowsky, was born into an eminent Jewish Zionist family in British Mandate Palestine. Naomi’s maternal grandfather, Itzhak Lev Goldberg (1860–1935), was founder and editor of HaAretz, still the leading newspaper in Israel. He anonymously donated the lands for the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as performing many other significant, anonymous acts of philanthropy and so is known as the “unknown benefactor.” Naomi’s father Shmuel (Samuel) Tolkowsky (1886–1965) pioneered the citrus trade in Palestine and eventually become Israel’s first ambassador to Switzerland. Naomi’s brother, Dan (1921–), was head of the Israel Air Force from 1953 to 1958 and later started the first venture capitalist fund to invest in high tech in Israel.

Naomi, a second daughter and middle of three children, was born in Manchester, England, in 1917 (apparently because of the bombing of London—where her parents were then living—during WWI) but grew up among the cultural, social, and economic elite of Tel Aviv. She had a quite difficult relationship with her own mother and was raised largely by nannies or governesses, as will be discussed later. In 1940, she married Raphael Patai, ordained as a rabbi but who turned rapidly to folklore and anthropology. A native of Hungary, he was the first person to receive a PhD from the new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Patai was the author of widely influential books, such as The Hebrew Goddess, The Arab Mind, The Jewish Mind, The Jewish Alchemists, Hebrew Myths (with Robert Graves), the prize-winning The Myth of the Jewish Race (with his daughter Jennifer Patai Wing, now Schneider), and many more. He also wrote a brilliant and fascinating three-volume autobiography that is a key source about Naomi Nir’s life up to the moment when she began therapy with Erich Neumann in 1949. In Patai’s Journeyman in Jerusalem (2000), the middle volume of his autobiography, he describes his meeting and life with Naomi:

… a friendship gradually developed between Naomi and me, expressed for another two years … confined to intellectual exchange … a young lady with a keen intellect, with definite view and opinions, with a personality and individuality. But at the same time, she was extremely reserved and reticent the moment our conversation touched on personal matters: in that case she would instantly withdraw into herself and become uncommunicative and even curt and tongue tied …

How I won the love of Naomi is a chapter in our relationship that completely escapes me … I do remember she underwent a profound change. She was no longer the flinching, wincing, girl-child who shrank from the slightest emotional and physical contact, but instead a young woman, glowing, burning with love.

She was of medium height, somewhat on the small size, with slim figure, narrow hips, beautiful full arms, and a slender neck upon which she carried a head crowned with rich dark-ash blonde hair that fell to her shoulders in large waves. She had a beautiful forehead … under straight eyebrows her gray-blue eyes were deep set … bow-shaped mouth, arched somewhat downward, enclosing beautiful white teeth. Oval face … I felt she was my intellectual equal. (Patai 2000, 342) <EXT>

Patai gives detailed description of intimate moments during their short courtship, wedding, and life as newlyweds that “did not cause even the slightest ripple of disagreement between us” (346). He dedicated a three-volume study of his research to Naomi, symbolically titled Adam va Adama (Adam and the Earth) since Adama, “earth,” is the feminine of Adam. Naomi spent most of her time doing what she liked best, namely “reading books on history, archaeology, psychology, Jewish and Oriental studies etc.” (352).

In view of subsequent events, Patai no doubt idealizes his relationship with Naomi: “Our marriage was blessed with harmony. Naomi and I saw eye to eye on everything … ” But he was very surprised to learn that Naomi’s relation with her mother “was characterized by tension, discord and antagonism.”

Naomi’s mother actively blocked Raphael from getting an academic position at the Goldberg Fund for the Promotion of Hebrew Literature and Culture to which he felt well suited and which Naomi’s grandfather had founded. As a result, Naomi severed for a time all relations with her parents, and this drama played out throughout her pregnancy with her first child. Patai speaks of warm, playful relations with their two daughters, Jennifer (Ofra) and Daphne. Naomi had been brought up, not by her mother, but by nannies and felt strongly that her children should be brought up just as strictly, in the style of her own British nursemaids. For example, Naomi felt that once a baby or child is put to bed for the night, any crying should be strictly ignored. In contrast, Patai grew up with a mother whose love for him knew no bounds.

Eventually “because of Naomi’s rundown state of health” the girls were put into foster care, first very briefly next door to Raphael’s parents and later for several years in a moshav outside of Tel Aviv. Patai, despite publishing five books and over one hundred articles, failed to find employment in Palestine and took up a Warburg fellowship in New York. Naomi placed the little girls in care with a German family at Ramot HaShavim, a moshav a few miles north of Tel Aviv. Naomi would visit irregularly and seemed unaware of the neglectful condition of her daughters. Jennifer (then known as Ofra) would say, “Why are you staying only a minute?”

Naomi also suffered from severe migraines and would need to spend long periods alone in a darkened room, further interfering with the attachment bonding. Many years later, Jennifer in a phone call to Israel, asked why she and Daphne had been left for three years in abusive care, without a mother. Naomi replied, in essence: “What’s the big deal about living with your mother? I did, and my mother didn’t care about me.” Naomi’s loveless relation with her own mother is revealed in a story that Naomi once told Daphne: as an adult, one day she was having lunch with her mother and a former nanny of Naomi’s happened by and greeted Naomi warmly. When the woman had left, Naomi’s mother said, “She always loved you, how strange!”

Later in 1947, Naomi joined her husband in New York, and the girls, despite having two sets of grandparents, uncles, and aunts, remained in this dreadful situation. Naomi and Raphael worked together to complete a lengthy biography of Zionist activist Robert Kesselman. Patai goes on to write: “The only differences that emerged between Naomi and me—they were slight ones, until to my great surprise and dismay, she decided to leave me in the spring of 1948 in New York … ” (2000, 430). Naomi never explained to her husband, nor to her daughters, the reason for the sudden divorce.

In a key passage in her journal described shortly, Naomi writes of her need to be alone. Indeed, a number of people, including her sister-in-law, said that had Naomi been born a Catholic, she would have surely become a nun. In any case, after Naomi returned alone to Tel Aviv, she changed her family name to Nir. Zionist ideology encouraged Jews to change their diaspora names to short, modern, or biblical Hebrew ones, often connected to nature. Presumably Naomi did not wish to return to her maiden name, nor to retain her husband’s name. Instead, she chose the name Nir. Nir means “plowed field” or “perhaps a furrow ready for plowing” (Jeremiah 4:3; Hosea 10:12.). Although Naomi did not discuss the meaning of her new name, perhaps because it was changed prior to beginning her journal, it may have indicated a desire to be connected to the earth, ready for planting. It is also probable that she liked the alliteration of Naomi Nir. Naomi, her biblical namesake, in the Book of Ruth, lives a life of loss and sorrow until she unexpectedly finds friendship and new life. As we shall see, there may have been a secret destiny in her name Naomi as well. At that time, she lived in her parents’ apartment in Tel Aviv along with her brother, Dan, and his wife, Miriam. Her father had gone to set up Israel’s first mission to Switzerland. Naomi at this time worked in an office in the Archives Department in the Ministry of Defense.

Naomi Nir began analysis with Erich Neumann toward the beginning of 1949. Neumann and his analyst wife, Julia, saw patients at their home in Tel Aviv on Gordon St., close to the sea. In addition to sessions, Naomi describes many active imagination conversations with him, and she would write him letters, or put portions of her Notes in his post box. During the long, difficult summer break in the analysis, when Erich Neumann was at the Eranos Conference speaking on Mystical Man, she would at times yearn for him, calling him “my darling,” but at other times write that she was glad he was away.

It is important to emphasize that extracts I have selected form only a tiny fraction of the material for the year 1949, and that at other points in the Notes, Naomi returns and discusses aspects of the analysis. In addition, I have cited only letters between Naomi and Neumann that she included in the Notes itself, which represents only a small portion of the correspondence of 130-plus letters from Neumann that survive.

Naomi Nir’s Notes

The first entry of the journal sets the tone of inner alienation:

And again this emptiness, this unrest and irritability, the inner weakness and not-being-there. What is it? Why this small, restless discomfort that dogs me so constantly? The morning was so beautiful, so golden and limpid and still. I want to sing and be glad within me, but the iron cast which encases my spirit closed upon it and choked it.

This initial entry is like an overture to the entire journal to follow and explores how Naomi feels trapped between inner “emptiness … weakness and not-being-there” and a “morning … so beautiful, so golden and limpid and still”; between a desire to sing and be glad and “the iron cast which encases my spirit.” Holding these dire opposites together will be the central challenge for the analysis with Erich Neumann.

She sees the tree trunks as human muscles, “tense and throbbing.” She then tries to summon her inner Muse:

Write and you will find your ways to yourself. But something in me answered: “No! I want to feel the light and thrill and music of it all directly, without translating life into words! I will not write.”

Her deep ambivalence toward writing, words, and the “sayable” continues:

… and the white pages within my closed bag burned into my soul, white pages with the letters still unwritten, the bridge to myself which I will not set up. “I will not write!” I repeated persistently … “Oh, why did I take the pages with me?” … I began to plan how to get rid of them …

Finally, she does manage to overcome the ambivalence between the unsaid and the word and writes. But even as she does write, she is harsh and critical of what emerged: “So now at last I have written poor empty words, poor and empty as my soul.”

On February 14, 1949, she writes for the first and only time about the incident that led to the end of her marriage to Raphael Patai: “I realize now what a kindness R. did me by being so harsh and violent with me—he made it as easy for me as was humanly possible, to leave him.” As we know from Patai’s account, Naomi’s action seemed to him impulsive and inexplicable. Naomi never expresses regret or ambivalence about the breakup and her desire to take up analysis seems connected, not with the divorce, but with her inner existential crisis.

Later she speaks of her “inner child”:

The child is timid and shy and dare not express itself—it is dumb and inarticulate as a kitten. When it is happy it smiles and there is light and lightness in her soul, when it is hurt and frightened it hides away and cries silently. It dare not stand up and speak for itself, but waits dumbly for someone to understand its dumb pleading, to comfort it and love it and reassure it. When in its loneliness nature offers it gay flowers, graceful birds, dancing trees, or murmuring whispers of leaves—it is comforted and smiles through its tears and after a moment no longer knows why it was so sad a moment ago and where the sorrow has fled.

The sole place where Naomi the wounded child and Naomi the adult woman can meet is in children’s art, either with paints themselves or in books on children’s art. This will play a role later in her life. What is remarkable is how much Naomi seems a helpless, ambivalent, wounded victim, living the feelings of the present moment where only things from nature, presumably the consoling presence of the Great Mother, make her smile.

The first reference concerning Erich Neumann (Dr. N.) comes on February 17, 1949, although she had already been in analysis for some weeks.

“The child” has been wanting to write, ever since yesterday evening, ever since the colourful, dancing drawing came singing out of its heart. I kept her back, thinking it would be better if she keeps her words for Dr. N., for listening to her he may understand. But I do not know whether I am right—I hesitate.

Ten days later (February 27, 1949), she records her first dream about Neumann:

 … I am told to come (to Dr. N) at two o’clock in the afternoon. I come and wait and wait—there is another girl waiting (a very young girl with a violin, I think). Finally, after I wait for hours, I realize that I must have come at one o’clock instead of two. Apart from that, when finally, Dr. N. is free to call in the next one—he calls in the girl. After a time two small boys appear with a schoolbook. They say Dr. N. said I was to help them with their lessons. I begin to read with them—it is something in Hebrew—and we come to a passage which they ask me to explain—and I can’t. I don’t understand it. It is something about ears and eyes. Finally, I give up the attempt and take the children home. It is some place in Jerusalem which I don’t know. I get off the bus and begin walking back. It is evening, the uneven cobbled little streets are getting dark. I don’t know my way.

Finally, I find my way back, and am finally in Dr. N.’s room. He accuses me—I don’t know of what, but I know that in defending myself I tell him of the times I fell off and nearly got killed, of the times when I got so dizzy I couldn’t go on—and as for my being late (of which he also accuses me) I remind him that he sent the boys to me. The mother of the boys is there somehow and is annoyed that he told me to help them instead of helping them himself. I see I have put Dr. N. into an unpleasant situation, and I try to smooth things.

There are many things of interest in this “initial dream” (Jung 1967, CW 5, ¶62; Kradin 2006). Overall, the dream reflects the already complex and complicated relationship with her analyst which will play itself out through the course of treatment. As an initial dream, it clearly points to the need for her to “care” for her inner children and to repair something in the way she perceives the world, her “ears and eyes.” Perhaps, the dream’s most telling line is:

He accuses me—I don’t know of what, but I know that in defending myself I tell him of the times I fell off and nearly got killed, of the times when I got so dizzy I couldn’t go on.

Clearly such an evocative scene can be understood in many ways, but I believe it highlights the therapeutic agenda of the need to deal with a defensiveness that has its roots in trauma (“I fell off and nearly got killed”) and dissociation (“I got so dizzy I couldn’t go on”).

The most poignant entries are those that reflect her fragmented inner life, and her extreme shifting of mood. On the day following the dream, she writes:

As though I were a sea-weed, I feel myself undulate, flowing hither and thither, without definite form yet still somehow all-of-a-piece undetachable. They flow through me, the waves, sweeping, sweeping, then letting go.

Now I am carried away on a mighty surge of passion, sweet, tormenting, exhausting and strengthening … I yield to the wave wildly, wholly, unresistently, longingly …

Later in the same entry, she reveals the purpose of the journal:

I am writing in the hope that through it I may come back to life. I was alive for a short while this afternoon as I sat beside the river looking at the reflections of trees on the slow-flowing waters. For a while I was alive and everything had sense and significance, and somehow all I knew and had known seemed to connect, to be part of the whole with the wind and the broken reflections, the trees, the afternoon sun, and warmth and understanding and love. A whole world of symbols and meanings lay behind every single thing I set my eyes upon.

Then—I don’t know why—I died again. The world broke up into splinters of separate objects, into isolated things that had no significance but only mere existence. All the ties that bind the separate things were gone—all symbolism, all significance, all echoes and shadows and lights, all love and relatedness, were gone. I was but a barren single splinter in a splintered world.

And in the following passage, she reveals another side of her feeling world:

A kind of rebellious rage is upon me. I feel like a child that is angry at everything, refuses to be reasonable, and is determined to break every damned cup and plate in the house … I’ll not wash the paint off my fingers, I’ll dirty the pages. I want to behave like a petulant child! So there!

This newfound emotional freedom to express defiance and rage is possibly a result of her treatment with Neumann. Indeed, in the very next entry (March 5, 1949) she describes her reactions to an actual session:

Something good and comforting came over me when Dr. N. said yesterday that I would live all my life fluctuating between the two (actually it is—translated into my terms—heaven and earth). It was as if he agreed that my attachment to heaven were more valid, and suddenly some battle within me ceased. And in the night, sometime between waking and sleeping, I suddenly thought: “I no longer have to fight to be allowed to love all that is beautiful.”—and of a sudden I know that these, too, are part of the earth and the earth is part of them.

Here we get a unique “snapshot” of how Neumann is helping her hold together the opposites and reawaken a dormant transcendent function of self-acceptance. Indeed, the very next entry starts: “Beginning of a renewed wish to paint” (March 6, 1949). Naomi’s reaction is very reminiscent of Kalsched’s description of trauma and raises the issue of whether in addition to a profound disturbance of the primary relationship, there were not additional traumas underlying such archetypal dissociation (1996). It may also reflect an inner inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, as when she writes:

I try to live according to the principle that life and dreams have value only in so far as the one corroborates the other. And so I fluctuate between condemning all life-experience, all human relationships, because they fall short of my dreams—or else (in despair of the emptiness which such a “method” leaves), I dismiss all dreams that are not substantiated, brushing them away as idle childish phantasies. This, too, leaves a dull empty ache in one’s heart … (March 19, 1949)

“ … I ask myself why joy is so fleeting and why pain drags so seemingly endlessly.” She discovers the incredible gap between her Self and her persona, and her false self: “I stare at the pathetic living lie of all these years … how can a human being be so deaf to its inner voices as to get so lost?” In a key passage in her journal, Naomi describes her need to be alone:

I must be alone—it is life to me now, it is the precondition of any kind of balance and mental functioning. —Yet Daphy is obviously unhappy, and Ofra’s little face has a drawn look about it that worries me.

What am I supposed to do? My God! What am I to do?

I think I do not want the children now. The thought of not being able to be alone undisturbed for some hours of each day, drives me desperate. I cannot live with all my time marked out—8 to 4—office; 4 — … children. I cannot.

It is a monstrous selfishness. I am a mother who is not prepared to sacrifice herself for her children’s happiness.

Why am I created so? … Why is being a mother to them the opposite of being true to my self?”

Naomi’s eldest daughter, Jennifer Schneider, wrote me:

About 25 years ago I remember having a phone conversation with Naomi. (I was in Arizona, she was in Israel). I asked her a question about in the 1940s when she decided to place Daphne and me with a German farm family who at the time made extra money by providing temporary room and board for children whose parents were going on a brief vacation. They never saw their role as including any caring relationship with those children, just room and board (and in our case, making sure we went to school, etc.). We were there for 3 years (!!), until our father, who had moved to New York City and remarried, brought us over in 1950 to live with him. She answered defensively, I never forgot that!!

At the end of that same February 1949 entry, a memory from Küsnacht emerges:

And again Kusnacht comes back to me: I am reading The Love Letters of a Chinese Lady. Words that always rang like sheer music to me lilting into my soul like a melody … “for it is the written word of Kwei-Lee who sends with each stroke of the brush a part of her heart … ”

This recollection raises intriguing questions. What was she was doing in Küsnacht? Was she seeking an encounter with Carl Jung or Emma Jung, who five years later would be her second Jungian analyst. What is it about these love letters that “lilting … like a melody” succeeded in nurturing her unnourished soul? The opening lines written by a loving wife to her absent husband, do evoke Naomi’s inner state:

The house on the mountaintop has lost its soul. It is nothing but a palace with empty windows. I go upon the terrace and look over the valley where the sun sinks a golden red ball, casting long purple shadows on the plain. Then I remember that thou art not coming from the city to me, and I say to myself that there can be no dawn that I care to see, and no sunset to gladden my eyes, unless I share it with thee. (Cooper 1919, 1).

Although recently separated from her husband, Naomi inwardly yearns for an absent lover, and she is relentlessly victimized by her own changeable moods as when she writes:

… in the office. It is quiet and a bit sad. —yet also happy in a way.

How long can one go on being happy?

The happiness does not last very long. Soon Naomi is in the depth of a soul winter. Like Jung, Naomi felt the natural language of the soul is “images, paintings, beauty.” In an especially poignant passage, she announces her return to her journal after a three-week absence:

To be writing again is bitter. It means I lost the battle and am signing a declaration of defeat … Yesterday I kept painting without being able to understand what for. It made no sense to me …

She describes how her drawing of a fanatical monk persecuted her (“This one will never forgive anything”) and tries to correct it into a girl’s face but only ends up crying.

Two days later (April 18, 1949), she recalled a dream:

… Of a sudden it came back to me. It was the story of a girl who lived in the woods, [with her mother] … primeval forest, so thick and deep and close, that people who live in it die after a time. They cannot stand it. I walked in this forest. It was immense and strange and uncanny. It was full of a deep silence … At some point I hear a strange knocking. The girl (who at times appears, yet at times is dead) asks me whether I know what it is. I look into the thickness of the forest that lies near me (whence the sound came) and see, through a half-solid fibrous haze, a woodpecker pecking a hole in a tree-trunk. I say so. She begins to explain to me that it is not quite as I saw, and tells me of the life of the birds. She shows me the strange fibrous haze behind which they live and tells me about it. ( … I am haunted by the feeling that I am lying. I am writing out this dream almost in fear—as if I were doing a forbidden thing.) I touch the fibrous haze and it is soft and crackly (together) to the touch. Behind this, as behind a screen, the birds live …

A procession of men carrying loads of “water (or earth—the things seem interchangeable)” from the forest’s immense supply.

I remember my surprise when I find that the mother—a human mother—who lives in the forest, has a big reservoir or pool of water in her house—water of the human kind, as if she could not use the immense forest supply. This struck me in the dream. It seemed so strange that humans should make expeditions into the forest to fetch some forest-water, yet a human living in the forest should need, to live on, water as is common among humans outside the forest.

Of the mother I am told she is always so young, so youthful, even at an age when other women look older and less full of life—yet the loneliness of life in the forest, the lack of other humans, has made her sad and aged and silent and queer. I go into her house—it has small rooms, pleasant with all kinds of small sculptured things—and in contrast to the small rooms there is that big stone-reservoir of water, humans’ water as part of the house. She cooks beside this water, using it for house purposes. (The thought strikes me: Is it that the forest-water has “mana” in it and cannot be used for dish-washing etc. [which are חולין]? Is that why men come at times to take a little of it to the place where men live?)

The mother and daughter chose to live in the forest … The daughter dies and the mother deteriorates … I remember her as white-haired and silent, with a kind of slowness about her …

The girl had been very talented in school. She had written wonderful poems. (The figure of Rima the bird-girl, in Hudson’s Green Mansions keeps coming back to me.)

Dr. N. stands nearby, in the forest, after the girl is dead, and shows me a letter which her teacher had written to her many years before—a kind of prophetic letter. The teacher (a woman) seems to have known that this strange girl upon whose talents she had hung such high hopes, and whom she loved greatly—would “return” to the forest and would die young. The whole letter, which was beautiful, was a kind of lament for what is yet to happen.

It is curious that Dr. N. is beside me when the girl is dead, when the great forest is being inspected by us … now only of historical interest. Yet when I am alone in the forest it is alive and real and “all there,” and the girl is alive, and altogether it is athrill with life and mystery. The scenes where the forest is a thing of the past (and where Dr. N. is beside me), seem to alternate with scenes where I am alone, and everything is alive and immediate.

I remember being worried by the question of past-present after I woke. Many times (perhaps already in the dream—yes) I kept trying to make these two things fit into a consistent picture. In one scene with Dr. N. (who, somehow, is never active or “significant” but always stands there as if to symbolize something)—we are looking at a photograph of the girl’s schooldays. She learned in the Herzliya Gymnasium, and the picture shows Mosensohn and Bugrashov—who were already elderly when I entered school some twenty-five years ago—as young men. I remember wondering in the dream how she could have been to school so many years ago and yet I met her in the forest now as a young girl.

The discrepancy of the forest as of historical interest and the forest as an intensely alive power of now—worries and worried me and will not leave me alone.

She remembered as against the mother’s subduedness, the strange happiness of the girl. And again Rima the bird-girl comes back to me. The very name of her is heavy and light with magic. <EXT>

This fascinating dream highlights the tension between the “dead” parts of Naomi’s psyche and other parts now coming to life. It is hard for her fragmented psyche to connect these disparate parts together. The mother in the dream seems like a compensatory, ever-youthful, maternal mother, in contrast with her actual biological mother. The role of Dr. N. seems to reflect some of her actual experience in therapy, inspecting the dead girl like an archaeologist.

At the end of that same long entry (April 18, 1949) is the first of many letters Naomi wrote to Neumann that she incorporated into her diary:

I have been puzzling over my relations with you (yes, to you, I didn’t start this with “Dear Dr. N.” because this letter-form of address “feels” unsuitable to me). Perhaps the dream made me turn this more urgently in my mind. Perhaps. But I was wondering about this yesterday (as often before) when some comment of yours made me realize how little I include you in my world. It is true, as the dream puts it: you do not enter the living forest with me … I do not know how to include you because I could only include you body-and-soul—and you do not want to be included completely, only partially, and I do not know how to do it.

I am still on the peripheries of human life and I do not know how to relate to a human being in a human fashion.

Naomi

At this point, it may be unclear whether this is a fantasy letter or an actual letter. But further entries, which often include Neumann’s replies, show clearly that in addition to sessions, Naomi had an intense correspondence with him. Naomi’s description of herself resembles a situation in which archetypes have not been humanized and therefore she cannot relate to human beings in a human fashion. At the same time, she describes defensive transference reactions in which she keeps her analyst at an emotional distance that minimizes the connection. In contrast, she has a fantasied transference of fusion of including him “body-and-soul.” Neumann, like many Jungians of his generation, did not work directly “with the transference” although they were aware they were “in the transference,” to use Jan Wiener’s clarifying distinction (2009). Naomi’s letter gives a real sense of how the analysis was proceeding as well as its inherent dynamics and tensions, which were sadly to be so prophetic.

Later in the journal, Naomi describes some psychotic-like reactions. Naomi painted four heads and then wonders who had painted them. She sees some heads as mocking her. On April 24, 1949, she cries out …

If I could come to terms with myself! If I could find what ails me and accept it and face it. Things keep moving relentlessly within me and my contact with them is so loose, so weak, that I cannot reach them. The ape and prehuman man come floating up on-and-off. What are they trying to make me see? Why did I tear up my writing this morning?

She has ongoing active imagination inner dialogues with “she,” an inner feminine voice that often speaks like a wise old woman. In the first dialogue, “she” advises caution concerning Neumann (April 27, 1949):

“She” said: You must not believe all he says. He tries to make you believe you are so innocent and stupid—this helping you escape taking charge … what he is doing with you now is part of his nature … Do you not remember you “came” to terms with the devil … Do you not remember what the devil [was] saying yesterday … I can hurt and torment human beings—but so long as they love God, I cannot break them.

The next entry (April 28, 1949) mentions “bringing charges” against Dr. N. “She” explains that Naomi conflates Dr. N. “as a human individual” and the psychoanalyst who “represents the process of becoming whole.” She realizes that her charges are against Neumann as a person, not as a psychoanalyst. Naomi expresses intense erotic transference, writing, “I need to love him as her ‘him—as son,’ as her messenger and representative … I fluctuate, rebelling, loving, withdrawing, pleading—baffled by a situation I cannot make out.” The dramatic, even destructive, tension between wanting Neumann, not as her analyst, but as a man who will love her totally, body-and-soul, will play itself out in the remaining half year of the analysis.

The dramatic triangle between Neumann, Naomi, and “she” reaches a new intensity in the next entry: “Last time, Dr. N. said: ‘I wonder why ‘she’ doesn’t tell you are a woman.’” Naomi then continues describing what appears to be an intensifying erotic countertransference: “… he had difficulty now remembering I am to him but a soul to be helped. I, as a woman, disturb him—as he has so often disturbed me.” Then she adds enigmatically that she told Neumann that “she” had said, “I was to refuse him nothing, that I was not to withdraw from him, that I was not to withhold anything from him.”

It is unclear whether “she” was the product of an active imagination or an inner figure that, perhaps, predated her analysis. The name itself recalls Rider Haggard’s novel She, which describes She-Who-Must Be-Obeyed (1887) and which had such an impact on Jung himself. The intensity of Naomi’s relationship to Neumann is reflected in what seems like a verbatim transcript from the analysis:

He asked me to ask “her” what he is to do about me. I asked him in surprise: “Can’t you ask your ‘third one’?” He had answered stumblingly: “‘She’ knows you better”—which sounded so poor, so unsuited to these things, that I could only smile … His intuition failed him so blatantly.

Later “she” explains that Neumann is her “guide” and she is a “growing soul that seeks its way.” “She” encourages Naomi to enter into a process with Neumann and submit to him as her analyst, even while “she” is aware of the dangers. Yet she goes on to record further accounts of an analytical impasse that seems to have developed: “Losing touch with the ‘role’ of guide, he suddenly lost faith in the process itself.” He said (apparently referring to Naomi’s journal), “Do I know all you will write till Sunday?”—in a worried way, as though it needed his intervention, as if her progress could not flow on alone without him.

He said: “Why don’t you call me to help you?” I said: “Don’t you trust “her” to guide me and help me?” He stammered something unconvincing and lame…

When Naomi returns home, she has an illuminating “waking dream” of speaking with Neumann:

We stood facing each other. I said very quietly but with deep emotion: “I do love you!” He answered, also very quietly but with the same deep, accepting, emotion in his voice:

“I love you too.”

I said: “What are we going to do about it?”

He said: “Respect each other’s integrity.”

I said: “God bless you.”

He answered: “You too.”

Then the “dream” vanished.

Later Naomi asks “she” whether it was wrong if the relationship became personal, whether it was forbidden. “She” replied it “would not be wrong if we did as the ‘third one’ said.” Adding “if … his love for you and your love for him … impoverishes him, makes him divided within himself, it is bad … ” But if it makes him “richer and wholer in himself, it is good.” At this point, Neumann, with help from “she,” is evidently able to contain the tension and hold the frame.

In another entry she writes:

I long to write that my life can be redeemed by love—yet the devil whispers mockingly at my ear: “You only want an excuse for loving him and giving yourself to him.” Great God! Does one need an excuse for loving?

Taking on aspects of the Self, “she” reassures Naomi that she will never be alone, “for I will be walking beside you.” At this point, the reader feels how much progress the analysis is making. Naomi is, perhaps for the very first time, experiencing a loving female presence from within her inner world.

Naomi tells of childlike fantasies of sudden transformation:

 … Like a child who believes she may wake up to-morrow as someone else. —as a beautiful princess instead of a little Cinderella—I keep waiting to wake up tomorrow as somebody else.

Jung taught that people are often trapped in a myth or fairy tale, and this seems true of Naomi. Here we get a clearer idea of Naomi’s diagnosis. She is unconsciously attached to a compensatory fairy tale in which she is like Cinderella, waiting passively to be turned into a princess. Her Cinderella complex put Naomi into a very passive position, as if in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be rescued. This fantasy reflected aspects of her double life. On the one hand, she was living as a princess, but one trapped in a loveless world that was dominated by a negative mother complex, waiting to be brought back to life by a Prince Charming.

Naomi then adds, “Ah, the folly of it! That anyone should sit amidst so much beauty and still be in trouble of soul!” It is not clear which beauty Naomi is referring to—the next paragraphs refer to waving sheaves, sun joyous on leaves and grass-blades—or something else, but it does recall a well-known story in the Talmud, in which Rabbi Yochanan asks his friend why he is weeping. His friend answers, “I am weeping because all this beauty will disappear.” To which Rabbi Yochanan said, “For that, it is certainly worth weeping.” And then they wept together. For Naomi, as for these rabbis, the contrast between beauty, and the loss of beauty, is almost unbearable.

Naomi then employs another metaphor to describe her inner state: “the tumbled rubble of stones the dust was rising and filling my soul … and a rumbling indistinct dull roar.” “She” then gives Naomi a lesson in love in response to Naomi’s “crying with disappointment and rage”:

You cannot force it to be yours. You cannot take it by force. You cannot seduce it. You must love it, and be ever prepared to receive it lovingly whenever it may choose to come to you. For you do not understand: you cannot give, you can but be taken by force. You think this is love. You think you must treat “it” likewise. But this is not so. You must give yourself wholly and of your own free will. You must be an “offer.” You must be ready to receive it lovingly when “it” comes.”

Then “she” says what you fear is that you will remain as you are. Later, “she” said, “If I did not know there is a spark in you, I would not trouble myself over you.”

Here “she” seems like the voice of Naomi’s Self, supporting, believing in her, facilitating change, and overcoming the threat of unbearable disappointment. Although “she” is an inner voice, it is likely a result of her therapeutic relationship with Neumann and the mothering she never had.

Other terrifying images appear between waking and sleep, such as being sucked down into a bottomless whirlpool. Yet a familiar tune provides comfort and catharsis. Hearing the tune Claire de Lune on the radio left her crying, in its evocation of the wild stillness, nostalgia, and joy of moonlit spaces! The impact left her “shaken through and through.” Returning to feeling the whirlpool sucking her “down, down,” here, too, Naomi is comforted by “she” who calms her, saying, “Do not be afraid, you will come up again.” Indeed, at another point, she is held under by the whirlpool, when “she” calls her back. “Come back, come back to this vale of tears.” Later, “she” wisely adds, put the future aside, just “face each moment as it comes.” Naomi hears the call to be in the present. To be here, now!

Then another image appears wrapped in shrouds—“round and round like an Egyptian mummy. Round and round in the swaddling clothes of the dead.” Images of swaddling and an Egyptian mummy suggest that Naomi is enacting a ritual process of death and rebirth. Indeed, the following day, May 9, 1949, there is a transformative experience of healing from the Self, when “she” says again, “You will never be alone, for I shall always be walking beside you …” The melody of a similar song “kept singing softly within me.” Now, perhaps for the first time, Naomi yearns for human companionship and love. On another troublesome night, Naomi is able to call out to “her,” and “she” answers softly and very near: “I am here.”

Much of our understanding of the analysis with Neumann is revealed through Naomi’s inner dialogues with “she and other powers within,” including “the devil.” We learn of her “letter of charges” against Neumann (which are never actually spelled out, reminiscent of the reasons for her divorce that were never explained). Yet, “she” urges her not to hurt him but be kind.

Before the next session “she” says explicitly, “You are to let him talk. You are to think of him and not of yourself,” and at the same time to be less blindly trustful but more critical. Spanish painting, Naomi says, unites “so beautifully their mysticism and their cruelty … that lie in the Spaniards and in ourselves … ”

Another image overwhelms her: “I am not here now most of the time. I am in a dense forest, walking alone … curiously unafraid.” But when she comes back to consciousness, “doubts (undefined, vague, timid)” assail her. The imbalance between her unconscious sense of being on her own journey in a dense forest and her conscious doubt and indecision is strikingly poignant.

The passion of her feelings toward Neumann further increases:

His eyes last night come back to me again and again, and his words and voice and slips that gave his feelings away. Oh, my God, I want him so! I want him so!

“She” says: “don’t close yourself up—accept it.” Her words, before, ring in my soul: “You must accept the pain; so you will be able to feel the joy of it …”

I would press my face into the sun-heated grass. I would let the sound of the water cool my burning face. I would listen to the whispering of the leaves and the murmur of the wind. I would listen and listen and listen, that “her” voice may rise within me and with the magic silence of acceptance.

She reads The Little Prince, searches for books on Jesus, or by Jung, in Tel Aviv bookstores. Yet, at other times, she seems dissociative: “Everything was unreal. I wasn’t there,” as when she almost faints at a restaurant, “with darkness before my eyes.” Or when she feels “an iron band pressed round my head as if my head were bursting,” a feeling that began when she first heard of Nazi tortures. Later she describes in vivid details a near drowning in Switzerland in what seems a true dissociative state:

I was not the frantic drowning girl—I just watched her with a clear, lucid, unemotional dispassionateness that later simply staggered me every time I remembered the episode. “I”—(= “she”) did not in the least feel worried or concerned because the girl was drowning … It was as if “she” was timeless and ageless … bound to this body.

A few weeks later, she writes, “Again I am far far away. I don’t exist.”

But then she would reconnect with her feelings for Neumann, writing, “I knew the integrity and goodness of ‘him,’ and I knew I loved him with all my heart, unconditionally.” Naomi’s phrase “with all my heart” echoes the language of shma prayer from the Bible of loving God “with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Nevertheless, the clarity of her love is once again undercut by her next line: “But most of the time I was aware of nothing.”

Two days later, she describes what “she” says just after Naomi was leaving her session:

You must be careful and watch yourself—or you will not only hurt yourself but make him suffer. You must understand that you have a difficult job before you—to remember him personally and to remember that his role is to represent me.” In the same inner encounter, “she” adds, “I want you to remember,” she said, “that whenever you judge yourself harshly it is not of me … you know he loves you …”

“She” explains that Naomi must at some point turn against him, nor is she to tie him to her, for she is “a danger to him as he is a danger to you.” Feverish and frightened, Naomi hears from “she” of the dangerous, incestuous character of their bond: “For you see,” she went on after a pause, “you still tend to feel to him at times as to a father. And that is a form of incest for you to receive him. You must first clear this up within yourself.” It is fascinating to see her inner voice guiding Naomi through incestuous, paternal transference, as though “she” had read Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949/1989).

Later Naomi writes:

I feel unsettled, as I have felt since I left him “yesterday.” I realize now that I am still far from where I would be … something drives me to write of my love, “to wallow” in it. Yet it would be but an escape … It is well that he should remember that in refusing me he withholds my greatest bridge to the unconscious.” She then speaks of “the power” she holds “to undermine his integrity.”

Then switching focus, she tells of her new insight,

For I seem to have ceased to hate the unconscious even as I realize its dangers. Is it because I came to realize to-day that my hate was defensive and that it was against the magic of my forest that I have been fighting? Is it because love to me still means what it meant to Rima?

She later gives a detailed account of the aftermath of another session:

It made me feel faint with misery and loss to know I could still turn against him. I felt my love was a lie. Much later I began to see that herein precisely lies my mistaken attitude toward love … I always feel that to refuse anything to one’s love means I do not love truly; that true love makes everything but the fulfilments of the loved one’s wishes selfishness. Now as I write this out, I see it is terribly wrong. But I still feel that way …

This key passage shows how much Naomi confused love with submission and power, following Jung’s key insight that love and power are opposites. She does confess a “devilish lust for power” is aroused within her.

Never have I been so aware of my power to make another one suffer. It frightens me. I may yet wreak on him the suppressed bitterness of all those years … he is made vulnerable by his love.

It also highlights the Jungian view of masochism, as spiritual impulse for submission, misdirected to an inappropriate human source. It may also help explain the dynamics of her marriage to Raphael Patai, which he described as true harmony when it may have reflected Naomi’s submission complex, in which she tried to give her “love” everything he wished. Indeed, she ends the entry, “I feel like praying that my love be great enough to make me human and not monstrous.”

She sees herself like a panting, suffocating, flapping fish “beside the underground sea. The waves had cast it on the shore and it was dying. The fish was I.” Every time, she saw a fish gasping, suffocating, she now understood, she “suffocated and died every time. ‘So I have died,’ I thought, ‘The cold sea-thing in me has died.’”

Naomi refers a number of times to a list of accusations toward Neumann that “will yet touch him to the quick.” The “charges,” however, are never made explicit in her text. Presumably they refer to the transference entanglement of professional distance. A few days later (May 22, 1949), she discusses for the first time, “the question of my shadow.” She tries to accept its existence but finds it hard, though it comes up in dreams and in the analysis. Here we get a bit of actual analysis, based on Hebrew wordplay. When Neumann tells her she is “holy” ((קדושה, the word that comes to her is a play on words: “For the קדשה was both priestess and prostitute, and I feel the word describes my nature truly.” Here, the reader feels the possibility of spirituality and desire, body and spirit coming together. We get another glimpse of the analytical couple later in the same entry. Naomi writes, “He said he had wished to tell me I was fortunate to be only bearing the cross, for he is crucified.” It is possible that Neumann is referring to a series of dreams and fantasies that inspired Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1969), which includes the figure of a crucified “apeman,” an image that also appears in Naomi’s own artwork.

Sitting by the Yarkon River, in Tel Aviv, she describes her changing moods, saying “I almost feel happy within me.” She experiences a kind of mystical union with the plant-world. She recalls how trees, “never unkind,” were the only refuge of her childhood. But then, erupting into anger, “Why isn’t he here? I hate him because he doesn’t want me badly enough to throw all considerations to the wind and come with me!” Part of her admires him for his restraint. And then, “Such integrity! I hate him for it! It is inhuman!”

A week later, she writes more stridently, “I remember my feelings as I left his house: ‘I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!!!’” “She” encourages Naomi to “let yourself hate him—perhaps you need it now.” Naomi feels the vast contrast to Neumann, complementing as one “with mien of an angel” while “hatred and hell” are “raging within me.” But soon after, she reports a transformative experience:

Suddenly I knew I was not hanging nailed to the cross any longer—I was standing on the ground at the foot of the cross leaning against the cross. I was in pain but I was standing steadily. “She” said: “All your life your cross will be your support.”

Watching a play set in the Nazi period, Nights of Rage at Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv, she undergoes an intense identification experience:

Suddenly the play was us. What happened there was the fight of immense powers inside the human soul, our soul, my soul. (I don’t think I ever understood before what tragedy meant.)

Then she begins to drown and experiences the horrors as applied to her own life.

The man whose eyes were poked out was the man I love. The man they tortured so was he … The anguish of his suffering was unbearable. I thought I would break.

Later, she has a moment of internalizing Neumann as an inner loving figure. “He was so near to me all day. I loved him so … and it was so good. I was happy.” It is a rare moment of happiness, soon replaced by the feeling that somewhere “within me the baby is crying, crying for the world it has lost.” This poignant image of a baby “crying for the world it has lost” reflects Naomi’s actual experience as an abandoned baby, unable to mourn the world she has lost. Later, she expresses a wish, not to live, but that despair be followed by yearning for Neumann: “If he were here, he could bring life back to me … If miracles could happen he would come now.” “She” tells Naomi to accept that he will not come today, but provides hope: “He is there, calling to you.” Yet in the next entry, she is back to “feeling empty, hard, angry, irritated … ” She describes a session when she told him she had turned away from him and marveled at how he handled it.

On June 9, 1949, Naomi writes about the tension between Neumann and “She” and felt as if she betrayed herself when she listened to him when “She” said otherwise. “Why must I choose between them?” Sitting alone in Neumann’s office when he was called out, Naomi experiences “She” telling her the cross is burned into her flesh and can never be removed. Soon after, Naomi had a somatic experience of a red hot iron cross burned into her back. “She” then told Naomi to ask Neumann for a talisman:

If only he had given me a round object—as he intended—it would have helped—I know it would have helped, for it would have reminded me of ultimate things—the only possible counterbalance to such pain. But I did not want that—I wanted something personal. I got my wish …

Naomi does not indicate what “personal object” Neumann gave her or what is the “round thing” Neumann had intended to give her. Roundness in Jewish tradition is associated with the view that “life goes round,” namely, hard times will give way eventually to better times. Symbolically, mourners are given hard-boiled eggs to eat at the first ritual meal following a funeral, as if to emphasize that just as an egg is round so, too, sorrow will yield eventually to joy.

On June 10, 1949, she puts entries into Neumann’s postbox, which she was told not to show him until the time comes. She holds back excerpts where she speaks of her love for him, which she feels would impoverish him, divide him against himself or make him suffer.

For he too longs for me for me, yet he may not touch me but must keep the relationship as non-personal as possible. I have seen how it has been wearing him down.

Hiding her feelings and seeing him solely as “psychopompos,” is the greatest “test of my love.”

It is the greatest act of love given to me to do for him—to respect his integrity, to treat him as an analyst during my visits. And should our love survive, if it be deep-rooted, we shall be able, perhaps, to take up a more personal relationship when treatment is over.

In a practice not usual at the time in both Tel Aviv and Zurich, Naomi was not only a patient of Neumann but attended Neumann’s seminars and lectures.

In E.N.’s last lecture—no, the one before—I understood him to say that Judaism had no feminine counterpart of God (or something like it): I wondered then why he did not mention the שכינה [Shekinah, Hebrew, handwritten]. I remember, for instance, the wonderful Midrash (which Raphael [Patai] also translated in his “Man and Temple”) where the Temple is described as the nuptial-chamber where the Shekinah comes to lament the loss of her lover, reminding him of their past love, in the erotic language mysticism used at the time. (Abramovitch 2006)

Naomi’s critique of Neumann’s views reflects the conflicting views held by Raphael Patai and Erich Neumann on the importance of the goddess in Ancient Israel.

Later, on June 20, 1949, Naomi writes of not attending one of Neumann’s lectures but asks, like a longing lover, “… does he know already I am not there?” Her inner dialogue continues: “A recurrent feeling: ‘Nothing firm to stand on.’”

EN stands for this inner absolute command “unto thyself be true.” It is this archetype that still clings to him in my “mind” … At some point I had a “sense impression” of my being at EN’s. I was telling him about the archetype and about the projections. As I finished, I said breathlessly: “I want to take the projection back to me.” I thought it was the last one.”

After a session with EN, she becomes aware of a growing “inflation.”

EN’s words yesterday that it is not to everyone that “they” come, seems to have gone to my head. I am beginning to feel again as if I were not human as other human beings are. <EXT>

She adds, a few lines later, “EN enables me to keep going by accepting my madness … I long so for EN’s company = he is my sanity.”

She remembers a “thorny and inhospitable” bush in the garden of her childhood that bloomed once every five years. Its flower rose up on its stem until it was higher than the surrounding trees until it, broken “by the force of its own unbalanced height,” sprawled on the ground, “not to bloom again for another five years.” Neumann sent her “a tiny miniature of that proud plant” with a note. Following the rebirth and death cycle of the giant flowering plant, Naomi goes through another dark period.

It is a desperate struggle now to keep my head above the flood … I feel as I were suffocating … I seem to be dying … I am empty … Utter blankness … I am not here at all … Oh, my God! Only pain, and more pain! Pain everywhere!

She feels her daughter’s unhappy face before her. Yet confesses that “despair creeps over me after several hours of her nearness” and has the “wish to curl up on the roadside and die.” At the end of that section, she writes:

Dear EN—I need your reassurance, I do! There seems to be nothing else left but you. What shall I do against all these powers of destruction?

Then, Naomi comes to a final decision to leave her children in care with their caretakers.

Later, she adds:

I said to EN: But what is the “bad” side of “the green one” that I must beware of, be conscious of? He shook his head saying: “I too wondered about it.” Then, without my being able to see the connection, he began to explain to me that there is something of individuation connected to “the green one.” He said it was of course Osiris “… ‘the green one’ … rising to individuation.”

They then had a quarrel about whether it was necessarily Osiris and no others and whether what is natural and individuation are opposed. That night she had a dream in which she was not accepted at a Kibbutz but offered a room for non-members. “I no longer ‘belong’ … ”

She writes how she is happy not to see Neumann as a father, not blaming him. She recalls his words from that day’s session, that they were like two trees that “perhaps must grow together.” Naomi was comforted. But at the next session, she felt Neumann made a number of “analytical blunders” when I “raged and blamed to-day.” Naomi quotes Neumann as saying:

Oh, individuation! It is all bluff! I get tired of saying it exists. I know Jung and all those people—they are all the same as anyone. There is something—but really little enough. It is just an invention of Jung!

It is hard to know what to make of Neumann’s speech as reported by Naomi and whether it was an accurate account of Neumann’s views or reflects her pique at him. Neumann was certainly critical of Jung on specific issues, but as revealed in their correspondence, he still had enormous respect for Jung personally and for his ideas. Naomi then reports a direct clash between Neumann and “She,” claiming Neumann told her, “I should leave ‘her’ behind the door, ‘so to speak’ when I am with him!… How dare he speak like that?!… I raged terribly.”

Naomi feels the acute tension of doing analysis “while being aware of the undercurrent of love between us—while being aware that we are both aware of it …” She says it would be sensible if she had an “analytical” relationship with EN and a personal one with another man. But such a relationship could only be “a ‘light love’ compared with a friendship with EN” and would lead to a breakdown because I would be “untrue to my inner feelings.” It is at this point, after a long period of fruitful consolidation in the analysis, that Naomi begins to act out her erotic transference and apparently evokes erotic countertransference in Neumann as well.

In July, Naomi goes for a visit to Kibbutz Negba. The word negba in Hebrew means “toward the desert” and this seems to be a metaphor for Naomi’s mood. On July 12, 1949, she writes: “I am alone, so alone … lonely as one’s inability to love.” Then, the next day, she writes “Terrible barrenness, no feeling.” En route, she sees the weary face of a man selling combs and soap and says, “I thought my heart would break with sorrow … Suffering drove me mad. I couldn’t stand it.” Battered shoes were a special trigger. When working at a previous job, Naomi writes that she felt “she had no skin, no protective covering. Everything touched to the raw.” Two days later, she is haunted by eyes of a dream child whose face is half hidden in Arab style.

“She,” speaking as the Great Mother, urges her to mature:

You must not speak as if you were a child … not even to your parents. You are no longer a child … only to me may you speak as a child would. <EXT>

She says she cannot find another companion, because

anything less would [act as] killers of her inner life … EN in accepting me, has enabled me gradually to accept myself … I am much less lonely now … In his company I cease being a freak.

In an important but unclear reference, she recalls “convents where so many summers were spent!?” Yet, perhaps these very experiences of living with religious sisters influenced her deep and ongoing interest in Christian mystics, such as St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, which feature prominently in later parts of her journal.

On July 19, 1949, she writes, “I went stormy again. I seemed to have died … [like] a child whose heart has been broken.” She wonders why she hates Neumann and responds: because she thought that friendship with him would mean killing the child, “the one who loves idleness and butterflies and flowers and coloured things and nonsense and toys … I project numinous on everything.” Naomi feels that her inner and outer world must not be divided. But when they are divided, she feels alone, cut off from all that is numinous and life giving. Neumann gave her the book The Way of All Women by Esther Harding to read. Naomi announces that she is glad Neumann is going away for a long summer break.

Then she describes a “repeating dream”:

There is an eagle’s head, and someone is trying to put in something into the right eye and then take something out.

Naomi imagines Neumann saying:

“But perhaps, it is good that embryo is taken out of his eye?” I say it is “ugly, unaesthetic.” EN replies that birth is unaesthetic.

Jung claimed that dreams repeat because the conscious part of the psyche, the ego, did not absorbed the message from the unconscious. Even without Naomi’s association, it seems clear that the dream is about correcting “vision,” how to see things accurately, like an “eagle eye.” To correct the defect, a symbolic surgery is required, putting something new in and taking something old out. Naomi, however, resists this transformation and so the dream continues to repeat, like “a letter unopened.”

On July 27, 1949, she visits Ramoth HaShavim, yet makes no mention of her two young daughters, but speaks of a “timid happiness.” A few days later (July 31, 1949), she is singing “everything is going my way” to herself, but quickly followed this by “great distress,” an oppressive dullness and painful breathing.

My feet seek, but ever the ground gives way beneath them.

A smile hangs in the air … and behind it all glistens the pent up, unshed tears. <EXT>

Before Neumann left for Europe, Naomi recalls his comforting phrase: “Pain is the precious fabric of which stillness is made.” On August 3, 1949,

Anguish … one’s secret dislike for one’s mother becomes a horrible guilt—the guilt of rejecting one’s Great Mother, the great rearer, the one without whom one cannot grow as a plant cannot grow without earth.”

Naomi’s experience closely reflects what Neumann was writing in The Origins and History of Consciousness: “The action of the ego in separating the World Parents is a struggle … experienced as guilt, and moreover as original guilt …” (1949/1989,114).

Then two days later, she writes: “I seem to be a pre-human being … banished from both worlds, the heavenly world which was my home and the earthly home I cannot reach.” This theme of an archetypal exile from both heaven and earth reverberates through her journal.

On August 6, 1949, she continues:

Darkness seems to be closing upon me. I cannot see. I feel as if I were dying … like a river that lost its way … I am aflame. I seem to be burning. Flames burst from me, my arms and my whole body are one blaze … as if I were seeing a vision that is joyful with a joy I have never known … this joyful flaming figure, breathless and thrilling with life—while I sit here at my desk with strange ache in my heart, feeling strangely stilled and humbled as before a miracle. <EXT>

Later, Naomi expresses another recurrent theme: “my fear that I may not find a way to paint … ” This fear anticipates Marion Milner’s famous book, On Not Being Able to Paint ([1950] 2010). Yet “she,” as so often, provides a new perspective, saying, “‘Running away’ may also be an unconscious attempt to get somewhere,’ ‘She’ said gently.”

Her emotional roller coaster continues as does her deep ambivalence to words.

I feel him so tenderly, so—so newly almost, as if I were peeping at him and at me to see what love is like. Ah! I am so weary of words! … my precious secret clasped to me, mysterious and strange and precious beyond words.

She reports being able to paint but afterward “returned to a world of such hopelessness and despair and weariness that my very life seemed to have ebbed away.” Naomi undergoes the cyclical process of emerging into life and creativity only to fall back into what resembles an anaclitic depression.

“A sea of grey enclosed me, closed upon me on every side. A sea of grey—that is what I painted.” Grey waters close upon her, drowning her, struggling “to bring back to life the love that lies strangled in the depth of the dark.” Then, Naomi has an iconic memory of being a lost child with no mother at Hatzor, an archaeological site in Galilee. She says “I used to love animals and trees and flowers. But now I love nothing.” Outside the gates of paradise, in a loveless existence, she howls as a lonely wolf.

“Again and again, I am beset by the fear that I shall find that it is not you I loved so, but a projection.” So she will “die a new death—again and again …”

Of a sudden I saw myself at EN’s in the early days—the first time perhaps that I spoke passionately, that I was shaken out of consciousness-of-myself by the urgency of what I was trying to convey to him. He was unwell then, and lying on the sofa. I sat beside the round table. I was trying to explain to him the feeling that haunted me when I listened to music, that I wasn’t really hearing; and when I looked at things I wasn’t really seeing. He asked me what I meant by not really hearing. I answered gropingly, that I wasn’t really hearing, not really as it should be, not really heard.

Ah, he said, “You are comparing it to some imagined standard.”

“I’m not imagining!” I cried, “It’s not imagination! I know! I’ve heard!” My words run on passionately, urgently, my usual reserve had fallen off my shoulders like a cloak that had been forgotten.

I do not know just what I said. I only know I found myself suddenly eager and breathless—and unable to explain myself clearly. I remember with a strange vividness … pleading eagerly, hopefully, urgently: “Don’t you understand?”

He had answered with an effort that I could sense, saying heavily: “I don’t understand—I don’t want to understand;” I remember how my hands dropped suddenly in a gesture of hopelessness, I remember how the light and eagerness and hope of finding someone who would understand and explain this strange inner seeking of mine, died within me … I kept remembering his face as he had sat copying out the German poem for me—how often I have remembered his face as it was then, how often the memory of it has swept me with an unfathomable tenderness and love. He had been so intent, so innerly alive with things he would not speak of, but which he had tried to tell me through the poem. I had embarrassed him by asking to translate. I could see his drawing-back. But I insisted.

Oh, my God, I love him so!

That poem once more carried me away from the earth which I was trying so obediently to stay on. And I blamed him for showing me he understood … to be exiled from him is to be exiled from that world, from that lost Paradise. I suddenly saw that I still believe to reach it through him… I know I must give up this longing to find in him the mystical lover. I know I shall doom our love if I expect of it the fulfilment of that burning mystical passion of mine.

I know that if I seek in his embrace to recover the lost Paradise, I shall but starve the life out of what might grow within me, making it pale and wan and sickly until it pine away and die. <EXT>

Here Naomi describes the great danger of acting out her passion, and then, realizing that it was but a projection and being left with nothing. Despite this insight, Naomi seems possessed by the complex. She dreams that “new-born child in me is too immolated because it is too pure to live” as a sacrifice to Moloch. She asks, “Will every new child in me ever be sacrificed to Moloch?” Moloch was the Canaanite god to whom babies were sacrificed. Her question almost surely reflects her own inner experience that she as an infant was similarly sacrificed. Such “primal agonies” cannot be expressed verbally, but are beyond words, only in:

Silence, so laden with sound that listening to it becomes an agony.

Silence—and within it screams ring madly wildly soundlessly and die into a sob that was never heard, that was never yet turned into notes. And the silence lies panting over the world, breathing heavily in its pain.

The moan of the very silence rises wailingly into the night.

He had said—when I told him of the dream of the burning girl whom I thought should be covered by a blanket to save her from being burnt to death—he had said: “Perhaps it is intended that she burn? Perhaps the fire must not be put out?” and he said that the blanket suggested sex to him. “It is my association, not yours,” he had added, “so it may be I am wrong.” Did he sense the cold fear that crept over me?

… I remembered EN’s words at his lecture—when he showed us that drawing of the dreamy white woman with the wild gipsy girl behind her—I remembered a hundred times his words that she should have left aside the gipsy side (“the passionate side”—that meant to me) of her nature because she was too sensitive and highly strung. He said if she had been eighteen or very young, he could understand her refusal to give this up, but a woman in her late twenties or early thirties … I had stared at that drawing so! The very life seemed to be drained out of me … I continued drinking in the agony it evoked … At one point his eyes fell upon me, his look followed mine, and he bent and turned over the drawing face down with a slight hardening of his mouth.

How many times this agony has since returned! … Why was I kept away from him so? Would I never be permitted to be his? … I knew then I had been seeking to find in a man the fulfilment of a passion that is not of the earth, that is of the spirit. I stammer yet when I try to speak of it, the words fall helplessly from my mind as a thing held—no matter, I cannot speak. This speechlessness lay upon me all this afternoon … I know no man can fulfill this longing for it is a longing for union with the divine. <EXT>

She writes no language can express intensity of her feelings: “The words seem gone.” She fears her love will dissipate in EN’s presence.

In mid-August, she writes,

I would not have “him” blame himself for my sadness … there was always sadness when I was “steady” … as if I had no defence against the tragedy of life, the inherent tragedy … Ever since I was a child I was strangely vulnerable to the pain and sadness and hurt of life about me … an “enfant triste” … I cried my heart out for every dead bird, for every wounded animal, for every mule I saw whipped. <EXT>

Elsewhere she writes of being traumatized when her father kills a cat and calls him “evil.” She is in her role as savior of the “thrown away”:

I would salvage the faded flowers my mother threw to the garbage-can …

Once more the weariness has reclaimed me … the only way to be happy is to forget the tragedy of the world, to escape into an imaginary world of my own, or to lose myself in that which brings self-loss to me—like music (above all) … beauty … Now, through the analysis, my “escapes” have gradually been taken away. But the knowledge of all the suffering that fills the world remains, and hangs with strange heaviness about me.

Toward Neumann, Naomi complains,

… you are fascinated by the “mystical” one in me and care for me less. Do you remember? … you are projecting something upon me, that you have become unconsciously involved … people in my dream … are somehow unconscious partial personalities of you, fragmentary parts of your psyche … I feel desperate.

I had a sense impression of EN last night. He was trying to convince me that I do live. I broke into hysterical laughter, which changed then into hysterical sobbing.

It is strange, this power of memory of EN had upon me, that every new change of realization within me comes up first connected with him. Ah, if I could understand at last what he himself means to me! If I could but understand that! For then perhaps I would cease tormenting myself so … if I do not love him then surely I can never love anyone … I must be incapable of love.

A strange feeling comes over me as I suddenly become aware of what I am writing. Something near bitterness but with a hidden violence that fills me with anguish … My life looks so catastrophic to me that I wonder how long I’ll go on fighting this lost battle. <EXT>

She describes herself as a “speck hanging over an abyss.” At the end of the entry, she cries out, “What am I doing here? What am I doing here?”

The End

The analysis with Erich Neumann ended on November 15, 1949. Only fourteen months later did Naomi mention this “termination” in her Notes. On January 25, 1951, she announces in her journal: “November 15^th 1949, the day I told him the analysis was over.” Why Naomi delayed recording this ending in her Notes remains unclear. Much later, she does write that during the preceding weeks of the analysis, their sessions did not involve actual analysis, just arguments.

In any case, Naomi and Neumann continued to have ongoing, post-termination contact. In 1950, Naomi saw Neumann twice only, but they wrote to one another often. Then there was a synchronous meeting at a bookshop. Later Neumann went to see her on January 10, 1951. On January 26, 1951, they met again on what Naomi refers to as “this catastrophic day.” Naomi elsewhere in her Notes reported that she felt a disgust for physical intimacy, so if there was some attempt at intimacy, it surely ended badly. At the time in the 1940s, and indeed until the 1970s, personal and even sexual contact between analyst and patient, after an appropriate “cooling off” period was considered ethically acceptable. Indeed, there were cases in which analyst and patient even married, as was the case for Neumann’s contemporaries, James and Hilda Kirsch, who were both married to other people when they met as analyst and patient. Other such instances include Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, or the catastrophic experiences of Horace Frink, founder of the New York Psychoanalytical Society, and the Jungian analyst John Weir Perry. But, remarkably, even after that catastrophic day, Naomi and Neumann apparently remained on good terms and continued to be in contact.

Aftermath

In a letter written to her daughter in 1990, Naomi writes:

The diaries were kept in packages addressed to Erich Neumann. I hoped that if I’d die they would reach him. They were meant for him very explicitly. But he died all too early.<EXT>

Erich Neumann died after a short illness in 1960.

Discussion

Erich Neumann as Analyst

According to his leading disciple, Dvora Kutchinski (Abramovitch 1985), Erich Neumann favored “presence” in preference to any technique, seeking an intimate rapport with patients. She described him: “Quiet. Here and there a word. He had very warm eyes. Very introvert. Quiet. He emanated tranquility, calming … He had long, full massive mane—before it was in style, long beautiful fingers and he smoked with an elegant cigarette holder” (Abramovitch 2006, 166). But at other times, he could be harsh, calling her a “stupid sheep.” In Naomi’s account, one can see that he relied heavily upon dream work, active imaginations, and amplifications, drawing on Egyptian, Greek, or Indian mythology, the Bible, or classical literature. At other times, analysis seemed a threesome of Neumann, Naomi, and “she.” Although Naomi experienced tensions between Neumann and “she,” they actually seemed to be working on the same side, guiding her toward growth and individuation.

The year 1949 was a pivotal time for Erich Neumann’s professional career. His first masterpiece, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949/1969), was published with a foreword by C. G. Jung. In that same year, another foundational work, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949/1989) with a preface by Jung, appeared. Neumann was hard at work on what had begun as a preface to Olga Froebe-Kaptyn’s archive of images (which later evolved into the Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism [ARAS]) but grew into The Great Mother: An Analysis of an Archetype (1972). The English edition is dedicated to Jung, “Friend and Master in his Eightieth Year.” Neumann was likely beginning to formulate one of his most poetic and accessible works, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (1952/1971), whose theme, of a woman in love with an unseen lover, resonates with Naomi’s fantasies. Neumann mostly used mythology and archetypal imagery as the basis for his Jungian developmental psychology, rather than clinical material. Naomi Nir does not explicitly appear in any of his works, yet it is certainly conceivable that Neumann’s analysis of Naomi Nir helped him formulate his ideas about the feminine. Indeed, later in her Notes (1955), Naomi complains that Erich Neumann is using her lines in his “poems,” or published work and lectures—without reference to her. She found this lack of acknowledgment very painful. Whether she had a legitimate claim or whether it is another instance of her pathological self-absorption, remains uncertain. However, late in life, when she read Neumann’s last Eranos lecture, The Psyche as a Place of Creation (Neumann 1960/1989), she felt that EN “seemed to understand what she was trying to say to him.”

Naomi was quite knowledgeable about Jungian psychology. During this one year alone, she read Jung’s Psychological Types and The Secret of the Golden Flower; Suzuki’s Studies in Zen Buddhism (which her brother Dan gave her); work from the British Jungian Michael Fordham as well as Neumann’s own Depth Psychology and a New Ethic in the original German. Reading psychology can be very helpful for certain patients (Kantrowitz 2005). But for Naomi, it seemed to have further distanced herself from a “lived life,” but deeper into a “pretend life.” As the Notes show, these topics became the source of argument and tension within the analysis. She argued with Neumann about her psychological type, the feminine, the child archetype, and the father archetype. Such intellectual discussion certainly did not help her gain a deeper sense of being grounded or enter into life.

Naomi read widely. Besides the works just mentioned, she threw herself into Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol; the work of great art historian Herbert Read, later a coeditor of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung; as well as a book on Gaugin and his suffering. Indeed, toward the end of the analysis (October 8, 1949), she writes that she can’t love anything “except when faced with suffering—even her own children.” Neumann does seem to have projected onto her his “spiritual anima,” as when he tells her she is close to the “depths” or a “mystic lover.” Naomi in turn yearned to be his femme inspiratrice, a yearning that continued throughout her life.

Diagnosis

Naomi Nir’s eldest daughter, the eminent physician-researcher Jennifer Schneider MD, PhD, whose many publications include The Wounded Healer: Addiction-Sensitive Therapy for the Sexually Exploitative Professional, which she coauthored with Richard Irons, believed Naomi suffered from a personality disorder. In terms of DSM-5, Naomi likely met criteria for schizotypal personality disorder, a diagnosis given to those who are often described as odd or eccentric and usually have few, if any, close relationships. Significantly, Naomi does not mention a single, close friend in the entire manuscript. People suffering from schizotypal personality disorder generally don’t understand how relationships form or the impact of their behavior on others. They may also misinterpret others’ motivations and behaviors and develop significant distrust of others. These problems may lead to severe anxiety and a tendency to avoid social situations, as the person with schizotypal personality disorder tends to hold peculiar beliefs and may have difficulty responding appropriately to social cues.

A Jungian approach might conceptualize Naomi as suffering from a disturbance in the primary relation and mother-child bonding. She almost certainly experienced emotional abandonment by her own mother as well as an extremely strict, impersonal regime by her professional caretakers. Such a basic fault led her to experience the world as empty and loveless. Her ego experience was alternating between a fragile ego, full of uncertainty and doubt, a yearning for a mystical union with Self, or a compensatory animus possession, sticking to set views at all costs. Perhaps, this animus possession is what characterized the later stages of the analysis in which there were only arguments. She was often hesitant to express her own views lest they overwhelm the listener, revealing a rather grandiose fantasy of her own influence, again perhaps in compensation to a dominant weak ego. Daphne Patai claimed that her mother had a “steely core” and was impervious to social norms while disregarding their impact on others, even her children or husband. Yet, at other times, she was suicidal, once in mid-October 1949 for ten days. Much later in Notes, in 1953, she refers, without any details, to a previous suicide attempt. At other times, she felt one was spiritually obligated to live out the fate one had been allotted.

In contrast, beauty, whether in painting, music, or nature, could be consoling. However, almost inevitably, she would fall back into an empty, loveless feeling. Nevertheless, it is striking that during much of her analysis with Neumann and with guidance from “she,” Naomi seems to make important steps toward self-awareness and becoming more “alive.” “She” told her she would always be with her, walking at her side, a move toward healing her inner emptiness. Toward Neumann she felt a genuine sense of intimacy. She was able to maintain inner dialogue with both, which was the beginning of a healing voyage. But then, after a short period of feeling alive, she would fall back into a state of self-torment and meaninglessness.

Naomi as a Mother

Twice in her Notes, Naomi discusses her agonizing dilemma around being a mother. On the one hand, she understands that her daughters are suffering severely from her absence. But, on the other hand, she feels she must have long stretches of time alone. Ultimately, Naomi decided not to take care of them, but to leave them in care, even though grandparents and other relatives lived nearby in Tel Aviv. Naomi seems profoundly unaware that she unconsciously re-created the circumstances of her own childhood. Just as she was physically and emotionally abandoned by her own mother, so, too, she abandoned her own daughters. She took pride in her “unworldliness,” which in turn justified her special sensitivities. For example, she wrote later in life to her daughter, saying she was incapable of actually renting an apartment for her daughters and herself. In the journal, there are no reports of Naomi discussing her anguish as a mother, in her analysis with Neumann, and therefore his attitude toward this situation remains a matter of speculation. However, Jungian analysis has been criticized as placing too much emphasis on individuation and one’s own personal journey at the expense of social involvement. It is not inconceivable that something similar may have occurred in analysis with Neumann.

Martin Buber (1965), who himself was abandoned by his actress-mother at age four, makes an important distinction between “guilty feelings” and “actual guilt.” He warned psychoanalysts not to confuse the two. Analysis can be very effective in relieving neurotic guilt feelings when you feel guilty, but have done nothing to deserve it. But analysis should not attempt to overcome actual guilt. In contrast, the analyst should strive to make the guilt conscious, to illuminate it and persevere in confronting it, and, ultimately, help point toward a tikkun, a repair, at the place where the human order was injured. In Naomi’s report of Neumann’s analysis, the focus seemed too much on guilty feelings, suffering, and spirituality and not enough on confronting actual guilt, personal responsibility, and repair.

Erotic Transference

Naomi clearly developed an intense erotic, but also a spiritual, transference on Neumann, and there was erotic-spiritual countertransference from Neumann’s side. Significantly, Naomi suggests that Neumann himself introduced sexual imagery into the temenos, as when he said the blanket in a dream reminded him of sex. However, what is remarkable is that Naomi understood her loving feelings for her analyst were most likely a projection. She describes holding the tension in an active imagination, speaking to an inner Neumann: “I want to take the projection back to me.” Or even more dramatically, “Again and again, I am beset by the fear that I shall find that it is not you I loved so, but a projection.”

For me, one of the most poignant moments in Notes is the “waking dream” in which she describes them together within an analytic container: “We stood facing each other. I said very quietly but with deep emotion: ‘I do love you!’” He answered, also very quietly but with the same deep, accepting, emotion in his voice:

“I love you too.”

I said: “What are we going to do about it.”

He said: “Respect each other’s integrity.”

I said: “God bless you.”

He answered: “You too.”

Later Naomi continues the inner dialogue with “she,” her inner wise woman, to clarify when a personal love relationship Neumann is forbidden or when it might even be beneficial: “She” replied it “would not be wrong if we did as [the] ‘third one’ said,” adding “if … his love for you and your love for him … impoverishes him, makes him divided within himself, it is bad … ” But if it makes him “richer and wholer in himself, it is good.” This impressive inner dialogue most likely reflects the professional way Neumann was able to hold the frame at that time. Subsequently, however, in ways not made explicit in her journal, Naomi and Neumann are drawn back into a dangerous love transference-countertransference dynamic that causes the analysis to unravel.

From the Patient’s Point of View

There are very few accounts by patients that describe the entire course of an analysis. Irvin Yalom tried in Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy (1974), in which his patient in lieu of payment wrote her version of sessions, as did Yalom. Although it was an interesting experiment, it did not really give the flavor and atmosphere of psychotherapy and is perhaps the least read of Yalom’s many influential books. Although there are some accounts of analysis with Freud or other psychoanalysts (for an overview, see de Spengler 2004), there are only a tiny number of accounts by analysands of their Jungian analysis. Susan Tiberghien, in Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis (1995), gives an interesting account of how she chose among two available analysts and discusses some aspects of clinical synchronicity as well as details of her dream work. But she had decided in advance to limit her experience to one year.

The most comprehensive and compelling account is certainly Naomi Lloyd’s The Knife and the Butterfly: A Story of a Jungian Analysis (2014). It is an intense first-person journey of a middle-aged English woman, a second Holocaust-generation survivor, as she moves from an acute suicidal despair to becoming a bereavement counselor. Significantly, the memoir is based not only on her personal recollections, but also on detailed taped interviews with her analyst, which she recorded in the later stages of her analysis. Large chunks from those interviews are quoted verbatim. It includes remarkable details such as, when asked to sit in a chair at the very first session, Lloyd replies; “Why would I want to sit in a place of such suffering?” and then questions her analyst, “Are you a mother?” She highlights how parking issues can be painful, practically and symbolically. A particularly poignant episode concerns how she is forced to cope when the analyst’s home is unexpectedly flooded and requires relocation to a strange, new setting. Likewise, she made the unusual decision not to talk at all in her final session. Instead, Lloyd brought heavy sound equipment, such as it was then, to the analyst’s office so they could listen to Schubert together, in silence. Sadly, Lloyd died before her manuscript could be completed. Her sister, living in Australia, did the final editing and brought it to publication. Naomi Lloyd’s account, remarkable as it is, giving a “real feel” for analysis, highlights the need for more accounts of analysis “from the patient’s point of view.” In this regard, Naomi Nir’s Notes are a unique contribution to the Jungian and psychoanalytic communities, giving a full and in-depth description of her analysis and the experiences of her inner life. What is also worth highlighting is that both Naomi Lloyd and Naomi Nir each raise serious concerns and dilemmas, almost never discussed in the professional clinical literature.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best summary is given by Daphne Patai, a distinguished scholar and professor of literature and Naomi’s younger daughter. She concluded: Naomi Nir was a perennial student, driven to use her prodigious intellect to reach into and then beyond her own personal experience in a life-long attempt to understand what she saw as the central force of love in a world overrun by trivia. Throughout her life she maintained a fierce if isolated commitment to a truth tenaciously revealed to her of what it is to be human: there is no deeper awareness without love.

Naomi Nir died in Jerusalem in 2004, at the age of eighty-six. The phrase her daughters chose to be on Naomi’s grave is taken from her Notes:

Little One,

You must renounce the sky

until you die.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).<NOTE>

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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———. 2006. “Erich Neumann as My Supervisor: An Interview with Dvora Kutzinski.” Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies 52, no. 2: 162–181.

———. 2023. “Who Is a Friend? Friendship in the Process of Individuation.” In Individuation Psychology: Essays in Honor of Murray Stein, edited by Steve Buser and Leon Cruz. Asheville, NC: Chiron.

Ben Tor, Amnon. 2016. Hazor: Canaanite Metropolis, Israelite City. New York: BAR.

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Cooper, Elizabeth. 1919. The Love Letters of a Chinese Lady. Edinburgh & London: Foulis.

de Spengler, Natháalia. 2004. Des psychanalystes témoignent de leur analyse personnelle. Psychothérapies 24: 131–137.

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Jung, C. G. 1943/1969. “On the Psychology of the Unconscious.” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. CW 7.

———. 1967. Symbols of Transformation. CW 5.

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———. 1949/1989. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. London: Karnac.

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ACKNOWEDGMENTS

I wish to express deep-felt gratitude to Jennifer Schneider and Daphne Patai who provided full access to Naomi Nir’s materials and shared invaluable insights and comments about their mother and the context in which she lived.<ACK>

<BIO>Henry Abramovitch is founding president and senior training analyst at the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology in Honor of Erich Neumann, and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. His books include Brothers and Sisters: Myth and Reality; Why Odysseus Came Home as a Stranger …; and Panic Attacks in Pistachio: A Psychological Detective Story. With Murray Stein, he has written plays available on YouTube: The Analyst and the Rabbi and My Lunch with Thomas. Correspondence: henry.abramovitch@gmail.com.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the extraordinary and extensive journals of Naomi Nir, this two-part article describes her experience in analysis with two seminal figures in Jungian psychology: Erich Neumann and Emma Jung.

KEY WORDS

analysis, dreams, erotic transference, journal, Emma Jung, Jungian psychology, Erich Neumann, Raphael Patai, patient’s experience.