Three Perspectives on Jung, Wells, and Schreber

Abstract

A single sentence in C. G. Jung’s “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” links H. G. Wells’s Christina Alberta’s Father and Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as illustrations of the principle that repression leads to insanity. The essay demonstrates the following points: Jung inspired the creation of Wells’s novel; comments on Schreber illuminate the course of the Freud-Jung friendship; the books illustrate Jung’s theory that repression leads to insanity; and projecting interiority onto God and believing the intrapsychic to be extrapsychic are problematic tendencies in both texts. Although Wells’s main character, Edward Albert Preemby, and Schreber himself make some progress toward psychological wholeness, Preemby dies before he can enjoy his new perspective, and Schreber returns to the asylum for his final years.