NoThere’s no need for much introduction, Sandra Petrignani is definitely one of the most important voices on the Italian literary scene. A long-time author, she has many works to her credit, from essays to fiction. Let’s at least remember Dear presences, The writer lives here, Goodbye Rome, Marguerite and La Corsara. Portrait of Natalia Ginzburg (finalist for the 2018 Strega Prize) e Autobiography of my dogs.
Now, with Dearest Doctor Jung the author he writes a novel in which he gives us backfaithfully and unfaithfully (the perfect way), the figure of the famous psychotherapist antagonist of Freud, Carl Gustav Jung. And it does so on various levels. From the point of view of Egle, the woman who writes the novel in the present tense, is the American Christiana Morgana true patient from the past who returns to visit him after thirty years in Küsnacht, on Lake Zurich.
A man with a powerful physique and a troubled soul, Jung collected students who later became psychotherapists and often his lovers. Dominating and melancholic, he is taciturn who sometimes falls into desperation and only knows how to seek treatment from women (from their bodies).
Sandra Petrignani was born in Piacenza. He lives in Rome and in the Umbrian countryside. She is the award-winning author of many books, essays and radio plays. © 2024 Giliola Chisté
One gets the feeling that Egle is a bit like the reincarnation of Christiana. Was that his intention or did it happen?
If this is indeed the case, it did not happen consciously. But Lady Morgana, as Jung called her, certainly exercised a great fascination on me and, since it is natural that I lent Egle things of mine, the projection that she, Romana, perceived in it is well explained.
His Jung appears fascinating but also very dominant. He is even called an “impostor” by one woman. Was it like that?
That woman, Ruth Bailey, old Jung’s friend-carer, was very witty and knew how to stand up to him. The epithet was a joke between them, but full of a truth that the great Swiss did not deny… They laughed a lot together, even at themselves.
Jung’s youth corresponds to the years of sexual liberation, but entirely male. Women submit to the will of those who want to have a wife and lover, often demanding that there be friendship between them.
Well, when I came across these Alpha male characteristics, Jung became unpleasant to me. Above all for the nonchalance with which he managed his relationship with women in general, with his wife Emma and his fixed lover Toni in particular. Then curiosity prevailed, and the possibility as a writer – to enter into the head and feelings of a man of that type, considered a Master, a kind of shaman adored by females and males. And so I also discovered its tenderness, its fragility. I came to love him again and was able to make him the main character of the novel.
Dearest Doctor Jung by Sandra Petrignani, Neri Pozza240 pages, €19
As a psychotherapist Jung talks about a cure that does not lead to healing but to knowing who we are.
It is the most fertile path for those who rely on psychotherapy. You are what you are, but you don’t know you are. Having the courage to recognize and accept ourselves can lead, albeit painfully, to an authentic relationship with ourselves and others. It means making peace with a lot of false problems that distress us. I admit that writing this novel was a bit like going back into analysis.
Jung had a grandfather who spoke to his dead wife and a granddaughter who was a professional medium. He believed in the paranormal and dreams. We always go back to the past. Precognitive dreams were as important to the Romans as they were to the Greeks.
Jung was always looking for primitive man and his behaviors. In his travels in Africa he went among uncivilized tribes learning Swahili to communicate with them despite taking serious risks. He loved ancient thought and studied alchemy thoroughly. The relationship he had with dreams was very different from that of Freud, with whom he broke off bloodily. Freud could not accept the paranormal, as Jung did also from personal experience. Freud was too worried about having psychoanalysis accepted by the scientific world and feared the visionary nature of his colleague-disciple on whom he had initially banked.
The awareness of “prior knowledge” is very striking. It’s fascinating.
I also like this about Jung: the awareness that the meaning of life comes from many previous lives and from others that will follow, until completeness. It’s something that for me goes back to my youthful relationships with Buddhism, with my travels to India in search of spirituality. I have always felt that reality is not just material, I don’t believe that our events end with death. It is an illusion that can be convenient for those who do not want to deal with the immorality and injustice of their own behavior. And which, as Jung himself predicted, is responsible for world wars and destruction. The thing that struck me most, when telling it, is the pessimism with which he looked at the future on earth due to human beings who do not know themselves and their own ferocious unconscious.