Mr. Bacon read the report of the committee on L’Atlantide.


One view was that the book demonstrated a conﬂict in Benoît’s mind between his spiritual side and a tedency toward material considerations.


Looked at from that angle, Antinéa was not accepted as a true anima ﬁgure—that is, a creation of unconscious fantasies—but was taken as having been more than half constructed with a view to literary eﬀect.

Another view represented in the committee was that the book represented a conﬂict between what was ratio- nal and what was irrational in Benoît’s psychology, rather than as a conﬂict between a spiritual and a materialistic viewpoint.

Mr. Aldrich, diﬀering from both of these viewpoints, presented a minority report in which he valiantly defended Antinéa not only as a true anima ﬁgure, but also as being a symbol of positive importance.

According to his view, Antinéa was neither a good woman nor an evil one, but complete on all sides. He has summarized his report as follows:

Insofar as the man is incompletely developed, or refuses to give her more than one side of his nature, he may expect that she will punish him. In Benoît’s romance, the hero is split in two: the sensual side of him is personiﬁed by Saint-A vit, while Morhange stands for an infantile and conventional sort of spirituality.

In eﬀect, the hero goes to Antinéa and says, ‘I tender you my sensual side, because Nature drives me; but I mean to deny you any participation in my spiritual side because, according to my conventional morality, love of woman and spirituality are opposites and cannot be reconciled.’




Dr. Jung: The most interesting point about this book is the way in which it diﬀers from She, is it not, Mr. Bacon?

Mr. Bacon: Yes, I must say I was a little confused in trying to get at the diﬀerences, but for one thing there is the theme of luxury greatly emphasized in Benoît’s book.


Dr. Jung: Yes, if you think of the outside details, there is a tremendous diﬀerence.



Haggard pays a good deal of attention to them himself, in fact, as for example when he describes an after- noon tea under perfectly absurd conditions, but when Haggard does this, it is with a sort of frugality; it is the sort of sensuality that belongs to the sportsman, while Benoît’s is that of the salon.

When you mention the sensuality in L’Atlantide, you have something, but there is a still greater diﬀerence.

Benoît fully acknowledges the place of sexuality, while in Haggard it always appears as a ﬁendish element. In Benoît it plays a big part, while in all of Haggard’s books it is decidedly in the background.



So it is worthwhile to go into some detail about this question of attitude. In order to do that we must pay some attention to Antinéa.


Mr. Bacon, will you describe the ways in which Antinéa diﬀers from “She”?

Mr. Bacon: Antinéa is a much more physiological object than “She,” who is very nebulous. Antinéa is represented as full of animal desire.




Dr. Jung: But you must admit it is a bit of a bad joke to have a salon full of dead men. Mr. Aldrich: Ah, but she gave them immortality.


She is an omnipotent queen who can have her every mood and whim satisﬁed. Such an Oriental queen can be very cruel without being vicious.

If we compare her with other similar types, she is not so bad. Moreover, she is in a diﬃcult situation.






Antinéa is not even so far along that she admits or sees their existence, and so she does not ﬁght, and we see that Antinéa is on a lower level than “She.” Our sympathy therefore goes to the latter.


This is somewhat gone in “She,” for “She” is already under the inﬂuence of things.

But we must remember that Antinéa is not a real woman, but the anima of a Frenchman, and here we have a typical diﬀerence between the French and the Anglo-Saxons.

If ever there was a book that could throw light on this diﬀerence it is this one.

I should like to hear from you on this point. How do you explain this peculiar diﬀerence? Mr. Schmitz: I believe that the diﬀerence between the French and the Anglo-Saxons,
between the French and the rest of Europe for that matter, arises out of the diﬀerence in their relation to the pagan world.

The French are the only people having a direct connection with this world. When the Romans conquered Gaul they surrounded it with Roman culture.


This diﬀerence runs through the whole French culture. Dr. Jung: What Mr. Schmitz says is very true.

Therein lies the reason for the diﬀerence between the French and the Anglo-Saxon viewpoints.





population and so received the Roman civilization also.


Therefore there is an absolute continuity between the Roman mentality and that of the Middle Ages. There is no break.

Even certain early Church Fathers were French.

Besides the Roman, there was a strong Greek inﬂuence that reached up the Rhone, and cultural inﬂuences from the Mediterranean came at a very early date.

All of these inﬂuences from the pagan world had a peculiar eﬀect.

They fortiﬁed the antique layers to such an extent that Christianity could not undo it.


It would be hard to say this to a Frenchman, because the French think of themselves as good Catholics. And so they are, in one sense; even when most skeptical they are still good Catholics.


Thus one can be Catholic in a negative way, and be pleased with venom against the thing formerly most rever- enced.

Those within the Church have a most positive attitude.

They center about Catholicism because they feel it embraces life.

Within its scope paganism persists, and so one ﬁnds among the most religious Frenchmen a full recognition of sexuality.



A man goes regularly to church and keeps up whatever sexual practices he may see ﬁt, for sexuality in his eyes has nothing to do with morality.


This peculiar diﬀerence explains, I think, every diﬀerence between “She” and Antinéa.

And since Antinéa has so deﬁnite a character, we can reconstruct something of the author’s conscious and ar- rive at an appreciation of a modern Frenchman.

Then there are other ﬁgures that throw much light on French psychology. Take Le Mesge, for example.


It is characteristic of the French mind to allow the limit of irrationality in behavior, and nowhere else can one see so many comical ﬁgures in reality; but they are nonetheless rational in their viewpoints.

Then Count Bielowsky, in spite of being a Pole, is a typical French ﬁgure of the Third Empire, a habitué of Paris.

His ﬁgure forms a necessary counterpart to that of Morhange, whose ﬂirtatious attitude toward the church is compensated by Bielowsky’s ﬂirtatious attitude toward “high life.”

The mediating ﬁgure between the two is Le Mesge.

Such contradictions always demand a compromise, and this comes about through a rational mediation. But here there is too little life, so then Saint-A vit is brought in to provide temperament and passion.
A Frenchman always allows himself to have “ﬁts,” where he can apply a whole arsenal of rhetoric.





We can say then that there is a peculiar atmosphere in L’Atlantide, and an altogether diﬀerent one from She. This is something I felt very profoundly and wonder if you did not also.

When one reads such a book one asks oneself, “What does it lead to?” What does it mean to you?


Mr. Bacon: There is an indeﬁnable sense of cheapness about it to me. It ends as if preparing for a sequel.

Mrs. Zinno: I think the ﬁgure of “She” is an eﬀort to connect unreality to reality, but Antinéa remains stuck in unreality, that is, the unconscious.

Dr. Jung: You have touched upon something important there.

Antinéa does not try to get out, she makes no attempt to reach the world, nor to let the world reach her. “She” is planning to rule the world, to get at it in some way.


It is quite conscious in England, and probably in ﬁfty years will be equally so in America. But the French point of view is to remain where they are.
The French are really not concerned with ruling the world, it is an aﬀectation that Napoleon, who was not a true Frenchman, brought—i. e., the idea of dominating Europe.

The French are concerned with their own country.

It is no wonder then that Antinéa sticks where she is. What I really feel about the issue is that it is hopeless.



It is a sort of apotheosis, something one can see at the end of a ﬁlm, the idea of La Gloire.



“She” than in Antinéa.


That rational suspicion is, of course, a tremendous depreciation of the function of the archetypes. It is the “nothing but” spirit again.
The value is gone from the archetype.

It says, “You can’t base yourself on the archetypes, so it is better not to build at all, the ground is not safe.” This is a peculiar fact that has to be reckoned with in the analysis of Frenchmen.

It is very hard to get them to take it seriously enough. Their rationalism is blocking them at every point.


They exhaust themselves in that ﬁght.





Dr. de Angulo: Will you discuss the point made in the report of the committee to the eﬀect that Antinéa was not an unconscious ﬁgure but was put into the unconscious setting deliberately?





Mrs. Jung: It had seemed to me that the animus was not a symbol of immortality, but of movement and life, and that it is man’s attitude that gives that diﬀerent aspect to the anima.

Dr.Jung: It is true that the animus is often represented by a moving ﬁgure—an aviator or a traﬃc manager.

Perhaps there is something in the historical fact of women being more stable, therefore there is more move- ment in the unconscious.

Mr. Schmitz: Surely there could have been no repression of the animus at the time of the matriarchy. Dr. Jung: We cannot be too sure.
Mrs. Zinno: The ﬁgures of gods carry the idea of immortality, do they not?

smuch as they are also animus ﬁgures and come into women’s dreams, I should think one could say the animus carried the meaning of immortality also.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is true, but there remains a tremendous diﬀerence between the animus and the anima.

Mr. Schmitz: Is immortality in the individual?


not brought forth, she assumes immortality. When she brings forth she dies.
But this problem of the anima and the animus is far too complex to be dealt with here. The End Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 146-168
