Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early taken it for granted that the split in my personality was my own purely personal affair and responsibility. Faust, to be sure, had made the problem somewhat easier for me by confessing, "Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast"; but he had thrown no light on the cause of this dichotomy. His insight seemed, in a sense, directed straight at me. In the days when I first read Faust I could not remotely guess the extent to which Goethe's strange heroic myth was a collective experience and that it prophetically anticipated the fate of the Germans. Therefore I felt personally implicated, and when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had helped commit the murder of two old people. This strange idea alarmed me, and I regarded it as my responsibility to atone for this crime, or to prevent its repetition.
My false conclusion was further supported by a bit of odd information that I picked up during those early years. I heard that it had been bruited about that my grandfather Jung had been an illegitimate son of Goethe's. This annoying story made an impression upon me insofar as it at once corroborated and seemed to explain my curious reaction to Faust. It is true that I did not believe in reincarnation, but I was instinctively familiar with that concept which the Indians call karma. Since in those days I had no idea of the existence of the unconscious, I could not have had any psychological understanding of my reactions. I also did not know - no more than, even today, it is generally known - that the future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be guessed by clairvoyants.
The Tower - Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung (1965)
