Just How good a pool player was Carl Jung?
Sigmund Vs. Carl at the Pool Table
Carl “CG” Jung, also known as the “Smokin’ Shrink”, was well known in the pool halls of Vienna and Zurich. He almost always beat Freud, which allegedly made Sigmund have bad dreams about pool clues and billiard balls and left him feeling very inferior.
Well, not really, or at least not that I know of. But this alleged photo of Jung and Freud shooting pool together tweaks the imagination. I hope it’s true; it’s a side of Jung one doesn’t really see or hear about.
(I am not assuming this is a legitimate photo…. I have seen it only at one website…. Check out Carl Jung’s bell-buttoms… If anyone has better evidence that Jung and Freud were pool players, please let me know.)(I’d still put my money on Carl over Sigmund any day.)
Great photo! My rational, thinking side assures me its Photoshopped, but there’s truth in the imaginal realm, as Hillman tells us…
Who would win in a game of pool, Freud or Jung? Hard to know… On the one hand, the game is obviously overflowing with sexual symbolism: nice long, hard cues, striving to put things in little holes… balls, for heaven sake! On the other hand, there are all those wonderful spherical symbols of the Self and completeness, and there’s something very cthonic in those little pockets that lurk below the “conscious level” of the nice green felt table top… Also, pool halls tend to be the realm of the shadow, at least for many middle class people…
I guess I would go with Jung, if only because in my fantasy, he would have had that much more experience playing with all those frat boys over at the Zofingia society…
Thanks for a fun post!