Cary F. Baynes 1925 Seminar Quotations
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Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925
So then you said I was to copy down the contents of the Red Book—once before you had had it copied, but you had since then added a great deal of material, so you wanted it done again and you would explain things to me as I went along, for you understood nearly everything in it you said.
In this way we could come to discuss many things which never came up in my analysis and I could understand your ideas from the foundation. ~Cary F. Baynes, The Red Book, Page 213.
When I asked Baynes if he would not like a seminar on the Red Book I had nothing other in mind than what you were doing with him.
Since I began to read it I have thought it would be a very fine thing, if instead of your discussing it with me as you said you would, Mona Lisa should be included too.
Perhaps she knows all that is in it so well, and understands it so completely that this would not appeal to her, but I thought it would . . . he [Peter Baynes] asked me . . .why it was such a problem with me about publishing the Red Book.
I could have slapped him sharply by saying it was a problem to me because you had so presented it . . . then you told him your own idea about it, and he was thoroughly non-plussed.
. . . When I said I wanted to hear you speak of the Red Book out of doors and you willed to think I had in mind a pink tea, I struck back at you in kind, and said that if the Red Book was not big enough to be talked about out of doors, then you would have to do something about it. ~Cary F. Baynes Diary, June 5, 1924.
After talking with Emma about the notes and finding that her reaction to the printing of them is just what my own was, all my resistances to that idea have now come back upon me very strongly, and I would like to put the matter before you once more.
I think those lectures you gave last spring are the most important thing that has happened in psychology in this century, because in them you give the passage of an idea from its place in nature as an archetype, to the position of an abstraction, or a concept, the last refinement of human ingenuity, you might say.
Such a thing has never ever even been dreamed of in the world before, much less done, and therefore I think those lectures ought to be treated in a way that befits the importance of their content.
But you will say, what better way is there of treating them than having them printed?
But I think the printing of them just exactly falsifies them in a very painful way.
It is generally accepted that when a thing is printed it is to be looked upon as in a more or less permanent form, but those notes are in no form at all, they could not be, and do not profess to be more than a schematic rehearsal of what you said.
They partake of the nature of the sculptor’s ébauche [mock up] in clay, and as such they have magic, but as soon as they are forced into something they are not, the magic goes out of them and they go flat.
Moreover, when you make something with spoken words, you can build extraordinary structures in a short space of time, but when it comes to the written or rather the printed word, the structures have
to have visible foundations under them if they are to carry, that is in the field of science.
Now all three series of lectures, Swanage, those here, and Cornwall, are filled with fugitive thoughts that flew with sureness when you spoke them, but go limping across the pages of the notes with only half a wing-power.
If you wrote them they would fly again, but as notes they won’t, and so it is another reason I think they ought not to be presented with the formality that printing gives them.
They should be kept just as they are, rough laboratory material, until such time as you will work up the ideas in them into a book which you will undoubtedly do in the course of time.
The best way to keep them in their place seems to be to have them mimeographed and given only to members of the class with a half a dozen exceptions such as Baynes, Shaw and a few others like that. . .
Last spring when I talked to you about it, you would look at it only as a harmless phantasy of Ward’s, this printing idea.
I have no doubt you thought the same thing when Hinkle proposed translating the Wandlung [Transformations and Symbols of the Libido], but look how far from harmless that phantasy proved to be! ~Cary F. Baynes Diary, September 26, 1925
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