Mary Mellon Letter to Carl Jung
C.G. Jung: His Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley
I’m very much upset that one of your letters has been lost-I have too few of them in the first place without the British Empire taking liberties.
I know of no way to retrieve it either.
I wonder if any of mine have gone astray.
You never answer specifically so it is hard to tell-except about the dreams-when they are too much to overlook.
The one about your betraying me was a terrible shock-and I know I needed it in just that fashion.
Cathy, who is a barometer for me, said just about that time-on looking at the snake medallion on my wrist-“I’m tired of that one-why don’t you wear the other” (meaning the clover Paul had given me) that set me thinking and coupled with the dream I had an inkling that something of the sort, which you told me in your letter, was wrong.
Then you explained it.
But it is so hard, Dr. Jung, to be so connected and not run into such pitfalls.
I can’t help the former and it takes eternal vigilance to be aware of the danger of losing myself in you.
But the opposite is true too. I look back now on the two years since I have seen you of your feeling for me. Paradoxically, that is what left me free to be myself and really love you.
I know, as well as you, that we may never see one another again, but after your last letter I feel better about it.
I begin to see just why not seeing you again could never alter anything, though at the same time there is nothing I want more-and perhaps we shall.
The whole thing is so strange that it may contain that too.
All these realizations about myself in connection with you are the sole cause, I am sure, of my being able to conceive another child-which has just happened.
No one else would believe or understand-nor does anyone else have to-but it is true.
It is a strange thing-the feeling of being with child again and stranger still to know and, though it doesn’t sound like very much-a good deal has happened through you, but not of you-so to speak-if you understand what I mean.
I know that everything is the result of the miraculous year I spent with you-but one thing leads me to believe that I have kept or gained my own identity.
That is the difference there is between my expression and that of those around me who have also been touched by you.
In other words there are people who live and breathe Jung, as you know.
It is a pattern they take up-based on your ways, your likes and dislikes, your mode of living, speech and to my great amazement-even handwriting. I have had letters from one or two in the N. Y. Psychological Club-and I swear I had to look twice to see if it weren’t yours.
I am sure I would have fallen into the same pattern had it not been for the realization or feel (sic] what connection it has with what has happened to me these past three years.
I express it badly but somehow, somewhere, some way you are in this child too.
It is as if I had been twice impregnated, for had it not been for the brutal and spiritual anguish which you and I have forced me to go through, I do not believe I would ever have conceived again.
I would never have got to the place where I knew what Paul is-who I am in relation to him, what I must be in relation to the world-and what I am in relation to you.
It all came to me in a wave the night of October 7-and I wrote Paul a letter.
This child was conceived soon after.
It is all so strange and mysterious-so very difficult and marvelous-that I am baffled and can only thank God that I understand even a slight part of it.
37 years ago, you once told me, you began to analyse-37 years ago I was born. I don’t understand. ~Mary Mellon, Jung’s Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley, Pages 18-20
