[Carl Jung on “My Greatest Wealth.]
When I look back upon it all today and consider what happened to me during the period of my work on the fantasies, it seems as though a message had come to me with overwhelming force.
There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also.
It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so.
From then on, my life belonged to the generality.
The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days.
I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity.
It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche.
I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth.
My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.
Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences.
All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago.
Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.