Jung wrote to Erich Neumann: ”In the case of bad books, it is enough that they get written. Good books, however, want to realize themselves and begin to pose questions which one would rather leave others to answer” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153.
…although Jung certainly did spend some time playing with building blocks, during this long regressive period, stretching out over nearly six years (until 1918), he lived a normal middle-class life as psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a large international practice, and his family never had to suffer on account of his preoccupation. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 154.
The building game was only a prelude, a rite d’entre. It released a stream of fantasies and had a calming effect on the emotions bound up with these inner images. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 154.
It was the concept of individuation, already sketched out in ” Septem Sermones,” that gave him relief, peace of mind, and the will to return to the world of scientific research; for the individuation process brings about the conjunction of opposites for which Jung had struggled during the preceding years. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 160.
Jung never completely recovered from Wilhelm’s premature death in 1930. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 162.
These visions filled Jung with indescribable bliss: ”One cannot imagine the beauty and intensity of feeling during the visions. They were the most powerful things I have ever experienced.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 163.
Having been stimulated by Karl Kerenyi’s book on the Aegean Festival in Faust Part II, he began working on Mysterium Coniunctionis in his sixty-sixth year; he finished the two volumes sixteen years later. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 165.
“My lifework is essentially an attempt to understand what others apparently can believe” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 167.
Jung’s mother, Emilie Jung (nee Preiswerk, 1849-1923), had a similar gift and was interested in the “supernatural.” She left behind a diary in which she noted down all the premonitions, “spookish” phenomena, and strange occurrences she had experienced. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.
Every week, at a fixed hour, he [Dr. Jung’s Maternal Grandfather] used to hold intimate conversations with his deceased first wife, very much to the chagrin of the second! Jung’s psychiatric diagnosis was that he suffered from “waking hallucinations,” though at the same time he dismissed this as a “mere word.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.
Samuel’s second wife, Augusta (nee Faber, 1805-1862), Jung’s maternal grandmother, was gifted with “second sight” and could also see “spirits.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 2.
As Oeri indicates, Jung did not confine himself to reading “occult” literature, but began his own experiments and, during the years 1899 and 1900, organized regular seances. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 3.
The psychoid archetype is not to be confused with archetypal images or archetypal contents. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 7.
“Although on the one hand our critical arguments cast doubt on every single case [ of apparitions], there is on the other hand not a single argument that could prove that spirits do not exist. In this regard, therefore, we must rest content with a non liquet.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 9.
In the early twenties Jung, together with Count Albert Schrenk-Notzing and Professor Eugen Bleuler, carried out a series of experiments with the Austrian medium, Rudi Schneider, at the Burgholzli. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 10.
Jung told me later that in one series of experiments, papier-mache objects (cutouts of angels and beer mats) which had been covered with luminous paint and placed out of reach of the medium rose up in the air and sailed through the room as soon as the medium fell into a trance. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 10.
At one seance, four of the five people present saw an object like a small moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. It was absolutely incomprehensible to them that Jung, the fifth person, could see nothing of the sort, although they repeatedly pointed out to him exactly where it was. From this Jung inferred the possibility of collective visions on such and other occasions-for instance, the sightings of flying saucers. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 11.
“If such things can occur,” wrote Jung, “then it is also conceivable that persons in the vicinity of mediums might act as a source of ions-in other words, nourishment might be effected by the passage of living molecules of albumen from one body to another.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 12.
In later years Jung no longer concerned himself with spiritualistic or occult phenomena and he never evaluated his parapsychological experiments scientifically, yet he did not by any means dismiss them as worthless. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 12
“In this vast and shadowy region, where everything seems possible and nothing believable, one must oneself have observed many strange happenings and in
addition heard, read, and if possible tested many stories by examining their witnesses in order to form an even moderately ,sure judgment,” he says in his foreword to Fanny Moser’s book. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 13.
From earliest times death and the idea of a life after death have filled man’s thoughts, and in religion, philosophy, and art have prompted answers to what is rationally unanswerable. To throw all this to the winds is, from the psychological standpoint, symptomatic of an atrophy of instinct and a willful disregard of one’s psychic roots, both of which must be paid for dearly. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 13.
Yet insects have no cerebrospinal system at all, but only a double chain of ganglia corresponding to the sympathetic system in man. Jung concludes that the ganglionic system can evidently produce thoughts and perceptions just as easily as the cerebrospinal system. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 15.