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George French Porter (1881- 1927) was an American businessman, collector, and philanthropist from Chicago and a patient of Jung’s and William Alonson White’s.
He married a Frenchwoman, Mirna Manziarly, who was a Theosophist and a friend of Krishnamurti.
It was on Porter’s invitation that Jung traveled to America in 1924- 25, and Porter financed the trip. In September 1926 he suffered a neck injury from a car accident, and in February 1927 he was planning to visit Jung in Zurich.
On February 24 he shot and killed himself.
The news was carried on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, which reproduced his suicide note to his wife, in which he wrote, “This fate was on me- the inevitable conclusion to a twisted life” (February 24, 1927).
The Tribune described him as a “sufferer from melancholia.”
Barbara Hannah noted, “When he died … Jung was much distressed and said that if he had only known about George Porter’s difficulties he would have gone to America at once to do all he could to help him” (Jung: A Biographical Memoir, p. 158).
His estate was worth $5 million.
He bequeathed Jung $20,000.
Franz Jung informed William McGuire that it proved to be “mining stock of slight value” (William McGuire, “Jung in America, 1924- 1925,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought [1978]: 37- 53; Chicago Tribune, February 24 and May 6, 1927; and see New York Herald Tribune, March 4 , 1927). ~The Red Books, Vol. VII, Page 241, fn 266
