1. Drafts of Memories Dreams Reflections by C.G. Jung recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe

Drafts of Memories Dreams Reflections by C.G. Jung recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe

Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group

 

CONFIDENTIAL

June 29, 1977

Dear Herb,

The parcel of typescript that you asked me to examine consists of drafts of MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS BY C. G. JUNG, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe’ (Pantheon Books, 1963).

The material is in German except for some passages interpolated from Jung’s 1925 Seminar in English. Much of it is carbon copy or photocopy.

The most important item of contents is, I believe, the so-called protocols: Mrs. Joffe’s transcripts of her (shorthand?) notes of her conversations with Jung, each dated, from 21 Sept. 1956 to 23 May 1958.

In revised form, these were the basis of a great deal of MDR, but they undoubtedly contain material that was not retained in the final version. I have marked this folder “A.”

The other folders (B to G: see list attached) contain a great many sheafs of typed drafts, not in any order; often successive versions of the same section; a few duplicates; an<d occasional cancelled passages.

Much of the material contains editing in hands that I can recognize: mostly Kurt Wolff’s but also A. Jaffé’ s and Wolfgang Sauerlander’s.

I’ve not attempted to read all this (my German would be too slow), but by the evidence of proper names and other clues I can say with assurance that it all pertains to MDR. I’ve not attempted to rearrange the material— that would take hours of close study by a person intimately familiar with MDR in German; I’ve had the contents of each folder machine-numbered as it stands, in order to impose some order and obviate the loss of pages.

The folders should be saved, too.

The genesis of MDR is told in Mrs. Jaffe’s introduction. The book was the brainchild of Kurt Wolff, acting as editor-in-chief of Pantheon Books. The plan was that Jung talk to Jaffe, then his secretary, and she transcribe her notes and work up the material in autobiographical form, under Wolff’s editorship. (Folder B has some penciled notes jotted inside it of Jaffe’s delivery of batches of the protocols, date, length, payment.) The drafts show Wolff’s and Jaffe’s intensive editorial labor in shaping the material.

Later in the process of composition, Jung wrote some parts of the book himself. These are here, too, but they also went through the same Wolff/ Jaffé editorial process. In other words, I believe there is no typescript here that can be considered pure Jung.

While some passages have been cancelled, I recognize a good deal more that was finally omitted from MDR but was not cancelled on these drafts.

Jack Barrett thought there were two chapters that had been excised before publication, but it’s more a matter of passages throughout the material that were removed for one reason or another: some evidently by Kurt Wolff for editorial reasons (e.g., sketches of William James and of Einstein, which are rather thin), others because of family objections—”auntifications,” Jung called them.

I note only a page or two referring to Toni Wolff (“T.W.”), about a dream involving her; and a half page of thoughts when Emma Jung died: these were dropped. There may be more that I have missed.

The task of identifying, ordering, and evaluating this material, and detecting the passages that were deleted, could be carried out readily by only two people now alive: Aniela Jaffe’ herself, and W. Sauerlander, who worked on it with Kurt Wolff and later after Wolff left Pantheon.

Otherwise, the work would require a person with idiomatic German and a Jungian background; the painstaking comparison with the published German version would be a very slow procedure.

Jack Barrett mentioned his and Paul Mellon’s interest in reading a translation of the unpublished parts.

The only person who could both identify and translate them is Sauerlander.

(Or perhaps Richard and Clara Winston, but their experience of the Jung scene is limited to translating MDR more than 15 years ago; and their translation was revised by Richard Hull.)

Mrs. Jaffe’s attitude toward these papers is unpredictable.

It occurs to me that she may silently have kept a copy of them also, inasmuch as this is a carbon copy.

I feel certain that she would be in favor of preserving the papers, but she would probably be opposed to any publication or airing of them now. As she is the author, in effect, her attitude is central.

The papers have to be regarded as the property of Pantheon Books, as they originated as a stage in Pantheon’s project of MDR.

While Wolff had a personal role in their preparation, as the editor, he was acting as an employee of Pantheon.

He withdrew from Pantheon, and therefore from the work on this book, at a point when I believe a final version of the German had been agreed among Jung, Jaffe, and Pantheon (the other publishers, Rascher and Collins, to the best of my knowledge, did not participate in the editorial shaping), and when these earlier drafts were no longer required.

The translators worked thereafter from the final version. It appears to me that these papers were in his working files (in Switzerland, by then) and he kept them rather than turning them back to Pantheon—which, shortly afterward, was merged with Random House.

Whatever the right or wrong of it, Kurt’s action preserved the material, which could have been lost or deliberately destroyed otherwise.

The primary–and very great—importance of these papers is that’ they contain a great deal of biographical matter and of Jung’s thought that is not recorded elsewhere.

They will be of very considerable value to a future biographer. In the second place, they are fascinating testimony of an elaborate literary and editorial process that involved Jung, Jaffe, and Kurt Wolff.

My opinion: in the larger, historical view, the papers should be preserved in an appropriate archive.

Rather than the Library of Congress (they are not part of the Bollingen papers), they should be placed in the Jung Archives in Zurich, after those archives have been taken over (later this year?) by either the University or the Federal Polytechnic Institute (ETH) and are no longer under the supervision of the Jung family, some members of which might still want to dispose of the papers.

Whether the papers should be deposited under seal for a certain time is something to consider.

The decision about the papers should, I think, be made in consultation with Mrs. Jaffé and the director of Pantheon, Andre Schiffrin.

I would be against surrendering the original papers to either party, whatever their claims; but a complete xerox copy could be offered to each, and a copy should be retained by Princeton University Press/Bollingen Foundation, suitably safeguarded.

If Pantheon and Mrs. Jaffe should agree on some way of publishing the omitted passages—as some kind of sequel, or in a revised and augmented edition of MDR—that would seem their right and should be acceptable to us, so long as the entire body of papers is preserved in an archive.

As several people at the Press have asked me about the “mysterious parcel” referred to in the pink folder, I’ve said that it proved to contain some German mss. of Jung’s that have already been published—without reference to MDR.

Bill ~Protocols (Rough Draft), Pages 230-232

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