Henry Murray often said that all theory is autobiography.
The Auntification of C. G. Jung
HENRY MURRAY often said that all theory is autobiography.
Andre Maurois observed that biography is sometimes disguised autobiography.1
I’d almost be willing to add a dictum of my own: “No psychobiography without autobiography.”
It’s frustrating if not impossible to do a psychobiographical analysis when your data deal only with the externals of an individual’s life.
A few autobiographers have striven to remain entirely in the realm of observable behavior,2 but most blend descriptions of their subjective experiences with accounts of external events.
Rarely is the inner life given as large a role as in C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.3
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (henceforth cited as MDR) has become one of the most widely read autobiographies of our time.
Initial reviews and later assessments of the book emphasized both Jung’s honesty and the autobiography’s unusually inward orientation: its focus on Jung’s dreams and visions throughout his life, rather than on people, places, or public events.
In so characterizing the autobiography, others have followed the lead of Jung himself.
He is quoted in the introduction as complaining about the “self-deceptions and downright lies” of “too many autobiographies.”
He says that in order to consider “the very first beginnings of my life … in an objective fashion,” “in order to assure for myself the necessary detachment and calm,” he has had to promise himself “that the results would not be published in my lifetime.”
He continues:
Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these “outer” experiences were never so very essential anyhow, or were so only in that they coincided with phases of my inner development. An enormous part of these “outer” manifestations of my life has vanished from my memory. . . . On the other hand, my recollection of “inner” experiences has grown all the more vivid and colorful.4
This autobiography is the principal or sole source of information on key periods in Jung’s life, especially his early childhood and the period of profound psychological distress following his breakup with Freud.
MDR has therefore served as a foundation for all subsequent biographies of Jung.5
But the conditions under which MDR emerged were no guarantee of its accuracy
or its comprehensiveness.
A close examination of the autobiography and its evolution shows it to be less factually honest than has usually been assumed.
Furthermore, preliminary drafts show Jung to have been a good deal more concerned with external events and personages in his life than we have been led to
believe.
In addition, the published versions of MDR completely omit or barely mention certain events and relationships highly important to Jung’s inner life.
Reshaping one’s life history to fit a final self-image is not unusual in autobiographical writing.
Early in his prologue Jung acknowledges that he is doing just that: “I have now undertaken … to tell my personal myth. . . . Whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”6
Actually that’s not the only question, especially when the reader is asked to accept Jung’s stories as true accounts of the behavior of other individuals (e.g., Sigmund Freud) whose lives were significant beyond their role in Jung’s personal myth.
But Jung’s statement does convey an important aspect of the autobiographical impulse, one that carries a degree of personal privilege: any autobiography is written at least in part to get down on paper how the world looks from one uniquely idiosyncratic perspective.
Unfortunately, Jung was not fully permitted to exercise that privilege.
He tried to tell his own personal myth, but his autobiography was then tampered with by others, who remodeled it in ways with which he did not altogether agree.
The history of Jung’s autobiography has received little public discussion.
Jung’s inner circle in Switzerland (and faithful Jungians everywhere) have been far more protective of his public image than even Freudians have been of Freud.
The major collections of Jung’s personal papers in Switzerland and elsewhere have not been easily accessible, though the situation is improving.
I’ve pieced together the following information over more than a decade from several unpublished sources, in addition to the published autobiography in its variant editions and a growing library of books and articles about Jung’s life.
A resourceful private eye with an ample expense account might have added everything up a lot faster, but spending a decade of intermittent research on a psychobiographical subject isn’t that unusual.
As in this case, the subject’s papers may be distributed over several archival
locations, some of which restrict access longer or more severely than others.
Certain sources of information may remain unknown until you stumble over
them, or until somebody better informed takes pity on you and points the way.
Certain pieces of the psychobiographical puzzle may make no sense until other
pieces turn up—accidentally or after a concentrated search.
A brief tour through the unpublished sources I’ve consulted on Jung (in chronological order of my access to them) will give a representative picture of the typically meandering course of such long-term archival investigation.
My search began with an oral history of Jung, called the C. G. Jung Biographical
Archive, housed at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library in Boston.
This oral history was assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Gene
Nameche, a young scholar who was supported financially by a Jung-oriented
private foundation.7
Nameche interviewed everyone he could find who had known Jung well enough to possess significant firsthand memories of the man.
To encourage openness, Nameche promised the mostly elderly interviewees that
none of their recollections would be made available to scholars for at least ten
years.
Most of the files had only recently been opened when I began to look at them in the early 1980s.
(Certain sensitive interviews or portions of interviews will remain closed for years to come. Some interviews appear to have been altogether erased from the record.)
At the Countway Library, I also came upon a heavily copyedited manuscript of the initial English-language version of the autobiography.
This was not quite the legendary Urtext, the original German-language manuscript prepared in close collaboration by Jung and his secretary.
But the Countway manuscript was the document that several translators, editors, and copyeditors worked on at Pantheon Books to establish the basic form of the autobiography’s first published edition.
(For both personal and legal reasons, Jung insisted on the book’s publication
initially in English translation rather than in the original German.)
The
Countway manuscript was used to establish the specific phrasing of many passages,
which were then translated back into German for the autobiography’s subsequent publication in Europe.
I had not known of the manuscript’s existence when I began doing research on Jung.
A friendly fellow researcher pointed it out to me after I had rummaged through the Jung oral history off and on for over a year.8
Several years and several hundred miles away, I happened upon the correspondence files of the Bollingen Foundation, which had been deposited in the Library of Congress.
The Bollingen Foundation (founded and funded by Paul and Mary Mellon, who had been analyzed by Jung) has financially supported many projects connected with Jungian psychology, especially the publication of Jung’s Collected Works in an authoritative English translation.
In the late 1980s, while I was doing
research on Freud in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Reading Room, I
noticed the Bollingen Foundation papers on a list of the Library’s archives.
I thought the papers might include a few items dealing with the translation of the
Collected Works, but I didn’t expect to find anything on Jung’s memoirs, since the
Bollingen Foundation had not been officially involved in the translation or pub
lication of MDR.
I soon found, however, that several of the people involved in translating, editing, and publishing the Collected Works also played a significant informal role in the evolution of the autobiography, and often corresponded with others in Jungian circles about how it was coming along.
By this time, I had heard from various sources that Jung’s own personal papers
were sitting in an archive in Zurich.
But nobody I talked to knew what was there or how to get into it.
I tried to obtain the autobiographical components of the archive by mail, or at least to learn whether any parts of the autobiography were included, but my inquiries met with little success.
The Jung papers were not well organized, I was told, and the Jung family was not eager to grant access.
I finally flew to Zurich in 1991 and took a local train to Jung’s house in the suburb of Kusnacht.
There I spent a remarkable three hours in Jung’s study, much of the time in friendly argument with C. G.’s 82-year-old son Franz Jung about whether anyone outside the family could have any valid reason to look at any of C. G.’s unpublished papers.
Franz Jung was a gracious host, and he told delightful stories about his father’s
architectural ineptitude.
(Franz is a professional architect; C. G. was an eager amateur.)
But I left the house feeling discouraged about the prospect of ever getting into the archives.
When I went to the ETH-Bibliothek two days later, the archivist (Dr. Beat Glaus) said that Franz Jung had sent word to let me look at all the manuscripts I had asked for.
I wouldn’t be allowed to photocopy them, but I could take as many notes as 1 wanted.
So for a week my fiancee and I ignored the touristic temptations of Zurich and copied out in longhand various fragments of MDR’s German-language manuscript.
The ETH-Bibliothek didn’t have as much of the manuscript as I’d hoped to see, but it was the real thing.
Portions were written in Jung’s hand; the rest had been typed by his secretary and collaborator, Aniela Jaffe.
We’re talking Urtext here, folks!
On the same day that I got my first taste of the Urtext, I interviewed Aniela Jaffe at her Zurich apartment.
In her mid-eighties, Frau Jaffe was frail and nearly blind, but she remained sharp of mind and tongue.
She dwelt at some length on her troubles with the Jung family.
She told me they had repeatedly tried to deprive her of the title-page credit and the royalties she deserved for co-authoring the autobiography.
She also said she couldn’t understand why I’d want to write anything about the history of MDR, since she had already written everything that needed to be said about it.
But she answered my questions anyway.
When I had looked through the Bollingen Foundation papers at the Library of
Congress, I noticed references to a set of Jung “protocols” that had been tucked
away there for a decade but were still off-limits to scholars.
At first I thought these “protocols” were records of Jung’s dreams and visions, perhaps transcribed from his personal diaries—potentially interesting but not what I was looking for.
However, through an exchange of letters with William McGuire (executive editor
of Jung’s Collected Works and the most reliable scholar in the Jungian camp),
I came to realize that the “protocols” contained many additional parts of the
German Urtext of MDR.
More precisely, they were a sort of proto-Urtext, including large and small chunks of the materials from which Aniela Jaffe had assembled the Urtext itself.
On another visit to the Library of Congress in the summer of 1992,1 learned from staff members that McGuire had the authority to give me permission to look at the “protocols” well in advance of their scheduled declassification.
So I went to a pay phone in the hallway outside the Manuscript Reading Room, called McGuire in Princeton, and asked for permission.
He gave it, and I went back in to feast on the “protocols.”
I eventually determined that substantial portions of MDR’s original manuscript are neither at the Library of Congress nor at the ETH-Bibliothek.
But between those two depositories of Jungian texts, there was quite enough Ur to make one researcher happy for many weeks. ~Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives, Page 51-55
