Alan C. Elms, Jung’s Lives, Hagiographies
HAGIOGRAPHIES
Among the early biographies were several written by devout Jungians who knew Jung personally and/or practiced Jungian psychotherapy.
Each writer sought to achieve one or more of these related aims: to assert Jung’s genius and his outstanding virtues as a human being; to defend him from criticism and excuse his apparent misdeeds; and to link the biography’s author as closely to Jung as possible.
A biography by the British psychiatrist E. A. Bennet, C. G. Jung (1961/1962), appeared even before MDR.
However, the book was based in part on interviews Bennet conducted with
Jung during the period when Aniela Jaffé was also interviewing Jung for the autobiography and, to some extent, while Jung was writing his own chapters for MDR.
Thus, there is considerable overlap between Bennet’s rather brief anecdotal account of Jung’s life and Jung’s more elaborate recounting of the same stories. Bennet’s book is therefore of interest mainly as it presents slightly different versions of Jung’s key autobiographical tales.
These different accounts may be regarded as a sort of check on Jung’s reliability. (However, in at least one instance, Bennet’s own reliability is doubtful: he describes the phallic god that Jung encountered in his first remembered dream as 12 inches rather than 12 feet tall [p. 10].
The height of the phallus is corrected in a posthumously published volume, Meetings with Jung [Bennet, 1985], where Bennet’s interviews are presented without paraphrase.)
Several years after MDR appeared, Aniela Jaffé wrote From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung (1968/1971) under her own name, rather than disguising it as part of his autobiography.
Jaffé had not been counted among the prominent scholars and therapists in the circle of women around Jung, but she knew him for a quarter-century and worked closely with him as his secretary, then as his collaborator on MDR, during the last seven years of his life.
In one of the book’s essays, she assigned herself the task of supplementing the insistently inner-directed MDR with an account of Jung’s daily life and his necessary interactions with “external reality” (p. 101).
Jaffé’s picture of him is in large part endearing, though sometimes embarrassingly adulatory (“I must confess that the approach of the old magician never lost its excitement in all those years” [p. 123]), and at other times indulgent toward his petty tyrannizing.
Soon after Jaffé’s account appeared, the most serious scholar in Jung’s inner circle, Marie-Louise von Franz, wrote a quite different biography of her mentor, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time (1972/1975).
Taking her biographical details from MDR, von Franz added extensive glosses in the form of discussions of theoretical concepts that grew from Jung’s personal experience.
Readers who seek a sophisticated but orthodox embellishment of Jung’s
“personal myth” will find the book helpful; those looking for further information on Jung’s life will not.
Von Franz’s housemate Barbara Hannah chose instead to write a “biographical memoir,” Jung: His Life and Work (1976). Like von Franz, Hannah was a Jungian therapist and a member of his inner circle.
She depends as heavily on MDR as von Franz does, but her exegesis
takes the form of quotations from her many conversations with Jung.
She often elaborates on the life events surrounding the quotations, so her book has become an additional source of information beyond MDR for later biographers. Hannah appears to be, for instance, the first writer to report Jung’s often-quoted remark contrasting himself with his more dogmatic disciples:
“Thank God, I am Jung, and not a Jungian!” (p. 78). She makes no effort to be an objective observer; she is as devoted to the great man as Jaffé or von Franz is and she accepts Jung’s perspective on every issue, theoretical or clinical or personal.
When she recounts (again for the first time in any biography) Jung’s long extramarital relationship with his second lover, Toni Wolff, she fully excuses his behavior, endorsing “his own scrupulous fairness to all parties,” and even agreeing to his rationalization that by keeping a mistress he avoided “the untold damage that fathers can do to their daughters by not living the whole of their erotic life, which is seldom completely contained in marriage” (p. 119).
Anthony Stevens is another Jungian therapist, but he did not know Jung personally.
His book On Jung (1990) contains little biographical information beyond what can be found in MDR, except for some further information on Toni Wolff.
The book is organized in terms of what Jungian theory has to say about each stage of the human life cycle, using incidents from MDR to illustrate each theoretical point.
Thus, Stevens reverses von Franz’s approach by going from Jung’s concepts to Jung’s life.
However, as with von Franz and Hannah, he makes no concerted psychobiographical effort to examine the processes through which Jung’s experiences evolved into theory.
Laurens van der Post, the charismatic author of many books and articles about his native South Africa and his world travels, breathlessly narrated a widely shown documentary film about Jung (Stedall, 1971), then wrote an effusively enthusiastic book, Jung and the Story of Our Time (1975). Van der Post came rather late to the Jungian cause, after his second wife was trained in Jungian psychotherapy by Toni Wolff.
Though he claims close friendship with Jung and is often cited in later biographies, his book is a peculiar document.
Like Barbara Hannah, he repeatedly takes biographical details from MDR, then embroiders them with paraphrases or approximate quotations from his frequent conversations and correspondence with Jung.
But in contrast to Hannah’s book, van der Post seldom if ever adds anything substantive to what was already known about Jung from MDR or from Jung’s published letters and other writers’ published accounts.
Van der Post says he took no notes of the conversations and he apparently held no letters in hand as he wrote his book. (Two published letters from Jung to van der Post [Adler, 1975, pp. 200–201 and 292–293] are mainly thank-you notes for small gifts.)
A recent biography of van der Post (Jones, 2002) characterizes him as a “compulsive liar” throughout his life (p. 359), who exaggerated or totally misrepresented such matters as his South African childhood, his wartime military service, and his many romantic relationships.
It is reasonable to wonder, as Jones does, just how close a friend van der Post was to Jung and whether most of his cited letters from Jung ever existed.
It is also reasonable to question whether any original observations van der Post reported about Jung can be trusted. Jones quotes Ruth Bailey, who
was a genuinely close friend of the Jung family and who served as Jung’s housekeeper/companion in his final years, as saying that Jung liked van der Post “well enough at first, and then he decided that he was a pea who had grown too big for its pod” (p. 330). ~Alan C. Elms, Jung’s Lives, Page 2-4
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Alan C. Elms: Uncovering Lives
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