The Auntification of C. G. Jung
Henry Murray often said that all theory is autobiography. André Maurois observed that biography is sometimes disguised autobiography. I’d almost add a dictum of my own: No psychobiography without autobiography.
It’s frustrating—if not impossible—to conduct a psychobiographical analysis when your data deal only with the externals of a person’s life. A few autobiographers have tried to remain strictly in the realm of observable behavior, but most blend subjective experience with external events. Rarely is the inner life given as much weight as in C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR) has become one of the most widely read autobiographies of our time. Reviews and later assessments praised both Jung’s honesty and the book’s unusually inward focus—centered on dreams and visions rather than people, places, or public events.
In characterizing the autobiography this way, critics followed Jung’s own lead. In the introduction, he complains about the “self-deceptions and downright lies” of “too many autobiographies.” He explains that to consider “the very first beginnings of my life … in an objective fashion,” and to maintain “detachment and calm,” he had to promise himself “that the results would not be published in my lifetime.”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.
This autobiography is the principal—or sole—source of information on key periods in Jung’s life, especially his early childhood and the psychological crisis following his break with Freud. MDR has served as the foundation for all subsequent biographies of Jung.
But the conditions under which MDR emerged offer no guarantee of accuracy or completeness. A close examination of the book and its evolution reveals it to be less factually honest than often assumed. Preliminary drafts show Jung was more concerned with external events and relationships than the final version suggests.
The published MDR omits or barely mentions certain events and relationships that were deeply important to Jung’s inner life. Reshaping one’s life history to fit a final self-image is common in autobiographical writing. Early in the prologue, Jung admits he’s doing exactly 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.
Actually, that’s not the only question—especially when readers are asked to accept Jung’s stories as true accounts of other individuals’ behavior (e.g., Sigmund Freud), whose lives mattered beyond their role in Jung’s personal myth.
Still, Jung’s statement captures something essential about autobiography: it’s a privileged act of framing the world from one uniquely idiosyncratic perspective. Unfortunately, Jung wasn’t fully permitted to exercise that privilege. He tried to tell his personal myth, but others tampered with the manuscript—remodeling it in ways he didn’t entirely agree with.
The history of Jung’s autobiography has received little public attention. His inner circle in Switzerland—and loyal Jungians elsewhere—have been more protective of his image than even Freudians were of Freud’s. Major collections of Jung’s personal papers have long been difficult to access, though that’s slowly changing.
Over more than a decade, I’ve pieced together information from several unpublished sources, variant editions of MDR, and a growing library of books and articles about Jung’s life. A well-funded private investigator might have uncovered it all faster, but spending a decade on a psychobiographical subject isn’t unusual.
As in this case, the subject’s papers may be scattered across multiple archives—some restricting access more severely than others. Certain sources remain unknown until you stumble across them, or until someone better informed points the way.
Some puzzle pieces make no sense until others turn up—whether by accident or through focused search. What follows is a brief tour through the unpublished sources I consulted on Jung, presented in the order I accessed them. It offers a representative glimpse into the typically meandering path of long-term archival investigation.
My search began with the C. G. Jung Biographical Archive, housed at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library in Boston. Assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Gene Nameche—a young scholar funded by a Jung-oriented foundation—the archive consists of interviews with those who knew Jung well enough to offer firsthand memories.
To encourage candor, Nameche promised the mostly elderly interviewees that their recollections wouldn’t be available to scholars for at least ten years. Most files had only recently been opened when I began reviewing them in the early 1980s. Some interviews remain sealed; others appear to have been erased entirely.
At Countway, I also discovered a heavily copyedited manuscript of the initial English-language version of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. While not the legendary Urtext—the original German manuscript prepared by Jung and his secretary—it was the working document used by translators and editors at Pantheon Books to shape the first published edition.
For legal and personal reasons, Jung insisted the book be published first in English. The Countway manuscript helped establish specific phrasing, which was then translated back into German for European publication. I hadn’t known it existed until a fellow researcher pointed it out after I’d spent over a year rummaging through the oral history archive.
Several years and several hundred miles later, I came across the Bollingen Foundation correspondence files at the Library of Congress. Founded by Paul and Mary Mellon—both analyzed by Jung—Bollingen funded many Jungian projects, especially the English translation of Jung’s Collected Works.
In the late 1980s, while researching Freud in the Manuscript Reading Room, I noticed the Bollingen papers listed in the archives. I expected a few items on the Collected Works, but not on MDR, since Bollingen hadn’t officially participated in its publication.
To my surprise, several individuals involved in translating and editing the Collected Works had also played informal roles in shaping MDR. Their correspondence revealed ongoing discussions within Jungian circles about the autobiography’s evolution.
By then, I’d heard that Jung’s personal papers were archived in Zurich. But no one I spoke with knew what was there or how to access it. My mail inquiries yielded little. The papers were said to be disorganized, and the Jung family reluctant to grant access.
In 1991, I flew to Zurich and took a train to Jung’s house in Küsnacht. I spent three hours in Jung’s study, much of it in friendly debate with his 82-year-old son, Franz Jung, about whether outsiders had any valid reason to view C. G.’s unpublished papers.
Franz was gracious and shared stories about his father’s architectural misadventures—Franz was a professional architect; C. G. an enthusiastic amateur. Still, I left discouraged about accessing the archives.
Two days later, at the ETH-Bibliothek, archivist Dr. Beat Glaus informed me that Franz Jung had authorized access to the manuscripts I’d requested. I couldn’t photocopy them, but I could take unlimited notes. So my fiancée and I spent a week ignoring Zurich’s tourist attractions, copying fragments of MDR’s German manuscript in longhand.
ETH didn’t hold as much of the manuscript as I’d hoped, but what they had was authentic. Some portions were in Jung’s handwriting; others typed by his secretary and collaborator, Aniela Jaffé. This was the Urtext.
That same day, I interviewed Jaffé at her Zurich apartment. Though frail and nearly blind in her mid-eighties, she remained mentally sharp and candid. She spoke at length about her conflicts with the Jung family, who had tried to deny her co-author credit and royalties. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to write about MDR’s history, claiming she’d already said everything necessary—but she answered my questions anyway.
While reviewing the Bollingen papers, I noticed references to a set of Jung “protocols” that had been stored for a decade but remained off-limits. Initially, I assumed they were dream records from Jung’s diaries—interesting, but not what I was after.
Through correspondence with William McGuire, executive editor of Jung’s Collected Works, I learned the protocols contained additional parts of MDR’s German Urtext. More precisely, they were proto-Urtext fragments—raw materials Jaffé used to assemble the final manuscript.
In summer 1992, I returned to the Library of Congress. Staff told me McGuire could authorize early access to the protocols. I called him from a pay phone outside the Manuscript Reading Room. He gave permission, and I returned to immerse myself in the documents.
Eventually, I concluded that substantial portions of MDR’s original manuscript are missing from both the Library of Congress and ETH-Bibliothek. But between the two, there was more than enough Urtext to keep one researcher happily occupied for weeks. ~ Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology, pp. 51–55
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