Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections – Introduction Quotations
On September 26, Ximena de Angulo wrote again to her mother:
I think there is a real danger of an outsider horning in, Jung seemed to imply that when he said to me that he saw the time had come to have a project of this sort undertaken.
Reporters are constantly now trying to interview him, and it won’t be long before some enterprising person saw the chance of a book being got out on him. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 24
On October 7, 1952 Jung wrote to Cary Baynes on the matter:
I have insisted from the beginning that you should come in.
You represent an entirely different point of view which is presumably rather important.
At all events, I would like you to join in and collaborate with Mrs. Heyer, and you had better hurry up before I am getting altogether too senile! Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 24
On April 4, 1954 he wrote to Baynes:
Concerning our dear Lucy Heyer I get more and more the feeling that you have left me holding the baby.
She would like to see me at least once a week, so that I could produce a biography for her.
I have tried to produce some flies for her to catch, but I don’t know whether she got anywhere with that game.
I must say I never would have thought of helping somebody as far away as Lucy Heyer to write my biography.
You just muscled her in, and I, thinking she might alleviate your task, said yes, and you just faded out.
I’m quite unable to continue this funny kind of playing at a biography.
You could just as well ask me to help that foolish American Radio-Company to produce myself in the form of a film.
I don’t go to church on Sundays with a prayer-book under my arm, nor do I wear a white coat, nor do I build hospitals, nor do I sit at the organ.
So I’m not fodder for the average sentimental needs of the general public.
And that will be so with my biography.
There is just nothing very interesting in it. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 24-25
Jung’s reply indicates a less than enthusiastic response to the work she had done:
Up to the present, I haven’t seen a line of what she has written about my biography.
A while ago, I told her it would be nice to see once something of all the interviews I had given her.
But up to now I have seen nothing.
I am not sure at all whether she has worked out something or not.
I always wondered what she was going to do about her interviews, but I couldn’t say that I have got any idea of it.
You will understand that under these circumstances I have grown progressively less keen to entertain the dear old lady and I have regretted the loss of time rather precious to me.
Thus, if I may express my view of the situation, I shouldn’t weep many tears if somebody would lead the sad lady kindly away.
I must say with my limited imagination I cannot conceive how she could possibly construct a biography of myself, but not being a literary man I would hardly know how to go about in writing a biography. PJung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, age 25-36
My decision in no way indicates a negative judgement on your intelligence or your ability, but springs entirely alone from my understanding, that in my case the abyss between my damned obligations and duty is really terrible.
This would make me completely discouraged, if I entrusted myself with such a task. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 29
In an undated letter to Daniel Brody which appears to be an explanation for the termination of the project, Jung wrote,
I have gained the impression from what I have read that my life does not at all contain the matter from which one could make a biography worth reading.
I feared this from the beginning and for that reason also never could imagine, how one would be capable of externalising a plausible image of a life [Lebensbild] from a long chain of banalities and inconspicuous things. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 29
Jung replied, “I have always mistrusted an autobiography because one can never tell the truth.
In so far as one is truthful, or believes one is truthful, it is an illusion, or of bad taste.” Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 27
[I]f I where you I shouldn’t bother about my biography.
I don’t want to write one, because quite apart from the lack of motive I wouldn’t know how to set about it.
Much less can I see how anybody else could disentangle this monstrous Gordian knot of fatality, denseness, and aspirations and what-not!
Anybody who would try such an adventure ought to analyze me far beyond my own head if he wants to make a real job of it. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 27
Someone wants to write my biography but it is foolish.
I am a simple Bourgeois.
I seldom travel—I sit here and write or walk down my garden—my life has not been dramatic.
Now old Schweitzer is dramatic—playing the organ, working in a long white coat among the palm trees or going with the bible under his arm to preach—or healing people.
No one knows what I am doing and it is not paintable and you cannot take a picture of it. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 27
Wolff’s ethos is captured in the following statement:
Either you publish books you think people ought to read, or books you think people want to read.
Publishers in the second category, publishers, that is to say, who slavishly cater to the public’s tastes, do not count in our scheme of things[; …] for publishing activity of this kind you need neither enthusiasm nor taste. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 28
To Richard Hull, the translator of Jung’s Collected Works,
Wolff described how for several years he had tried to persuade Jung to write [an autobiography], how Jung had always refused, and how finally he (Kurt) hit on the happy idea of an “Eckerfrau” to whom Jung could dictate at random, the Eckerfrau being Aniela Jaffé Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 29
In an interview with Gene Nameche, she recalled that after Jung’s wife’s death,
I answered many letters for him, he did not feel at all like doing that work.
I read my tentative answers to him—sometimes he corrected a word or a sentence, sometimes it was all right.
After a certain time he began to be interested again in what he got from the world and I stopped writing in his name. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 30
Jaffé wrote a portrait of Jung in Du in 1955 in which she noted:
The greatness of this life does not lie outside.
Personal details: studies, career, professional positions, honors, travels and encounters are only pointers, outward markers, between and behind which the fullness of human experience plays out, and the great arc of the soul’s development spans.
The discrepancy between the relative inconspicuousness of this researcher’s life and the inner density and fullness could overwhelm every biographer; for it befits only the man himself who bears such a life, who has given it form and also been shaped by it to report, reveal or draw a veil over his experiences.
To allow the contemporary world and the night world to have a share in his innermost.
Yet for the observer who seeks to understand this life its polarities will also be significant: they correspond to the differentiation between the personal world of consciousness and the impersonal one of the not-I, of the limited world of consciousness and the vast world of the psyche or the unconscious. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 30-31
At breakfast C. G. spoke of the difficulties implicit in the idea of anyone writing his biography; he said it would require a full understanding of his thought, and no one understood it completely.
Freud’s life, he said, could be easily described because his thought was simply laid out.
But with him it was more complex, for unless the development of his thought were central to his biography it would be no more than a series of incidents, like writing the biography of Kant without knowing his work. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 31
As you know, I am a somewhat complicated phenomenon, which hardly can be covered by one biographer only […].
Therefore I should like to make you a similar proposition, namely that you proceed along your line as a medical man like Philp has done on his part as a theologian.
Being a doctor you would inquire into the anamnesis of your patient and you would ask the questions and I would answer as a patient would answer.
Thus you would move along the lines of your habitual thinking and would be enabled to produce a picture of my personality understandable at least to more or less medical people.
Philp certainly would produce a picture of my religious aspect, equally satisfactory.
Since it is undeniable that one of several aspects is medical, another theological, a biography written by specialists in their field has the best chance of being accurate, although not comprehensive in as much as the specifical psychological synthesis would demand somebody equally at home in primitive psychology, mythology, history, parapsychology and science—and even in the field of artistic experience. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 31-32
Jaffé was quick to reply on Jung’s behalf on December 11:
Dr. Jung said that at the present moment two biographies are in the making and a third one will start in springtime.
So, he said, that for the moment he has enough to do providing the different biographers with his memories and thoughts.
He is convinced that you would understand this difficulty and that he cannot make up his mind to begin a fourth one.
That would be too much for him. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 33
If one only knew what lay in seeds which later blossomed, these small experiences become terribly important.
They then contain an almost mysterious profundity.
Jung did not tell me these broader associations; he assumes that I understand them; something he explicitly emphasized. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 37
It had been proposed that the book be written not as a “biography” but in the form of an “autobiography,” with Jung himself as the narrator.
This plan determined the form of the book, and my first task consisted solely in asking questions and noting down Jung’s replies. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 39
I went into the Wolffs’ without an Ahnung that I was going to read a book with living fire in it.
I was conscious as I read, that I was in a sort of passionate participation with your crucifixion, it was mine too, and everything was involved in the way you handled it.
Then the outside world melted away and I was THERE, that is, in a state of being wholly new to me; I knew for the first time, but what I knew I absolutely cannot report.
This I cannot understand.
Do you think I got into the region beyond Maya?
I did not think that anything like this would be permitted to me.
It marks a climax in my life […].
Irrespective of its effects on me, this is a profoundly moving book, and it is so right the way it is written, that the contents are out of prying, monkey hands.
Also it is the right introduction to the Red Book, and so I can die in peace on that score! Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 39
The special thing about your form of communication is that it will immediately bring about an active reaction in the reader.
One involuntarily gets into a dialogue with what has been read.
Be it childhood memories, dreams, the final visions—the effect is an expansion of consciousness, an activation of one’s own content, an abandonment of the normal limits of the known and the circumspect.
To meet a person who so radically surrenders to his daimon is something extraordinary—how extraordinary is one who lives so long and faithfully with one’s self perhaps not fully consciously.
The fact that you have found a form of communicating these experiences in a completely natural, non-hermetic, unmysterious way, allowing the reader to participate in the self-expression of one’s own self, with absolute impartiality—that makes your book into something unique, almost eerie in its effect.
So one wants to continue the conversation with the book to infinity, because here is someone who has exceeded the normal mortal limits, has an idea of the greater consciousness in which we are included, and which opens up to us this consciousness, as far as a man is able to open it up.
Just as it is so extraordinarily personal, the manuscript has such a great fascination and becomes universally effective. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 40
That’s how I feel about life, as a tremendous stream.
It is painful to be outside this stream, and to be in the stream is a painful delight.
But to be outside is no delight.
One is then so to speak, very glad to be in it, but it is only a reward for one’s own cowardice, and one pays for it with spiritual constipation.
How one can live so half-cocked is a complete mystery to me. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 40
After reading the first installment I realized that Jung was (and he still is) writing this book with a directness and immediacy I hadn’t dared to hope for.
The aliveness and freshness of the great old man […] are really incredible.
When in February I expressed to him my admiration for the way he is writing this book, he said, “It’s one of the pleasant advantages of old age not to care any more what other people may think or say, but just to speak without inhibition in all sincerity how one feels.”
It’s this human grandeur, the sovereign truthfulness of the memories that impresses and excites me so much. Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 40-41
Sonu Shamdasani, Jung’s Life and Work Interviews for Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 14-42
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