Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Part autobiography, part confession. The nearest thing to Jung explaining himself.
My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.
Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe across the last years of Jung's life, this volume sets down his account of an inner life he kept largely out of his published work. Jung narrates the confrontation with the unconscious that followed his break with Freud: the visions, the figures who spoke to him, the years he described as a pursuit of the images that governed him. He recounts childhood dreams, the building of the Bollingen tower, and his travels, treating each as material rather than anecdote. For the clinician, the value lies in watching a method form from the inside. Jung shows individuation not as doctrine but as something he underwent, tested against his own fear of going under. The prose stays close to experience, wary of system, and candid about what he could not explain. Jaffe's framing preserves his voice while marking where memory and interpretation part.
About the author
Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. He worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement before breaking with him in 1913 over the nature of the libido and the unconscious. Jung's work posits a collective unconscious populated by archetypes, and frames individuation as the lifelong integration of the psyche. He also distinguished psychological types along the introversion and extraversion axis. He practised and wrote in Zurich until his death in 1961.
Details
- 1962
- 1963
- Erinnerungen, Traume, Gedanken
- German
- Richard and Clara Winston
- Vintage
- Vintage, 1995
- 448
- 9780679723950