Critical Notices

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, by C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull. London,  Routledge & Collins, 1963. pp.  384. 8 illustrations. 45s. New York,  Pantheon.

Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, von C. G. Jung. Aufgezeichnet und herausgegeben von Aniela jaffé. Zürich und Stuttgart,  Rascher, 1962. Mit 25 Tafeln. pp.  422. Fr/DM. 29.

“My life is the story of a self-realization of the unconscious”—this opening sentence of Jung's autobiography shows both its intentions and its limitations. Strictly speaking, this is no autobiography at all, but a report on “encounters with the inner reality”. This explains why the book gives relatively little of Jung's life or external history but concentrates on his inner development and crises. They alone seemed to Jung to be worth recording, and his purpose is most clearly expressed in a phrase of a letter to the publisher Kurt Wolff who first suggested the plan of the autobiography to Jung: to look at his life “three-dimensionally, that is with the inclusion of the unconscious …” Thus most of the book is focused on the unconscious processes underlying external events. Since, however, with a person like Jung these unconscious processes were so intimately bound up with his work, we can find a great deal about the sources of the latter.

It is, in itself, an interesting question what made Jung agree to such an autobiography at all, particularly since he had often expressed his dislike of talking about himself and his life. The book seems to show an urgent desire to explain himself to the world, and to be understood at this late hour in his life—Jung was in his eighties when he started on the book. He wanted to convey his real intentions and to depict the conditions in and from which his work grew. This would tally with Jung's willingness in his later years to submit to newspaper interviews or have himself filmed—a last effort to break out of an isolation which at times seemed to him to threaten his whole work.

That this feeling of isolatio