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As the editor tells us in his introductory note, Contact with Jung was first planned as a memorial supplement to the Journal of Analytical Psychology. It is a collection of short essays that were written, soon after Jung's death, by analytical psychologists living in various parts of the world. In accordance with the editor's suggestion, these essays set out either to convey personal impressions of Jung the man; or to elaborate on some ideas and intellectual tools gained from Jung the scientist and philosopher; or else to describe the history of the associations of analytical psychologists in the different countries. It cannot have been easy to compress complicated feelings and thoughts about Jung and his theories into short papers that are valid and meaningful; and it must have demanded remarkable skill in the editor to construct, out of the forty-two different contributions, a book that has coherence and avoids the pitfalls of excessive dispersion of themes on the one hand, and emotionalism on the other.
Contrary to the original intention, these essays now appear in book form and are thus available to the general public; but the volume remains an “In Memoriam”. I approached it, I must confess, with considerable apprehension. For mourning is liable to provoke strong and often unrecognized feelings of anger, depression, and resentment, and these may express themselves either in overt or covert attacks on the dead or in such defensive techniques as idealization. The death of a great man, who must have attracted particularly powerful projections, is likely to make the mourning reactions, conscious and unconscious, even more acute. And analysts are not likely to escape this kind of experience entirely. Perhaps some of the episodes at the Second International Congress of Analytical Psychology were just such a consequence. Nevertheless, I wonder whether living with Jung's theories and incorporating them to some extent may not have helped some analysts to bring these react