Dr Bernhard was passionately convinced that only by awareness in both individuals and nations of the mythologems they are living can collective psychoses be avoided, and he was haunted by the idea that he must write his ‘auto-mythobiography’ i.e. an account of the Jewish mythologem of entry into the expulsion from the Promised Land as made manifest in the inner and outer events of his life.

However, whereas he conversed with ease and subtlety, in writing he was impeded by a preoccupation with scientific exactness, and it was not until February 1965 that he began dictating the introduction and his interpretation, in terms of the mythologem, of the big dreams and active imagination which he had recorded ever since the start of his Jungian analysis in Berlin in 1932. He died in June 1965, aged 69, on the very eve of the day upon which he was to begin their interpretation in terms of the outward happenings of his life, a tragic happening which in itself could be taken to illustrate his thesis.