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The editor has asked me to write about Jung, with the facts in mind that this is the centenary of his birth and that I am one among the dwindling group of persons who knew him at all well.
A growing number of vignettes of Jung have been published: reports of interviews with him or short accounts of what he was like, and there are archives at the Wickes Foundation in the United States which contain many more such contributions. My reflections will contribute to the continuing collection of data. They will be personal and have an analytic tinge. They will not, indeed could not, constitute an analysis of Jung as a man—an investigation which he himself began in Memories, dreams reflections and will be further developed only when a biography of him comes to be written.
In 1932 I met H. G. Baynes, a friend of my parents when I was a child, He had come back to England after many years of working in Zürich as Jung's assistant, and talked at length about his experiences, giving me a striking impression of Jung as a most remarkable man—a ‘giant’, he once remarked. Eventually he suggested that I might go out to Zürich with a view to being analysed by the master; accordingly I wrote to Jung telling him of Baynes' suggestion and stating that it would be necessary to find work in Switzerland because I had no money. Jung replied that I should go out to see him.
It was in 1933 when I went to Zürich, and in the railway carriage, as my sole companion, was a young Jew who was making arrangements to leave Germany. He talked at length about what was going on there: I was shocked and fascinated.