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As A Training Analyst and teacher of the methods of analytical psychology I am occasionally asked what it was like to be an analysand of C. G. Jung. I used to feel uncomfortable about replying to such requests. One's personal analysis is so private that it cannot be readily described, and its real essence can never by fully communicated to those outside it, and, in some respects, not even to the analyst himself. Would it not be better to keep discreetly silent?, I thought. There is another reason why I considered that such an exposure might be rash, or at least misleading. Having lived so long beyond the period of my analysis with Jung (I was first in Zürich in 1929), I felt I was now in that dangerous place where history, if retold, all too easily becomes myth and I would probably be telling a questionable autobiographical story, instead of reproducing a picture of reality.
I resolved these doubts in time by realizing that in our work myth is also a certain kind of reality, and that instead of being afraid to expose some aspects of my personal analysis I should rather welcome the opportunity to make clear not only to others but also to myself whatever I recall of Jung's way of working—‘mythistorical’ though it may be. Having done so occasionally during the years since Jung's death I have noticed that my students have been grateful for what I could tell them and seemed not to be in any doubt that what I had said rang true.
I was encouraged by another request from the psychologist Gene Nameche, who was employed by the Wickes Foundation to collect taped interviews from those of us who had worked with Jung or known him intimately. Here an even greater objectivity was required than my reminiscences to students, since this file of interviews is sealed in a special place in the library at Harvard, only to be opened to scholars in 1981, twenty years after Jung's death. In talking with Dr Nameche I found that I presented a picture of Jung and his method that seemed new even t