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This is not a biography of Jung, let alone the biography: the author purposely calls it in the Preface, ‘a biographical memoir, showing his life as it appeared to me’. It ‘was written entirely from my own standpoint, the standpoint of those of his pupils who were privileged also to see him outside analysis’. She explains moreover, that, realising ‘Jung's children were very much against anything biographical being written about their father, since they felt that all that is necessary has been said in his own Memories, dreams, reflections’, she did not tell them she was writing it; when they read it ‘they thoroughly disapproved’.
It throws a small beam of light onto the complexity of present-day attitudes that the revelations Jung chose to make in Memories, dreams, reflections of his inner extraordinarily intense conflicts are acceptable, whereas the spreading beyond Zürich of the openly observed facts about his long friendship with Toni Wolff was regretted. Although Hannah states that Jung ‘found that his feeling for Toni added to rather than diminished his affection and devotion for his wife and family’, that ‘his problem of how to include Toni Wolff in his life fell within the same period’ as the critical time of ‘facing the unconscious’ (p. 117), and that he succeeded in that inclusion ‘primarily because of his own scrupulous fairness to all parties’ (p. 119), she also acknowledges ‘most painful difficulties’: there was much natural human jealousy. But clearly there was enough real love, and no one took destructive action. Yet it must be understood that in a family many susceptibilities to pain do still operate, and the present permissiveness toward the young does not yet necessarily get granted to parents. Subjectivity remains dominant.
The number of books about Jung is growing, the best known so far being Contact with Jung, edited by in 1963, C. G. Jung: his myth in our time (1972), Jung and the story of our time (1975) a