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‘My life is what I have done, my scientific work: the one is inseparable from the other. The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformation.’ (: Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Fontana, 1967, p. 249).
Although Jaffé groups the six essays in this collection under two headings, four on the work of Jung and two on more personal aspects of his life, both aspects are closely intertwined, the one informing the other: the theoretical papers trace the development not only of Jung's thought, but of the man who thought, while, in the personal essays, the theory is given living substance by what Jaffé modestly calls the ‘few sidelights’ she throws on ‘the man as I saw him, and as he appeared to me in the daily round of the last years of his life’ (p. 160, Hull's translation).
All the essays have appeared elsewhere. Three are to be found in Jaffé's earlier book, From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung (English translation by R. F. C. Hull, 1972). These are ‘Parapsychology: experience and theory’, ‘Alchemy’, and ‘From Jung's last years’. The others are a short piece on ‘Superstition’ , an essay drawing comparisons between Jung and Erich Neumann, ‘Unitary reality and creativity’ , and a paper on ‘Jung and the Eranos conferences’ which she gave at Eranos in 1975, the year of Jung's centenary.
The paper ‘Alchemy’ serves as a focus for themes which form a unifying thread running through all the essays. Once Jung had perceived the symbolic nature of the alchemical process he found that alchemy provided him with ‘the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious’ (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 231), confirming for him the inner experiences out of which he shaped his ideas on the archetypes and on individuation. Moreover, alchemy both represented in itself the two-sidedness of reality, like the bipolar nature of the archetype, the instinctual and the spiritual, matter an