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The late Dr E. A. Bennet, who died in 1977 in his eighty-ninth year, combined the academic study of philosophy, theology and medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, with military experience during two World Wars and long years of practice in psychiatry and psychotherapy. This must have made for common ground between himself and Jung whom he met for the first time in the early Thirties, even before 1935 when he became greatly impressed by the personality of Jung on the occasion of Jung's Tavistock Lectures. The sympathy thus activated resulted in Bennet lecturing regularly on Jung and other topics in the Medical School at Trinity, in his participating for a time in the newly set-up training in the Society of Analytical Psychology, and in his influencing young psychiatrists in the Maudsley Hospital into taking an interest in Jung.
After World War II, Bennet became a friend of Jung, and during the years 1946 to 1961 spent sixteen periods of time with him, in all seventy-eight days, during the last fifteen years of Jung's life until his death in 1961. Those were the years that were to see the publication of Jung's creative, highly original and extended historical studies. Bennet especially intensified the visits in 1955, the year of Jung's 80th birthday celebrations, a year when a furore was arising over the publication of ‘Answer to Job’ (in German in 1952 and in English in 1954). It was above all, however, the year in which Jung experienced the intense grief and sense of loss that were inevitably connected with the death of Emma, his wife.
During all this time Dr Bennet made fairly systematic notes of the content of Jung's free and easy conversational style, spontaneous and oracular as it was, and compounded of quips and pronouncements still expressing a touch of the enfant terrible in his generalisations and thrusts. Jung, at this stage in his life, could still be in fine form—enough to make people take note, or even notes, as indeed Bennet did, sometimes during the conve