My Friend Michael

Michael and I have been friends since 1932. It was not long before we became intimate friends, a happy state of affairs that has existed ever since. He, Violet de Laszlo, Joe Henderson and myself, with Peter Baynes as the prime mover and coordinator, started to have informal meetings at least once a month. We exchanged ideas, tried out our writings, but did no training. At this time, in contrast to the Freudians, there were no Jungian training centres. Our analysts, Baynes or Jung, fumbled for their version of Excalibur, tapped us on the head with it, and said, ‘I now dub thee a Jungian analyst’. We considered ourselves superior to a few soi-disant Jungian analysts who were floating around London. Glover and Jones and their Psychoanalytic Institute took little, if any, notice of us. We added Jane Wheelwright, Marjorie Edwards and Helena Henderson to our group, which we called the Analytical Psychology Club of London. Through the years lay clubs, such as the A.P.C., preceded the formation of professional training centres in the Jungian world. The precedent was set in Zürich in the late 1920s. After Hitler's usurpation of power in Germany, our group was augmented by James Kirsch, Erna Rosenbaum, and Gerhard Adler. In 1938 the practising analysts, of whom Mike was the leading light, began to have professional meetings. Before we could start training candidates there came Munich, and then the war. Peter died during the war and Mike became the undisputed leader of the British Jungians. Incidentally, he has always resisted being called the leader of the Jungians in England. After the war Mike masterminded the formation of the Society of Analytical Psychology. It was not long before a rift began to form between London and Zürich. At the centre of this increasing tension lay the importance of children and child analysis. Jung had said privately that it was bad enough having to be a child, let alone spending the rest of your life working with them. He also believed that chil