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In the 1950s, in a public lecture at the C. G. Jung Foundation in New York, Laurens van der Post spoke openly about the relations between Antonia (Toni) Wolff and Jung. That was the first occasion, as far as there is any available documentation, of a public acknowledgement of the role that Wolff played in Jung's personal life. There had been occasional earlier references in the literature to her participation in the history of analytical psychology, and of course there were those individuals who knew of her relationship with Jung, but of that role there had been, in van der Post's words, ‘a reprehensible silence about her among the persons who were alive and knew her and who behaved as if she did not render the particular service that she did to Jung, and therefore to psychology’. Van der Post felt that the time had come to break that ‘reprehensible silence’ and his remarks that evening disturbed some, shocked some, and delighted others. But it remained a turning-point in the public awareness of the Jung-Wolff liaison.
Since that occasion, some forty years ago, many have spoken, many have written, sometimes in passing, sometimes at elaborate length, about that alliance. What was then, in the 1950s, a guarded and protective silence on the part of those who knew, has become an all but taken-for-granted biographical reality. Much, however, of the literature on Wolff nowadays is derivative, information acquired indirectly from those who knew her or who knew of her at the time.
Hart's paper, however, recounts several occasions on which he observed her at close range, both as analyst and teacher, on the one hand, and in her role as active member of the Zurich Institute and the Zurich Psychological Club, on the other. From his memories of Wolff as Institute teacher and Club participant, he adds footnotes to the history of her friendship with Jung and her equivocal position in the Jungian community at that time.
Among those who were close to Wolff or who, like Hart, had some f