Interview of Murray Stein

JW: Well here I am in Zurich on 29th September 2018, in Murray Stein's very beautiful consulting room, and about to conduct an interview, a dialogue, between us. The context for this is that the Journal of Analytical Psychology, of which I am on the Editorial Board, does from time to time organize interviews with eminent Jungians.

You have a long history in the field of analytical psychology, Murray, and at the last Journal meeting I volunteered your name and volunteered myself as interviewer as we've known each other for a long period of time. So it's my great pleasure to do this today as you're somebody who has made a huge contribution in so many different areas of analytical psychology. Thank you for agreeing. There will be a film made of this interview and hopefully a slightly edited version in the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

I want to start, going fairly chronologically, by asking you to tell me a bit about your personal background, the environment in which you were brought up, to develop a framework for talking more about your professional life.

MS: I grew up in a special family environment. My father was a Protestant pastor so our life was very much permeated by church and religion. We went to church regularly, usually two or three times a week. My father preached and taught and took care of the congregation, my mother was involved in various church activities, and in our home, we regularly talked about the Bible and my mother would read us Bible stories before breakfast. The biblical world was our world more than the temporal world we lived in. Bible stories were my equivalent of fairy tales in childhood.

I was born in Saskatchewan, out on the pretty wild plains of central Canada. My maternal grandparents were pioneers there who immigrated to Canada from Prussia in the late 19^th century in order to keep their sons out of the army. They were descendants of Swiss Anabaptists and were pacifist so they didn't want their boys going to war. My father emigrated f