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In the very first sentence of his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1983), Jung proclaims: ‘My life is a story of the self-realisation of the unconscious’ (MDR, p. 17). A little later he declares that what he is about to tell is his ‘personal myth’, that is, his inner experiences of the ‘transitory world’. Jung means that in his own life the role played by the unconscious has been nothing less than crucial, and that this personal history of the self-realisation of his unconscious can only be told as a myth, as a story that is based not on an objective foundation but on the imaginative unity of his life history. In the first page of his memoirs, he extols the value of myth as a medium for expressing the ‘innermost’ being of man. He is not interested in the truth value of his myth, but in its subjective meaning—that his myth can be told as his own truth.1 In the eighty-third year of his life, Jung concluded his life-work with the narration of his personal myth.
The term ‘personal myth’ is, of course, somewhat paradoxical, because it is one of the few basic characteristics of myth that it is an anonymous text, without a known author and therefore irreducible to an individual.2 Now, when I refer to Jung's narrative of his ‘inner life’ as a ‘personal myth’ I am well aware of the fact that as a myth it is sui generis, a kind of ‘near-equivalent’ to an ‘ordinary myth’ (whatever that is). What I am also aware of is another ‘unmythical’ characteristic of Jung's myth: it is a consciously fabricated drama, where the protagonist himself is the narrator. Yet, as myth can be many things at once and it escapes our attempts at a clear formulation of its ‘essence’, I go on talking about his narrative as a ‘personal myth’.
In his myth, there are certain key words like ‘personalities No. 1 & 2’, ‘fantasy’, ‘dreams’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Salome and Philemon’, ‘the Tower’, and, of course, the words which are the sine qua non for his whole life and work: ‘the psyche’ and ‘the unconscious