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How does one tell the story of another's life? When the other is someone like Freud or Jung, this question becomes especially pertinent because each of these thinkers has provided biographers with alternative frameworks for viewing and telling life stories. Freud's framework is primarily personal, retrospective, reductive, and causal; Jung's perspective is essentially transpersonal, prospective, symbolic, and teleological. Thus, one would not be amazed if a Jungian biography of Jung were found wanting by Freudians and congenial to Jungians, although even a Jungian scholar might find some drawbacks in a biography focused on archetypal issues (see Sherry, 1988). Wehr's Jung: A Biography is crafted within an essentially Jungian framework; therefore, its beauty will depend significantly on the eye of the beholder.
Both Freud and Jung were keenly aware that they could not be objective about their own lives. When offered a considerable advance against royalties for his autobiography in 1929, Freud commented, “What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity” (E. Freud, 1960, p. 391).