Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Jung was over eighty when he agreed to tell the story of his life, and he made a point of warning that he would not talk about dates, job titles, or business trips the way many people expect from an ordinary autobiography. He wanted to talk about what he called his inner myth, the story that only makes sense from the inside.

The person who organized this material was Aniela Jaffé, a close collaborator of his in Zurich, who spent years listening, taking notes, and editing what became this book, published only after Jung's death, in 1962. It is a personal account, handpicked near the end of his life, with an editor who also decided what went in and what stayed out, partly at the family's request.

Jung was born in 1875 into a modest Swiss family, the son of a Protestant pastor with a small salary, in a rented house near the church. Life was frugal, the kind we would compare today to people who count coins to make it to the end of the month.

His mother had a divided way of being: by day she seemed homey and calm, but at night she spoke and acted as if someone else had taken over her body. Jung grew up feeling that there were two mothers, and that sense that people hide a second layer stayed with him his whole life.

For years he was practically an only child, playing alone in the yard and in the empty church while his father prepared the sermon, and that loneliness early on turned into a habit of talking to objects and stones instead of other children.

In the garden of the house there was a large stone where the boy liked to sit, and there he invented a game that would return decades later in his theory: he wondered whether he was the one sitting on the stone, or whether the stone was the one feeling someone sitting on top of it.

This back and forth between two identities, the boy aware of himself and a kind of mineral consciousness, motionless and ancient, stood out as one of the first signs that Jung, from very early on, did not separate the inner world from the outer one the simple way most people do.

He himself said, when he was old, that he went back to visit that stone as an adult and felt the pull of the same childhood question, as if a part of him had stayed there sitting, waiting for the rest of life to happen around it.