readings, and the one inside the corpus’s own
mechanism — a descent that was voluntary and held, a frame question that
came back empty, and a check written as a professional rule by the man
who named the apparatusFourth of the readings, and the first that is not a
manual for anything. The holy daimon and
the holy heretics read Frater Acher
from the practitioner’s side of the corpus’s mechanism; undreaming wetiko found the same collapse
on a field of persons. This one is the mechanism
itself, reported from the inside by the person who built the
vocabulary the mechanism post is written
in — a collapse entered deliberately, on purpose, and survived. Its
interest is not that the descent is described from within. It is that
the book says what held it, reaches the frame question in its own words
and finds no living answer there, and then goes on working — which is
the practice-without-frame that the
frames series concluded was the only thing that ever carried
anyone.
Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from the scan of the Vintage revised edition, checked character for character against the file and cited by chapter, because the scan carries the book’s own page flow and no page markers; the reading of them is an inference, offered as one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims that the unconscious is a substance, a place, a person or a god, and nothing claims it is not; the post holds the text’s own register, which brackets itself in the text’s own words (§8). No living person is diagnosed, and nothing below is a reading of Jung’s states or of anyone else’s. The book’s authorship is part of the reading: it is a recorded and edited autobiography, and §7 says exactly what that does to a citation — including this post’s own. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections is C. G. Jung’s autobiography — recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, in the Vintage revised edition.1 Its chapters are named: Prologue, First Years, School Years, Student Years, Psychiatric Activities, Sigmund Freud, Confrontation with the Unconscious, The Work, The Tower, Travels, Visions, On Life after Death, Late Thoughts, Retrospect.
That chapter list is already the reason this reading exists. The blog’s mechanism post describes a state with three properties: sustained inward attention; a generator of self-content that falls rather than runs away; and a reporting faculty that survives the collapse — which is why the person inside it is not lying and cannot see it.
The chapter called Confrontation with the Unconscious is that state reported from the inside, by a man who went into it deliberately and came out, and who says so in his eighty-third year: “Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth.”2 A strange thing for a psychiatrist to say, and the Prologue knows it — “Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.”2
This reading takes the corpus’s author — the one document in its library in which somebody sets out to report a state that cannot report itself, and states the conditions.
The chapter opens at the break with Freud, and names the state without decoration:
“After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me. it would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing.”3
The vocabulary is the mechanism post’s own — disorientation, no footing, a centre of gravity gone. But the chapter does not stop at the state. It records what the person did with it, and the three things it records are the whole of this reading.
First, the task. It is stated as an obligation:
“Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche. I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me during my building game.”4
Two clauses there, and the corpus should hold both. The descent is given a job — comprehension — and the job is not private. §6 returns to that second clause, because it is the corpus’s collective scale arriving inside one person.
Second, the insistence that it was a strength and not a surrender. The passage continues:
“My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them—Nietzsche, and Holderlin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.”3
Read that as a claim about himself, and no reading can check it. Read it as a report of a condition and the corpus can use it: the feature named is not insight but strength, and the comparison is with people named as shattered by the same material. That is the mechanism post’s difference between a state that is survived and one that is not, reported by somebody who watched both.
Third, the anchor. The text describes a felt imperative:
“When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me til I had mastered the task.”3
and then, in the same passage, the piece of ordinary practice that belongs beside it:
“I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check.”3
The book is precise about the difference between his use of the technique and the tradition’s. He used it “only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious”, then “abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh”, whereas “The Indian, on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate completely the multitude of psychic contents and images”.3 That is a meter: the technique is applied to the part of the system that has to stay online, and dropped the moment it has done that. It is the holy heretics’ dose with the sign reversed — not how much descent, but how much restraint — and the reason given is procedural: the images have to keep speaking.
The counterweight, and it is not small. This is a retrospective account of 1913 to 1919, written for a book published in 1963 and — §7 — partly assembled from a 1925 seminar. A survivor’s report about his own survival is the class of evidence the holy daimon had to fence when it read Acher’s diary. What can be reported exactly is that the text names a task, a technique for holding steady, and a strength — all three as things that belonged to him, not as things true of anyone else.
The chapter lays out three instruments.
Writing it down. The first act after the task statement is transcription — “I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me during my building game”4 — and the manuscript history is stated plainly:
“I wrote these fantasies down first in the Black Book; later, I transferred them to the Red Book, which I also embellished with drawings” (the scan prints a question mark there, where the sense requires an exclamation — a reading of the OCR, not of the original, which this post did not see)5 — and “It contains most of my mandala drawings.”5
The material was written before it was understood, and the attempt to make it art failed — “In the Red Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never finished it”5 — which §4 returns to.
The diagram. The second instrument arrives towards the end of the descent, and it is a daily one:
“I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day.”6
Note what the instrument is claimed to be for: observation of change over time — a daily drawing used to see movement invisible from inside a single moment, not a symbol system and not a ritual. And the effect credited to it: “This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.”6
The patients. The third instrument is other people, and it comes first — the chapter’s opening move is a change in how he worked:
“I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to leave things to chance.”3
and the method is reported as one that ran itself: “The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ replies and associations.”3 Read structurally, the descent’s instrument panel has three feeds: a private written record, a private daily diagram, and material other people produced. Only the third is not the practitioner’s own product.
And that is where the counterweight goes. The third instrument is other people’s material; the reading of it remained his, and “seemed to follow of their own accord” is his report of his own reading of somebody else’s dreams. The blog’s container finding is exactly this problem, and it is not solved by having a patient in the room.
Here is the passage this reading turns on. Jung arrives at the corpus’s frame problem in his own words, from inside the collapse, decades before the corpus existed:
“About this time I experienced a moment of unusual clarity in which I looked back over the way I had traveled so far. I thought, ‘Now you possess a key to mythology and are free to unlock all the gates of the unconscious psyche.’ But then something whispered within me […] And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be, ‘Do you live in it?’ I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live by. ‘Then do we no longer have any myth?’ ‘No, evidently we no longer have any myth.’ ‘But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live?’ At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.”7
Three things are happening at once.
It is the frame is a variable, reached from the inside. The myths of the past are readable — the key works, every gate opens — and reading them is not the same as having one to live by. Where the corpus says a frame supplies the reading of a state that cannot read itself, Jung’s version is that he held the master key to everyone’s frame and none of his own, and that the second thing was the problem.
It is the direct link to the deep inheritance. That post’s finding is that the shape of a cosmology is inherited, not chosen. Jung’s dead end is its complement, and the relation should be stated rather than collapsed: an inherited frame is not an inhabited one. He does not say the myth is gone from the record; he says he does not live in it — “For me, it is not what I live by” — and Late Thoughts, forty years later: “They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.”8 Inheritance is a layer; inhabiting it is a separate fact, and the two can come apart in one person.
And the dead end is not where the chapter ends. Some pages later, on the building game, the text reports:
“I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning, it released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.”9
Read that carefully. “I had no answer to my question” — the frame question is answered nowhere in this book, and the text says so. What replaced the answer was a practice with an object — childish building, stones, a village, a church with a dome — that produced material, which was then written down and worked on. The myth was not found; it was being made. The whole descent is on that side of the ledger: no living frame, a task, and work.
Counterweight. The chapter is thematically arranged, not chronological: the myth dialogue stands earlier in it than the building-game passage, which belongs to the 1913 material. This reading’s sequence — dead end, then practice — is therefore an inference from the chapter’s order, not a claim about what Jung thought in what month. What is not an inference is the pairing: in one chapter, nobody living in a myth, and an inner certainty about being on the way to one.
The corpus has a reading about a guide: the holy daimon, where the meeting is with a being that arrives from outside, is unowned, and knows more than the practitioner. The word appears in this book too, and each use sharpens the row.
On Freud, at the close of a hard passage on one-sidedness:
“He remained the victim of the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon.”10
Read the grammar: a man in the grip of his daimon — not a man who has one, not a man who met one. The relation named is that of being held, and in a book that describes its own author the same way, the sentence is not a metaphor borrowed for colour.
On himself, in the Retrospect, the vocabulary is consistent and it is not gentle:
“There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon.”11
“I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.”11
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”11
And in Late Thoughts the word is defined in a way that holds the question open:
“This instinct comes to us from within, as a compulsion or will or command, and—if as has more or less been done from time immemorial—we give it the name of a personal daimon we are at least aptly expressing the psychological situation. And if, by employing the concept of the archetype, we attempt to define a little more closely the point at which the daimon grips us, we have not abolished anything, only approached closer to the source of life.”8
The reading, and it is this post’s. The corpus’s daimon row now has a third shape. In Acher the daimon is met — unowned, pointed outward, and, as that reading’s counterweight said, still at the top of an asymmetry in which the practitioner is a camera and the daimon is the surgeon. In Holy Heretics the relation is mutual: “my daimon beholds me.” In Jung the daimon is neither met nor held: it grips, and what is subtracted is the person’s own will — “left me no freedom of choice.” That is the category the corpus’s owned cosmos test was built to catch: a thing that holds a person, named as such by the person it held, and regretted: “This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me.”
And the counterweight is stated by the text itself. Jung’s framing refuses to decide what the daimon is: it is “the name” given to an endogenous compulsion, and the archetype concept does not abolish the thing — “we have not abolished anything, only approached closer to the source of life.”8 That is the register this post holds: whether the daimon is a being, a drive, or a name for a drive is a question the book declines. Nothing here is a finding about Freud — the sentence is cited as his characterisation of a colleague, in the register of the text.
The task statement’s second clause is the whole of this section:
“to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general”4
The chapter then produces an instance — a vision of the war, reported with a specificity no abstract claim could carry:
“I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that in the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country […] I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.”12
and then the part the mechanism post should sit up for, because it is that post’s far-side appraisal recorded as an event:
“An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’”12
Read against the mechanism post: a reading that cannot be produced from inside the state, arriving from somewhere the person experiences as not himself — an inner voice, authoritative, instructing him to accept the vision as real. The post’s claim is that the appraisal comes from whatever stands on the far side; here the book supplies it verbatim, does not say whose it is, and the descent that follows is an attempt to understand a thing he had already been told not to doubt.
The link to undreaming wetiko is a link of direction. That reading found the collapse on a field of persons, moving through a generation and between two friends and across a population, with nobody choosing it and no single person who could read it. Here the unit is one person and the claim is the inverse: what happens in one nervous system coincides with what is happening to everyone. Levy’s unit is a field carrying the thing between people; Jung’s is an individual whose inner state registers the collective one. Same phenomenon, opposite direction of travel, and the corpus now holds both.
The counterweight. “Coincided” is the text’s word, and coincidence is reported by the person having both experiences. Nothing here has measured a correspondence between one man’s visions and a war. What can be reported exactly is that the book states the individual collapse as a collective instrument — understanding his own disorientation was, in his own account, a way of understanding the time — which is the exact reverse of the modern instinct to treat an inner state as private.
Everything quoted above needs one more qualification, and it is this book’s own structural fact, printed in its front matter by the woman who made it. The book is not written by Jung in the ordinary sense, and Jaffé’s Introduction says what it is:
“I have used the records of our conversations to supplement the chapters he wrote himself, have expanded his sometimes terse allusions, and have eliminated repetitions. The further the book progressed, the closer became the fusion between his work and mine.”13
She is exact about what the book is not: “The chapters are rapidly moving beams of light that only fleetingly illuminate the outward events of Jung’s life and work”, because “Only the spiritual essence of his life’s experience remained in his memory, and this alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling.”13 And his own relation to it is recorded — “He did not regard these memoirs as a scientific work, nor even as a book by himself”, and “he always spoke and wrote of it as ‘Aniela Jaffe’s project,’ to which he had made contributions.”13
One line there changes how the central chapter must be cited, and it is why §2 and §4 are cited by chapter rather than attributed to a speaker:
“In order to complete the chapters ‘Sigmund Freud’ and ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious,’ I incorporated a number of passages from a seminar delivered in 1925, in which Jung spoke for the first time of his inner development.”13
The chapter this reading turns on — the disorientation, the task, the yoga, the myth dead end — is editorially assembled: its sentences are Jung’s words, but the selection, the order and the jointing are Jaffé’s, drawn in part from a seminar he gave twelve years after the events. That is not a defect; it is the most important thing a careful reader can know about this book, and the editor discloses it in her first pages.
What follows for the corpus is a citation rule, not a doubt. Quote it by chapter, as a document with an editor, exactly as the blog already quotes the Acher diary (the holy daimon §7). Do not quote it as an unmediated “Jung said”, because where he did not write the joins, speaker and arranger are formally different parties. And the counterweight cuts the other way: a fused book is not thereby unreliable — both contributors said it was fused, which is a higher standard of disclosure than most first-person material in this corpus arrives with.
Here is the finding.
The word “safeguard” does not occur in this file — a case-insensitive search returns 0 hits, as in Holy Daimon and Holy Heretics. But everything else in the search is different, and the difference is the finding. The clinical vocabulary is not missing; it is the book’s native language, because the author is a clinician: 0 hits for “breakdown”, “mental health”, “go see” and “seek help”; and, as case-insensitive substring counts, 81 for “doctor”, 19 for “psychiatrist”, 29 for “therapy”, 13 for “hospital”, 10 for “psychosis”, 61 for “psychiatr-”. So the corpus’s usual negative — the genre has no referral — does not survive contact with this book unchanged, and the search has to be re-run as a different question: does the text route anyone anywhere, and who does it route?
It routes the practitioner, as a rule, in the chapter on Psychiatric Activities:
“I am in favor of non-medical men studying psychotherapy and practicing it; but in dealing with latent psychoses there is the risk of their making dangerous mistakes. Therefore I favor laymen working as analysts, but under the guidance of a professional physician. As soon as a lay analyst feels the slightest bit uncertain, he ought to consult his mentor.”14
The reason is in the paragraph before — “These latent psychoses are the betes noires of psychotherapists, since they are often very difficult to recognize” — and it is attached to a case where the recognition mattered:
“His emphatic normality reflected a personality which would not have been developed but simply shattered by a confrontation with the unconscious.”14
This is a check, and it is the check the corpus said was missing. The holy daimon found it missing: “What is missing is not a pace. It is a check” — an instrument outside the practitioner by which a state can be assessed. The holy heretics found the same absence: lone workers with no member who can read another’s state, “the one safeguard this blog’s model says cannot be located inside the person having the experience”. Here the check is a rule of practice — work under a professional physician; at the first uncertainty, go to the mentor — and the reason is that the state is hard to see from inside the one place a lay analyst is looking.
The honest scope is narrower. Three limits. One: the rule governs the analyst’s work with patients, not a reader’s own practice; a reader of this book is routed nowhere. Two: his own descent was not held by a clinician at all. What the text names as the thing that kept him on this side of it is ordinary life, stated as a counterpoise:
“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person. The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits.”15
with the detail that makes it a fact rather than a sentiment — “I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht”15 — and the summary: “Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence.”15 A counterpoise is not a check. It is a load on the other side of the scale, and the text says what it was for: proof “again and again that I really existed”.15
Three: the one outside reading that actually arrived during the descent was refused, and the text records the refusal as part of the turning point. The chapter lists what ended it: the first event was “that I broke with the woman who was determined to convince me that my fantasies had artistic value”.6 Her reading — that the material was art, and that an artist may neglect reality — is quoted with its force intact: “The letter got on my nerves. It was far from stupid, and therefore dangerously persuasive.”6 He judged the reading wrong and ended the relation, and the record’s verdict is that this was the correct call. A person reading another person’s state, arriving at the weakest possible moment, and being dismissed — and a check is not automatically a good check.
So this book has more than any prior reading in the series, and it still does not hand the reader a route. It has the clinical register, a supervision rule, a stated recognition problem and a named counterpoise; it has no rule for a solitary practitioner’s own descent, no pace and no gate. What it has instead is the thing §4 found: a task, and the decision to work.
Three corrections.
First, the Western column gets the context for a quotation it has been holding without it. Its §2 quotes Jung’s descent from the Red Book — “the spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance…”, and “What you speak, that is madness.”16 That is a different work: Liber Novus, edited by Shamdasani, is the descent itself, written during it; Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the retrospective account of the same period, and it is where the practice around the collapse is stated — the task, the writing down, the daily diagram, the counterpoise of family and profession, the yoga used to hold the emotions rather than to end them, and the refusal of the one outside reading that arrived. The corpus has used the descent as a quotation for years; this reading supplies it as a practice with a job. The two books must not be run together: a phrase from Liber Novus cannot be cited to this chapter, and a phrase from this chapter cannot be cited as the Red Book.
Second, the frames series’ conclusion gets its first instance from inside a single life. The cosmos that refuses concluded that no property of a cosmology is self-enforcing and that the safeguard lives in a practice; the deep inheritance reduced the series to the same finding. Jung’s chapter is that conclusion with a date on it: he reaches the frame question in his own words, states that he does not live in any myth, records the dead end in one sentence — “I had reached a dead end.” — and then does not stop. What he does instead is named: a task, an obligation to comprehend, a practice that produces material, and a counterpoise keeping the ordinary world in place. The frames series says the safeguard is a practice; this reading adds what the practice ran under — an object, a person still working, and something ordinary holding the other end of the scale. That is narrower, and it is checkable against the text.
Third, the safeguards row needs its scope fixed, and this is the correction with a sting. The holy daimon and the holy heretics both end on the absence of a clinical referral — no route out of the practice to anyone. That finding is sound and should stand scoped to its genre: manuals for solitary practice. It must not be generalised to “the tradition” or “the West”, because the corpus’s most-cited psychologist writes the opposite into his own professional rule — supervision by a physician, and the mentor consulted at the first uncertainty specifically because the state is hard to recognise. The row is about what a text hands a reader who has no teacher. It is not a finding about whether the literature contains a check, and this book is the counterexample.
A reading holds one source whole — its structure, its instrumentation, its evidence, its editor — and asks what a blog that has quoted sources for years has to change. What this one says is a split finding.
This is the strongest instance the corpus has of the mechanism surviving: described from inside, by the person who lived it, with the conditions named — a task rather than a curiosity, a technique for restraint rather than for obliteration, ordinary life as a counterpoise, and a refusal to convert the material into art precisely because art would end the obligation. And it is the book in which the corpus’s missing check appears at last — a professional rule, in a physician’s register, in a chapter that says the thing is hard to recognise — while Jung held his own descent with a family, an address and a job (the professional rule quoted above is ch. IV’s, which Jaffé’s Introduction says she built from his conversations with the Burgholzli assistant doctors).
The two halves do not cancel. They are what the record contains: a descent that was voluntary and held, a frame question that was reached and not answered, and a practice carried on regardless. There is no living myth in this book. There is a man building a church out of stones by the lake because he could not think of anything else to do with the material, and an inner certainty that he was on the way to a myth — which is a different sentence from having one, and the difference is the whole of this reading.
Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage quoted from this book, taken from the scan of the Vintage revised edition of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, checked character for character against the file and cited in the notes by chapter, with the scan’s OCR damage flagged where a quoted line carries it. Absences reported as search results: “safeguard”, “breakdown”, “mental health”, “go see” and “seek help” return 0 hits in the file; and, as case-insensitive substring counts, “doctor” 81, “psychiatrist” 19, “physician” 10, “therapy” 29, “hospital” 13, “psychosis” 10, “psychiatr-” 61 — the register of a clinician, itemised at §8. Authorship is disclosed, not reconstructed: the book is a fusion of Jung’s chapters and Jaffé’s records of conversations, and the chapter this reading turns on is partly assembled from a 1925 seminar, which is why citations here are to chapters and not to “Jung said” without qualification. Inferred, as this post’s — §2’s reading of the task, the strength and the yoga as the descent’s holding conditions; §3’s reading of the three instruments, and its limit that only the patients’ material, not their reading, is external; §4’s reading of the myth dialogue as the corpus’s frame question reached from the inside and answered with a practice, with the ordering caveat stated there; §5’s finding that the corpus’s daimon row gains a third shape, the daimon that grips rather than the daimon that is met; §6’s reading of the collective register and the direction it runs in against undreaming wetiko; §7’s citation rule; §8’s negative finding; and the three corrections in §9. The gap is real and is not resolved here: this book contains a clinical supervision rule, a stated recognition problem, a named counterpoise and the clinical register throughout — and no pace, no gate, and no route for a reader’s own descent; the check it states governs an analyst’s work with patients, and it is not a route for the practice a reader might attempt. That is a structural description of a text, not a finding about a person. The cosmology is not endorsed — the post takes no position on whether the unconscious is a substance, a place or a person, and holds the text’s own bracketing, which is that “we have not abolished anything, only approached closer to the source of life”; no living person is diagnosed; and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated from the German by
Richard and Clara Winston, revised edition, New York: Vintage Books.
Read from a djvu OCR of that edition (906 KB); every quotation from this
book in this post was checked character for character against the file,
with its collapsed whitespace normalised. The scan is ASCII throughout:
quotation marks and apostrophes are rendered here as the straight ASCII
the file uses, the file’s -- is rendered as an em dash,
inner quotations are rendered as single quotes, and [...]
inside a quotation marks an elision of this post’s. Where the
scan’s OCR is damaged, this post says so and quotes what is
printed, because the damage is part of what was verified: the
scan lowercases the sentence-initial “it” in “it would be no
exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation” (quoted as printed at
§2); “til” at §2 is the scan’s spelling; and the contents listing
reproduces two printing errors of its own (an alternative spelling of
“Trails” for “Travels”, and a doubled “X”). The named chapters, in the
scan: Prologue, First Years, School Years, Student Years, Psychiatric
Activities, Sigmund Freud, Confrontation with the Unconscious, The Work,
The Tower, Travels, Visions, On Life after Death, Late Thoughts,
Retrospect.↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Prologue: “Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth.”; and, immediately before it, “Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”. §2–3: “After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me. it would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing.”; “My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them—Nietzsche, and Holderlin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.”; “When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me til I had mastered the task.”; the yoga passage — “I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check”, with the qualification “only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious”, “abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh”, and “The Indian, on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate completely the multitude of psychic contents and images”; the change in method — “I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to leave things to chance.”, “The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ replies and associations”; and, at §8, “It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious” (the 1914 sequence): “Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche. I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me during my building game. This work took precedence over everything else.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”: “I wrote these fantasies down first in the Black Book; later, I transferred them to the Red Book, which I also embellished with drawings? It contains most of my mandala drawings. In the Red Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never finished it.” The scan prints a question mark after “drawings” where the sense requires an exclamation; the notes quote the sentence as printed, and the body quotation at §3 stops before the damaged mark and flags it.↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”: “It was only toward the end of the First World War that I gradually began to emerge from the darkness. Two events contributed to this. The first was that I broke with the woman who was determined to convince me that my fantasies had artistic value; the second and principal event was that I began to understand mandala drawings.”; “I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day.”; the letter from “that esthetic lady”, “The letter got on my nerves. It was far from stupid, and therefore dangerously persuasive.”; and “This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”, the myth dialogue, a single continuous passage in the scan: “About this time I experienced a moment of unusual clarity in which I looked back over the way I had traveled so far. I thought, ‘Now you possess a key to mythology and are free to unlock all the gates of the unconscious psyche.’ But then something whispered within me […]. And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be, ‘Do you live in it?’ I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live by. ‘Then do we no longer have any myth?’ ‘No, evidently we no longer have any myth.’ ‘But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live?’ At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.” The elision at […] is this post’s, and it marks a place where the scan’s OCR has mangled an exclamation and its closing quotation mark; the wording either side is verbatim. The scan’s own quotation marks in this dialogue are damaged, and inner quotes are rendered here as the chapter’s dialogue requires — the wording alone is quoted, character for character.↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Late Thoughts”: “This instinct comes to us from within, as a compulsion or will or command, and—if as has more or less been done from time immemorial—we give it the name of a personal daimon we are at least aptly expressing the psychological situation. And if, by employing the concept of the archetype, we attempt to define a little more closely the point at which the daimon grips us, we have not abolished anything, only approached closer to the source of life.”; “It is only natural that I as a psychiatrist (doctor of the soul) should espouse such a view”; and, on the myth, “They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.” The same chapter’s account of the person driven by his daimon — who “truly enters the ‘untrodden, untreadable regions’”, “where there are no charted ways and no shelter spreads a protecting roof over his head. There are no precepts to guide him…” — and its verdict on the person who does not go: “I cannot blame the person who takes to his heels at once.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious” (the building-game sequence, later in the chapter than the dialogue above): “I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning, it released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.” Also from the same sequence: “I went on with my building game after the noon meal every day, whenever the weather permitted.” §4’s ordering claim is an inference from the chapter’s arrangement, not a chronology.↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Sigmund Freud”: “He remained the victim of the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon.” Cited as the text’s characterisation of a colleague and as its use of the word; §5 makes no finding about Freud.↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Retrospect: “There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon.”; “I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.”; “A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”, the autumn 1913 vision and its sequel: “I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that in the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country […] I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.”; and “Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was emphasized. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’” Reported as the text reports it; this post endorses nothing about the vision’s source.↩︎
Aniela Jaffé, Introduction to Memories, Dreams, Reflections — signed in the scan “Aniela Jarre”, the OCR’s rendering of Jaffé, over “December 1961”: “I have used the records of our conversations to supplement the chapters he wrote himself, have expanded his sometimes terse allusions, and have eliminated repetitions. The further the book progressed, the closer became the fusion between his work and mine.”; “The chapters are rapidly moving beams of light that only fleetingly illuminate the outward events of Jung’s life and work.”; “Only the spiritual essence of his life’s experience remained in his memory, and this alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling.”; “He did not regard these memoirs as a scientific work, nor even as a book by himself. Rather, he always spoke and wrote of it as ‘Aniela Jaffe’s project,’ to which he had made contributions. At his specific request it is not to be included in his Collected Works.”; and “In order to complete the chapters ‘Sigmund Freud’ and ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious,’ I incorporated a number of passages from a seminar delivered in 1925, in which Jung spoke for the first time of his inner development.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Psychiatric Activities”, the lay-analysis passage: “These latent psychoses are the betes noires of psychotherapists, since they are often very difficult to recognize” (the scan prints “betes noires” without diacritics); “His emphatic normality reflected a personality which would not have been developed but simply shattered by a confrontation with the unconscious.”; “I am in favor of non-medical men studying psychotherapy and practicing it; but in dealing with latent psychoses there is the risk of their making dangerous mistakes. Therefore I favor laymen working as analysts, but under the guidance of a professional physician. As soon as a lay analyst feels the slightest bit uncertain, he ought to consult his mentor.”↩︎
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”: “It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person. The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht—these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche.”; and, later in the chapter, “Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence.”↩︎
Jung, C. G., The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited and with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani, New York: W. W. Norton, 2009 — cited here only as it is cited in the Western column, whose note records the edition it read. This post did not read the Red Book, and no quotation from Liber Novus is presented here as from Memories, Dreams, Reflections; the two works are kept separate throughout, at §9 and in this post’s citation rule at §7.↩︎