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        Until the end of his long life, Carl G Jung steadfastly refused to attempt his autobiography, which his friends and disciples urged him to write and his admirers throughout the world hoped for from him. What he had to say, he maintained, was to be found in the 20 volumes of his professional writings like 'Psychiatric Studies', 'Experimental Researches', 'The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease', 'Freud and Psycho Analysis', 'Analytical Psychology', 'The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche', 'The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious', 'Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self', 'Psychology and Religion', 'Psychology and Alchemy', 'General Problems of Psychotherapy', ]The Development of Personality', 'The Spirit in Man', and 'Art and Literature'. In any event, he did not believe that men were capable of recording the truth about themselves. However, in 1957, he agreed to provide his friend and assistant of many years' standing Aniela Jaffe with the necessary material and exercise a responsible supervision over what she wrote. The result was a unique memoir of the inner life of a great and original genius. C G Jung's memoirs were published in German under the title 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' in 1961. Soon it was translated into English and published first in USA and then in England.
 

Carl Jung with wife and children in 1918.

        We have only to take a cursory glance at Carl Jung's 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' to see how the man himself was full and overflowing with a greater concern and compassion for the human predicament. This revolutionary book contains the frank revelations of the innermost life of one of the greatest explorers of the human mind. Jung's single-minded humility, his passion to unearth truth, these and many other lovely impressions emerge from this absorbing and many-sided book. J B Priestley wrote in 'Sunday Telegraph': 'Carl Jung was on a giant scale, he was a master physician of the soul in his insights, a profound sage in his conclusions. He is also one of Western Man's great liberators'.

        Some seventy years ago, C G Jung announced the emergence of 'modern man as an entirely new phenomenon'. What distinguishes the truly modern man from the rest is his highly evolved consciousness. Unlike the mass of men (which includes those 'up to-date,' but false 'moderns') Jung's modern man has separated himself from the collective unconscious. 'Indeed, he is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stands before the nothing out of which all may grow'. His situation, however, has created a problem which is also new in the history of consciousness. Where now is psyche to be found? Psyche is no longer available to him in the culture as a whole, not even in the forms such as religion once provided. 'That age lies as far behind as childhood itself'. As a result, modern man realises he has nowhere else to go but has been 'thrown back upon himself'. Psyche can only be found within. This was the quintessence of his whole approach to the problems of the human mind.

        Through encounters with disturbed and deranged personalities and others that he recorded in the profusion of his lectures, seminars, books, essays, letters and other writings, Jung came to the conclusion that every human being had a story, or to put it in its most evolved form 'a myth of his own'. Jung has clearly recorded in many of his essays that he had learned from the start how in every disturbance of the personality, even in its most extreme psychotic form of schizophrenia (or dementia-praecox as it was then commonly called), one could discern the elements of a personal story. The story was the personality's most precious possession. And the person could only be cured or healed by the psychiatrist getting hold of the story. That was the secret key to unlock the door which barred reality in all its dimensions both within and without from entering the personality and transforming it. Further he held that the story not only contained an account of the particular hurt, rejection or trauma (as other men were hastening to call it), but the potential of the wholesome development of the personality. This arrest of the personality in one profound unconscious timeless moment of itself which was called 'psychosis' was due, he would assert, because the development of the person's story, like the sun in the midst of Joshua's battle against the Philistines, suddenly stood still. In this context Jung said: 'The hell of the mad is that not only has time suddenly ceased to exist for them but some memory of what it and its season once meant to them remains to remind them of the fact that it is no longer there'.

        He was rapidly learning from the nature of some specific hallucination, delusion, psychosis or neurosis, how a personal story was clamouring to be carried on and to be lived. Even more, he recognised from what his own dreams meant to him how dreams were an essential part of the evolution of the story. But none of these things, Jung stressed, were ever there just for the asking. They could be discovered only by a constantly reiterated, truthful, and face-to-face encounter between patient and psychiatrist. All his life he saw psychiatry in terms of a dialogue at the deepest level between his own outer-inner self, and the patient. Without such an interchange in which both the reality of the psychiatrist and deprivation of reality of the patient face each other openly as problems to each other, the vital secret remained hidden.

        It was as ironic and devastating to Jung at the beginning of the 20th Century, as it should be to most of us today, who persist in the same error, that the word 'myth' in common usage was the label applied to what the rationalist in command of the day dismissed as illusion, non-existent, apocryphal, or some other of the proliferating breed of reductive words which the cerebral norms of our time have produced for either dismissing or denying the existence of any invisible and non-conceptual forms of reality. Yet one has only to read Jung's stories of his encounters with patients in hospital and private consulting room to realise that one is in the presence of a new phenomenon in the life of our own times. Like the parables, all these stories and case histories of Jung are packed with the seeds of new meaning. No one can take them with good faith into his own imagination and remain unchanged.

        Freud had stated that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious. He certainly made that the goal of his work as a theorist. And yet he made the unconscious sound very unpleasant, to say the least: it was a cauldron of seething desires, a bottomless pit of perverse and incestuous cravings, a burial ground for frightening experiences which nevertheless came back time and again to haunt us.

        On the other hand, Carl Jung, a younger colleague of Freud, made the exploration of this 'inner space' his life's work. He went equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of mythology, religion, and philosophy. Jung was well-versed in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabala, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If there was anyone who could make sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form, it was Carl Jung.

        He was endowed with a mysterious capacity for very lucid dreaming and occasional visions. In the fall of 1913, he had a vision of a 'monstrous flood' engulfing most of Europe and lapping at the mountains of his native Switzerland. He saw thousands of people drowning and civilization crumbling. Then, the waters turned into blood. This vision was followed, in the next few weeks, by dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood. He was afraid that he was becoming psychotic. But on 1 August of that year, World War I began. Jung felt that there had been a connection, somehow, between himself as an individual and humanity in general that could not be explained away. From then until 1928, he went through a rather painful process of self-exploration that formed the basis of all of his later theorising till his death in 1961. He carefully recorded his dreams, fantasies, and visions, and drew, painted, and sculpted them as well.

        Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the unconscious itself, not the 'little' personal unconscious that Freud made such a big deal out of, but a new collective unconscious of humanity itself, an unconscious that could contain all the dead, not just our personal ghosts. Jung began to see the mentally-ill as people who are haunted by these ghosts, in an age where no one is supposed to even believe in them. If we could only recapture our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts, become comfortable with the dead, and heal our mental illnesses. His mission statement as a research scientist and as a great teacher can be summed up in his own words: 'An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child'.