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Within the work Memories, dreams, thoughts of Carl G. Jung, we will find a literary virtue. And this is the “amenity”. Here Jung recounts features of his life and thoughts with the amiability of a novelist. Everything that nears this author was something prodigious and revealing. In the spring of 1957, Jung was just 18 years old. It began with conversations with Aniela Jaffé. Who was one of his best collaborations and Jung’s friend. She is also the author of another splendid book on Jung’s life and work, 1992. [ Memories, dreams, thoughts ]
These conversations were the foundations of the book on which we are commenting today, on which Jung himself began to write his life as a necessity. “Well, if one day you leave it, unpleasant physical symptoms will manifest.”
It should not be forgotten that the writing of these reports was based on that molten magma. It was the experience and living thought of one of the greatest figures in psychology and knowledge of our time. Great for the value and originality that it was supposed to overcome a vision like that of Freud himself when he managed to broaden rationalism. [ Memories, dreams, thoughts ]
In some cases it is closed or confused. Jung had to pay a heavy price for breaking up with the Viennese master for his daring. One of the ways to fix and clarify his attitude was to write this book in which he brings out the deepest roots of his way of thinking and being.
We are before some memories, before the decisive and revealing facts of the life of a man. But supported at all times in what was his thought and, above all, in the assessment of his intimate experiences. Apparently the only ones that were worth mentioning.
Jaffé, in the prologue to these memoirs, adopts a phrase from Jung that is decisive for accepting and understanding his works. It is the following:
“I have suffered too much misunderstanding and isolation that comes when things are said that men do not understand.”
-Carl G. Jung.
Jung was a clear dissident from his young years in the medical field. In that of knowledge and also in the religious field. This is because it is very far from the dogmatic Christian point of view. His wonderful Response to Job would be just the tip of the iceberg of this controversy. [ Memories, dreams, thoughts ]
By maintaining this attitude, not only did his professional and social prestige go into it. But also what he would soon recognize as one of his great finds. Your own individualization process.
Jung turns the old cliché that the religious phenomenon is only a repressive or alienating element. To bet on the opposite and say that the cause of many neuroses, especially during the second half of life, is a weakening of this fundamental nature. Religion. To think like this, it was necessary to understand this last concept of its fertile initiatory sense.
These primary ideas must be remembered because they are at the beginning of the memories, dreams, and thoughts collected in this volume. Starting with those of his childhood. Already then he showed his concern for the mystery that lay beneath reality. For the deepest truth, the most intimate, the one that there are no words to express it.
Facing the challenge of addressing the unknown and shaping it. It describes the prodigious adventure of knowing oneself, of being ultimately responsible for that process of “individuation”, which is nothing more than self-realization. Becoming yourself.
Symbols of his theory, the forest, the stone, the mandala, inspiring readings, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plato, Eckhart, are shown very early in his life. His passion for interrelating different knowledge, history, religion, ethnography, archeology. Above all, that love for simplicity and compassion had its roots in the basic tendencies of Schopenhauer’s thought but which will expand with his later knowledge of the East.
Within the book, we also find Jung’s first steps in the field of psychiatry, his meeting with Sigmund Freud, the trip they made together to America, and of course, the break. Based on this was his dissent on issues of the occult and numinous. The interpretation of sexuality, or an anecdote. Jung began to analyze Freud. But as we have said, at the beginning of his work, his self-realization had a lot to do with it. The one that played an important role, that other symbol or reality that was the bullfighting that he built in Bollingen.
We will find the description of the trips he made to India, Italy, and Africa. As Jung grew older and older, his thinking became unusually enriched. He delved into mythical and mystical thought, shaping conceptions. Until then elusive of the unconscious and the human soul.
The result was to lay the foundations of psychology for the 21st century through findings that are it is own and that the final glossary of this book collects. Although very briefly. Mood, archetype, unconscious, individuation, introversion, synchronicity, and shadow.
The wisdom found within this book is accompanied by a purely literary virtue. The amenities. Everything is revealing in the life of any man in the light of his knowledge. From the truth itself. Jung’s work gave the man of the twentieth-century hope.