Memories, Dreams, Reflections. By Carl Jung

I read this book not knowing what to expect. Nor knowing anything about Jung.It is refreshing and relevant. Jung's exploration of psyche, dreams, etc. is admirable, contagious, and complex. I recommend this book to anyone who has felt curious about their inner life, or to those curious about psychology generally. The only negative about this book is that it's ideas can be complicated. This slower mind needed to re-read many passages to begin understanding them. That's more my fault than the book's though. Overall I'd say get it.

Of course, nothing could be more ridiculous than for Jung to make this claim. Having now read what amounts (in my book, although the word is never used in this one) to an autobiography, I can safely say that I’ve never read a writer with a more impressive memory. He even goes into great detail about his youth.So, do I agree with everything Jung has to say? No. For example, on p. 69, we find: “(o)f the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.” Now truth be told, German is as much Jung’s native language as Hegel’s. So who am I, an English speaker, to question his assertion?Moreover, Jung is not loath to admit his own shortcomings when it comes to the very field for which he is virtually as famous as Freud. On p. 124, we have: “(t)he impression this case made upon me typifies my reaction to the psychiatry of the period. When I became an assistant, I had the feeling that I understood nothing whatsoever about what psychiatry purported to be. I felt extremely uncomfortable beside my chief and my colleagues, who assumed such airs of certainty while I was groping perplexedly in the dark. For I regarded the main task of psychiatry as understanding the things that were taking place within the sick mind, and as yet I knew nothing about these things. Here I was engaged in a profession in which I did not know my way about!”That said, we find just a few pages later (on p. 146) “I embarked on the adventure of my intellectual development by becoming a psychiatrist.” Lucky for us, he did.But Hegel is not alone in earning Jung’s criticism. On p. 189, we read: “Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts–which incidentally possessed him more than he it.”Although I could easily go on with citations from the book, I’ll conclude with this paragraph found on p. 358: “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions–not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.”RRBHudson, New York12 September 2022