Although he had already “resolved to take the plunge,” the letter ends with a refusal. To the day of his death the conflict between affirmation and rejection was never entirely settled. There always remained a residue of scepticism, a shying away from his future readers. 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 Jaffé’s project,” to which he had made contributions. At his specific request, it is not to be included in his Collected Works.
Jung has been particularly reticent in speaking of his encounters with people, both public figures and close friends and relatives. “I have spoken with many famous men of my time, the great ones of science and politics, with explorers, artists and writers, princes and financial magnates; but if I am honest I must say that only a few such encounters have been significant experiences for me. Our meetings were like those ships on the high seas, when they dip their flags to one another. Usually, too, these persons had something to ask of me which I am not at liberty to divulge. Thus I have retained no memories of them, however important these persons may be in the eyes of the world. Our meetings were without portent; they soon faded away and bore no deeper consequences. But of those relationships, which were vital to me, and which came to me like memories of far-off times, I cannot speak, for they pertain not only to my innermost life but also to that of others. It is not for me to fling open to the public eye doors that are closed forever.”
The paucity of outward events is, however, amply compensated by the account of Jung’s inner experiences, and by a rich harvest of thoughts which, as he himself says, are an integral part of his biography. This is true first and foremost of his religious ideas, for this book contains Jung’s religious testament.
Jung was led to a confrontation with religious questions by a number of different routes. There were his childhood visions, which brought him face to face with the reality of religious experience and remained with him to the end of his life. There was his insuppressible curiosity concerning everything that had led him to do with the contents of the psyche and its manifestations — the urge to know which characterised his scientific work. And, last but not least, there was his conscience as a physician. He was well aware that the patient’s religious attitude plays a crucial part in the therapy of psychic illnesses. This observation coincided with his discovery that the psyche spontaneously produces images with a religious content, that it is “by nature religious.” It also became apparent to him that numerous neuroses spring from a disregard of this fundamental characteristic of the psyche, especially during the second half of life.
Jung’s concept of religion differed in many respects from traditional Christianity — above all in his answer to the problem of evil and his conception of a God who is not entirely good or kind. From the viewpoint of dogmatic Christianity, Jung was distinctly an “outsider.” For all his worldwide fame, this verdict was forcibly borne in upon him by the reactions to his writings. This grieved him, and here and there in this book he expresses the disappointment of an investigator who felt that his religious ideas were not properly understood. More than once he said grimly, “They would have burned me as a heretic in the Middle Ages!” Only since his death have theologians in increasing numbers begun to say that Jung was indubitably an outstanding figure in the religious history of our century.
Jung explicitly declared his allegiance to Christianity, and the most important of his works deal with the religious problems of the Christian. He looked at these questions from the standpoint of psychology, deliberately setting a bond between it and the theological approach. In so doing he stressed the necessity of understanding and reflecting, as against the Christian demand for faith. He took this necessity for granted, as one of the essential features of life. “I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted to Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force,” he wrote in 1952 to a young clergyman.
This book is the only place in his extensive writings in which Jung speaks of God and his personal experience of God. While he was writing of his youthful rebellion against the church, he once said, “At that time I realised God — for me, at least — was one of the most immediate experiences.” In his scientific works Jung seldom speaks of God; there he is at pains to use the term “the God-image in the human psyche.” This is no contradiction. In the one case his language is subjective, based on inner experience; in the other it is the objective language of scientific inquiry. In the first case he is speaking as an individual, whose thoughts are influenced by passionate, powerful feelings, intuitions, and experiences of a long and unusually rich life; in the second, he is speaking as the scientist who consciously restricts himself to what may be demonstrated and supported by evidence. As a scientist, Jung is an empiricist. When Jung speaks of his religious experiences in this book, he is assuming that his readers are willing to enter into his point of view. His subjective statements will be acceptable only to those who have had similar experiences —or, to put it another way, to those in whose psyche the God-image bears the same or similar features.
Although Jung was active and affirmative in the making of the “autobiography,” for a long time his attitude towards the prospect of its publication remained — quite understandably — highly critical and negative. He rather dreaded the reaction of the public, for one thing because of the candour with which he had revealed his religious experiences and ideas, and for another because the hostility aroused by his book, Answer to Job, was still too close, and the incomprehension or misunderstanding of the world in general was too painful. “I have guarded this material all my life, and have never wanted it exposed to the world; for if it is assailed, I shall be affected even more than in the case of my other books. I do not know whether I shall be so far removed from this world that the arrows of criticism will no longer reach me and that I shall be able to bear the adverse reactions. I have suffered enough from incomprehension and from the isolation one falls into when one says things that people do not understand. If the Job book met with so much misunderstanding, my ‘memoirs’ will have an even more unfortunate fate. The ‘autobiography’ is my life, viewed in the light of the knowledge I have gained from my scientific endeavours. Both are one, and therefore this book makes great demands on people who do not know or cannot understand my scientific ideas. My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around. The way I am and the way I write are a unity. All my ideas and all my endeavours are myself. Thus, the ‘autobiography’ is merely the dot on the i.”
During the years in which the book was taking shape a process of transformation and objectivisation was also taking place in Jung. With each successive chapter he moved, as it were, farther away from himself, until at last he was able to see himself as well as the significance of his life and work from a distance. “If I ask the value of my life, I can only measure myself against the centuries and then I must say, Yes, it means something. Measured by the ideas of today, it means nothing.” The impersonality, the feeling of historical continuity expressed in these words, emerges ever more strongly in the course of the book, as the reader will see.
The chapter entitled “The Work,” with its brief survey of the genesis of Jung’s most important writings, is fragmentary. How could this be otherwise, when his collected works comprise nearly twenty volumes? Moreover, Jung never felt any disposition to offer a summary of his ideas — either in conversation or in writing. When he was asked to do so, he replied in his characteristic, rather drastic fashion, “That sort of thing lies entirely outside my range. I see no sense in publishing a condensation of papers in which I went to so much trouble to discuss the subject in detail. I should have to omit all my evidence and rely on a type of categorical statement which would not make my results any easier to understand. The characteristic ruminant activity of ungulate animals, which consists in the regurgitation of what has already been chewed over, is anything but stimulating to my appetite …”
The reader should therefore regard this chapter as a retrospective sketch written in response to a special occasion, and not expect it to be comprehensive.
The short glossary which I have included at the
