Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C.G. Jung and Aniela Jung, Carl Gustav;Jaffe

Book Overview

An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings.

"An important, firsthand document for readers who wish to understand this seminal writer and thinker." --Booklist

In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679723951
• ISBN13: 9780679723950
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Jordan Peterson recommended this book on LinkedIn.

I read this book cover to cover. It was the fifth book in a book a month, six month challenge. The most alarming thing about this read. Was not how easy and comfortable it was. It was actually the fact that Carl Jung and I have one glaring thing in common. We both love to think about that abstract. Which is not polite to talk about in public. We walk there mentally all the time. His lack of understanding of Hindu fell into straight ego. Though he had a wonderful understanding most theological concepts that are more prominent today, than in his time. He was a fascinating German. I felt a mild kinship with him. I think about the abstract as much as he did throughout his entire life and I am 34.

The correct understanding of Jung's compensation theory

According to Jung, the unconscious tries to "compensate" the "lopsidedness" in the conscious attitude, and dreams are part of this process. He says: "The relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This is the best proven rule of dream interpretation" (Collected Works, Vol. 16). The examination of Jung's dream interpretations reveals that what he calls "lopsidedness" is a harmful mistake, or a harmful mental/behavioral failure, and "compensation" means the correction of the mistake, or the termination of the mental/behavioral failure. As I explained elsewhere, the compensation of the lopsidedness in the conscious attitude by the unconscious is only a particular manifestation of the general truth that all functions of the mind, or all of its "topographical parts" in Freud's words, complement each other and constitute an integrated system, in contradiction with Freud's theory of conflict. In fact, Jung's theory was produced as a reaction to Freud's conflict theory. Consequently, we can equally say that consciousness sometimes compensates the lopsidedness in the unconscious attitude. Besides, it is most natural to expect such cooperation to work even when it is not possible to talk about any lopsidedness in the conscious or unconscious attitude. I described this cooperation in much detail elsewhere in my chapter on cerebral lateralization. Again as I explained elsewhere, Jung's conception of the function of dreams is basically correct and constitutes a very fruitful idea. But he did not apply this idea adequately to dream interpretation, apparently because he did not express it clearly and used instead obscure ideas like lopsidedness and compensation. His major mistake was to assume that every dream presented the compensated state of the lopsidedness, or the corrected state of the mistake. Jung could be able to produce a correct theory of dreams if he tried to answer the following questions: (a) What is the content of lopsidedness in general but clear terms? (b) How does the conscious attitude become lopsided and why it cannot correct its lopsidedness itself? (c) What makes the unconscious fit to compensate the lopsidedness of the conscious attitude? (d) In what measure the unconscious succeeds or fails in doing the compensation work, and why? (e) Most importantly, how does the unconscious do the job of compensation, or the correction of the harmful mistake? It is evident that in the absence of especially the answer to the last question, it is not possible to discover all the thoughts expressed by a dream. As I explained elsewhere, a complete dream contains three types of thought: (a) the presentation of the lopsidedeness, or the mistake, which is treated by the dream; (b) the explanation of the cause of the mistake, or failure, which is often in the form of the external attribution of the failure; and (c) the correction of the mistake, or the termination of the failure. A complete dream begins either with thought (a) or (b) a

"But Who Manipulates The Apparatus?"

More than any other work in his oeuvre, Carl Jung's biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) takes the reader inside the mind of the eminent Swiss psychologist. Jung was both a self-admitted gnostic and an introvert, and this very personal account of his life, which he was completing at the time of his death, is correspondingly subjective in tone. Jung had a difficult but remarkable childhood, to which he devotes a substantial portion of the text. Both blessed and plagued by heretical visions which he was unprepared to understand or interpret (among them: God defecating on a cathedral; an enormous cyclopean phallus enthroned in a subterranean chamber), Jung also found himself unable to seek advice from his father, a country parson suffering from a crisis of faith, or his mother, whom Jung believed to have a weird and "uncanny" "second personality" which only emerged at night. In time, the awkward young Carl came to believe that he had a guiding "second personality" of his own, which he perceived to belong to a mature and intellectually accomplished man of 18th century Europe (as an adult, Jung would adopt another "psychic being," whom he called "Philemon," as his personal "daimon," mentor, and guide). Already tending temperamentally towards remove from others, these experiences only acerbated Jung's boyhood sense of rural backwardness, loneliness, and social isolation. Due to both its subjective nature and the enormous scope of Jung's experiences and speculative beliefs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the sort of book that hardline scientists and skeptics may scoff at, especially since Jung is largely concerned with discovering the liminal crossroads where objective truth, physical law, spirituality, and human psychology converge. Throughout his life, he also placed a tremendous value on the meaning of personal and collective dreams, both those he considered merely informational as well as those he considered prophetic and of a collective nature. Throughout the volume, anecdotes abound of seances, extrasensory perception, automatic writing, "poltergeist" phenomena, "meaningful coincidences," alchemy, visitations from the dead, unidentified flying objects (which Jung, who never claimed to actually glimpse one, did not believe to be vehicles from other planets, though he didn't absolutely rule out the possibility), alternate dimensions, the Holy Grail, and, in one bizarre episode, a seemingly endless parade of merry-making phantom boys who pass by his lakeside home in the dead of night. Though Jung interprets this particular "haunting" in terms of local history, it's remarkable that he, who believes "the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays," doesn't consider the trooping fairies of Celtic and Germanic folklore as any equally likely explanation. In another incident, he and companion, while traveling in Italy, spend hours admiring the interior of a cathedral, only to discover later that the mosaics they found so unfo

The Myth of the Man, Look elsewhere for Biography

"What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science... Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only "tell stories." Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is _my_ fable, _my_ truth." (C. G. Jung, p. 3)If you're looking for a book "about" the life of Carl Jung, keep on looking. This is not so much a biography as it is a window into the process of Jung's experience. Think of this as Jung's "case summary" of his life. We don't read many of the amusing anectdotes, or "objective" critical insights that other biographies offer in abundance. Instead we get to experience Jung's auto-mythos for ourselves.Jung reveals much, imparts wisdom, offers us early memories, and paints the canvas of his life for us. It's an incredible gift from a wise and self-reflective man. Jung was not without his faults, as other biographers have pointed out, he had many--some quite appalling! More than one of his analysands became his lover--behavior that would cost him his license today. But again, this is material you should look elsewhere for. Here he ponders his fears, his weaknesses, the ones that he has already accepted and worked with.I recommend this book for people who have never read Jung before. It teaches more about his approach than any of his other books. It finds the meaning in his own life, viewed through his approach to life. "Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything." (p. 340)

Great Book

This book is less complicated than most of Jung's other writings and really explains the man Carl Jung. I highly recommend the book to anyone studying Jung. I would also recommend the book an Encounter With A Prophet.