ABSTRACT

Jung’s prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections makes it quite clear that finally now, in his advanced old age, he has taken up the challenge to understand the “germ of meaning” in his own autobiographical raw material. A mother capable of containing projective identification unconsciously processes those projections and responds adequately to the infant’s needs. The import of these phrases, sustained by the aesthetic of these opening chapters, suggests just that integration of the personal and collective that had previously eluded Jung. Worthy of particular note is Jung’s first envisagement of Jesus “sitting on a throne” and the association of being “taken” with being swallowed up by the ground in burial. The Kleiman resonance— psyche expressed in the visceral language of bodily process—grows even stronger in the extraordinarily intense and sustained passage in Jung’s autobiography where he describes the culmination of his childhood spiritual angst.