In the last years of his life, Carl Jung collaborated with analyst Anelia Jaffe to produce what I'll term a "transpersonal memoir." By that I mean that MEMORIES contains very few purely personal items of information in comparison to most memoirs. There are some such items in the first three chapters authored by Jung, such as his interactions with his relatives and classmates-- but even in those chapters, Jung places his emphasis on his transpersonal experiences: his penchant for dreams with archetypal content, his thoughts on various religions, and assorted experiences with psychic phenomena. This emphasis becomes more pronounced in the rest of the book, which Jaffe compiled by drawing on Jung's recorded conversations.
One aspect of Jung's life I find puzzling is that despite his rich imaginative life, from these reminiscences he never seems to have attempted artistic expression in any medium. Once, late in the memoir Jung is informed by one of his "spirit guides" that something Jung wrote was "art," and he scoffs at the very possibility of his doing so. If one assumes Jung's not covering up youthful indiscretions, I can only guess that Jung had such high regard for the makers of great art, such as Goethe, that he wouldn't even "try his hand" at writing poetry or fiction. It's also possible that Jung's "Number One personality"-- the one he claimed was preoccupied with science and empiricism-- always exerted more influence over the ways in which he approached his career.
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