Autobiography as agenda

Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections is as valid an autobiography

as any other despite claims that (a) he did not write it and (b) he
leaves a great deal out and (3) there are few external details to
place him in contexts. In fact, what I propose to do is to investigate
how Jung’s ideas about what-makes-up-a-life had impact on the
substance and form of its telling in MDR qualifies it as viable
autobiography.

There is a powerful connection between what Jung thinks it takes to

be human and how the autobiography of his life is told: in fact, just
how individuation is processed as a self-reflexive faculty is manifest
in his work. Indeed, how we narrate our lives to each other and to
ourselves is closely intertwined with the individuation process as
every therapist will know. If we see ourselves as heroes in a myth of
a sacred quest, perhaps hyperbole and glorious undertakings and
dire villainous enemies will be the tenor of the narrative. If we see
ourselves as seekers of truth, mystic contemplatives in a myth of
achieving sanctity, a quieter, more passive style might well suit.
Tracking what styles we use when we tell the story of ourselves is a
useful heuristic in coming to terms with a personality – our own or
another’s. I want to point this out at least briefly here in talking
about MDR.

Of course its unique qualities are also widely praised. But by

focusing on at least one of the complaints about MDR, I hope to
show its virtues in a broader context. What are the main
complaints? As I briefly reviewed above, MDR is said to be unreliable
because it leaves out crucial events in its writer’s life, and apart
from some sections, it is not written by Jung at all. Its focus almost
exclusively on the interior of the narrator is irksome since that is not
what autobiography usually does. Where does he explain his

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connections to lovers, to earlier mentors, to Nazism and the
international organisations that excluded Jewish members?

But even though as modern readers of autobiographies, we think we

know what to expect in such a volume, in fact, Jung’s memoir is in a
long tradition of self-narrative. Its methods are a viable pursuit
directly because of Jung’s discoveries about ‘individuation’ and
related to that, his typological ideas of personality.

1. the autobiographical form

To set the stage, briefly: in fact, autobiography is a relatively new

form (see Olney). Deriving from the epideictic – orations of praise or
blame - the focus of such endeavour was the speaker’s agenda – to
educate or to defend a personality, usually an important person in
the community. It was not personal confession. This romantic notion
came later.

As to truthfulness, early 15th to 18th century European self-narratives

like Carlo Goldoni’s, Cellini’s or Casanova’s were not expected to be
exact truth. These volumes were also meant to entertain just as the
early saints’ lives which had wide distribution in medieval times
were meant to. The delightful trajectory in those stories of bad men
(and some women) transforming into saints gave readers the
opportunity to enjoy hearing about the early roguish days in the life
of the saint, which were naturally embellished all in the name of
witnessing God’s goodness. Virtue prevailed but it was entertaining
to see what the person had to overcome to get there. Those works
certainly influenced early fictional forms like the novel, for example.

Additionally, an ingredient of pedagogy certainly was important in

self-narrative. To set MDR further in context, it is useful to compare
it specifically to other self-narratives written to an agenda, as I
contend MDR is, like Augustine’s Confessions or Vico’s
Autobiography.

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Both are proto-autobiographical forms; in Augustine’s case his story
is revealed as a form of prayer, and in Vico’s case, his story is a
rhetorical endeavour placing the individual in a philosophical historic
universe. Their shared Neo-platonic coordinates allow them to write
self-narrative despite personal discomfort. Jung’s intention is located
here too. The neo-platonic individual is a significant exemplar of the
ways of the universe. Writing about their lives has universal and
pedagogic purpose.

To investigate further what type of narrative Jung’s is, I’d like to

explore what autobiography as a specific form of narrative can
mean and then look at one specific theme in MDR to demonstrate
how it conforms to this form of literary work.

2. Autobiography as narrative

In ‘The Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1969) lays the

groundwork for his theories by emphasizing that death is a natural
function and a primal coordinate of what ‘storytelling’ is at
inception. Scripted narratives are frozen outside personal and
specific place contexts, but yet they are comprised of the utterly
familiar narrative of a life – the trajectory of life is birth, events in
relating to people, eating, sleeping, etc. Stories are exempla and as
such they are instrumental, they transmit information. Benjamin
shows links of contextual, multi-perspective narratives (individual
lives) to cosmic time, which are inevitably essential to stories of self:
‘It is…characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or
wisdom, but above all his real life … - the stuff that stories are
made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of
his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside
a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of
himself under which he has encountered himself without
being aware of it. (Ibid.: 94)’

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Particularity is the instance of the individual. And, like the individual
is in the world, particularity is an ‘interruption’ and, in fact,
Benjamin says, a series of ‘interruptions’ define what ‘time’ is
because ‘time’ is marked in that way. The way in which events
cohere in a self-narrative represents and reflects on what that life
amounts to, and it also reflects the era in which that person has
lived. These particularities make up universal cosmic time. We are
close to Jung’s notion of the personal myth here.

To set out his argument about individuation and personal myth, Jung
establishes a rhetorical space. This is a place of communicative
disruption or interruption. In the rhetorical space, arguments
operate as both propositions and as assumptions in the formula of
narrative discourse. Resolutions of a kind are proposed. A rhetorical
approach assumes a common, universal expressive technique that
reflects and participates in empirical and symbolic exchange. For
example, Ricoeur sets out in Time and Narrative that ‘emplotment’
(or story) and agency are inextricably intertwined, and that this
interweaving is based on audience expectation (which idea he gets
from Hayden White). In this case, our expectation is of how a life
plays out. In fact, Ricoeur argues that we go so far as to base our
quotidian expectations all the time on ‘as-yet untold stories – there
is a ‘pre-narrative quality of experience’ (1984 [Vol 1]: 74).

Common (‘archetypal’) narrative patterns derive from character

type which not unnaturally generates plot. We see this formula
operating in Jung’s (1921) discussion of ‘types’ in Chapter 10 of
Psychological Types, where the variety of ‘types’ is explained by
telling stories to define them. The structuralist viewpoint might
trace the relationship, but fails to recognize the ‘primal’ symbolic
drive. On the other hand, Jung recognises these symbolic patterns.

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Autobiography has another variable: the reliability of the narrator
and the relationship to a younger self. Irregularity or inconsistency
in the narrator’s report calls ‘external fact’ into question. But are
there ever reliable narrators? An investigation of these issues opens
up the underlying significance of narrative itself. Reliability and
agency, action and location form constraints on self-narrative and
are the stuff of those lives as ‘interruptions’. Autobiography
provides a site of conflicting interpretations, which interpretations
Kermode (1979) says, form what narrative is in another aspect.
Autobiography demands reception, recognition or rejection by
witnesses, without whom the narrative is not complete.

There are many constraints on autobiography, and MDR shares

those limitations. These constraints are various – like
accommodating a family objecting to the inclusion of mistresses, or
mention of uncomfortable political affiliations. You might say these
form ethical constraints that have to do with Jung’s profession; his
living patients have to rely on him still.

Yet, it is common to include in autobiography both private and

public matters, and Jung knows that we have such expectations; but
we, the readers, also know that we must expect and accommodate
a biased selection of events from a writer of autobiography.

Jean Starobinski (1980) points out that autobiographical narration is

‘discursive narrative’ rather than ‘portraiture.’ It is not a description
of a personality, but rather a story of a person’s drives and
decisions, best described internally since the writer knows his
decisions – it is recounting the dynamic of his personal narrative.
We sense the strains on the material whenever Jung reaches back to
gloss earlier activities. Our belief in the truth of the account is
unsettled; these glosses on the text are a ‘kind of obstacle to the
fidelity of the exact happening’ (ibid.: 76). A perfect stylistic and

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theoretical fit in the narrative as the teller recounts how the boy
grows to be this man, this narrator, creates a sense of contrivance,
or manipulation. What we read here is, in effect, transparently
shaped ‘fable.’ But in MDR this should not disturb us. It is, actually,
fable that Jung promises us and it is what we are reoriented to
expect from MDR.

An important genre feature (and therefore another constraint) is the

identification of the older narrator with the younger man, which is
constantly affirmed by Jung. A large part of his purpose is to reveal
the emergence of an identity – identity is immanent in the growth of
the narrator into who he is. It is a voyage of discovery. He adds a
theoretical curve to this affirmation of identity – i.e. that the
individual emerges from unconsciousness into consciousness and
integrates into an awareness of the larger, collective unconscious;
this is the source of the added fabulist dimension.

The theme of Jung’s memoir is embedded in its retrieval of past

event to exemplify a present revelation of what was hidden
meaning. The particular is impregnated with the universal. The
particular is recreated in all its uniqueness even as it mirrors and
embodies the universal.

3. autobiography and secrets

When narrators omit events that they have deemed irrelevant or

contradictory, they hide them deliberately. This leads us to a
pervasive theme in MDR: secrets. I will explore this constraint on
MDR in more detail.

Creating secrets is both a personal and a collective drive in creating

narrative order. The formation of secrets is motivated obviously by a
desire to cover over discrepancies in order to make an

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interpretation coherent (Kermode 1979). In this way, secrets shape
personalities, motivating action (as well as nations do in hiding
events in chronicles of their pasts; but this is not my concern here).
Secrets are the cornerstone of narrative which in this aspect
maintain a series of interpretations foregrounding some matters,
and hiding others. Since Jung argues that underlying personality and
personal myth is covert, to tell one’s life story may well lead to
uncovering a secret schema. The integrity of the personality is
bound up by hidden patterns.

In fact, often, secrets are ‘at odds with sequence, which is

considered… an aspect of propriety (“refined common sense”); and
a passion for sequence may result in the suppression of the secret’
(Kermode, 1980: 87-88). In fact, our suspect narrator ‘breaks down
the conventional relationship between sequential narrative and
history-likeness, with its arbitrary imposition of truth’ (ibid.: 89).
(This raises issues with the common non-sequential narratives of
internet gaming narratives; not my concern here either.)

In the first three chapters of MDR, and in later chapters about his
travels, or encounters with Freud (to whom, he discloses here, he
had lied), with his patients in treatment, and finally, in his arduous
tussles with another layer of (what are) involuntary ‘secret’
repositories of meaning – the unconscious - we grasp the crucial
importance of secrets in Jung’s psychic life. The boy, Jung, hides his
frightening dreams, his illicit associations of meaning – the black-
skirted fearful Catholic priests who swallow little children of his
manikin and scroll with secret writings. He tends a sacred fire and
engages others to help him maintain it (presumably not disclosing
the reasons he did so). These were ‘inviolable secret(s) which must
never be betrayed, for the safety of my life depended on it. Why
that was so I did not ask myself. It was simply so.’ (Jung 1963: 22).

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Jung, the child, is seen to construct ‘givens’ in this way, implanting
underlying motivations for behaviour, aroused by fear, as the older
Jung tells us, looking back. These private ‘myths’ or ‘fables’ which
he later discovers (and manipulates) in his patients for therapeutic
purposes, are the unconscious ‘complexes’. These motivating
underlying clusters of significance impact on every act. Cognition
and conatus are filtered through these underground elements;
Jung’s MDR reflects this conviction.

In many cases … the patient who comes to us has a story that

is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind
therapy only really begins after the investigation of that
wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock
against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have
a key to the treatment.
(Ibid.: 117)

Jung tells us about the river near him when he was growing up
where dead bodies were found at times along its banks. He nearly
becomes one of those bodies later, still a boy, when he nearly trips
off a dangerous high bridge. The older Jung concurs with his mother
that his act was suicidal. (Were the other such events in his life?)

By defining the near-slip as showing suicidal potential, Jung

presages a mythic sequence of the ritual of dismemberment, self
destruction followed by self-re-collection in the individuation process
in his own life. This revealed impulse throws up hidden images
which are ‘impersonal’ and from independent sources since they are
not part of the young boy’s personal repertoire. These unconscious,
archetypal images, present themselves in response to his seeking
resolution of a fear.

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In ‘Transformation symbolism in the Mass’ Jung (1954) asks if we
can explain where the collective images come from in any other
way but from an impersonal source? He refers to the mystery of
bread turning into the body of Christ:
… transubstantiation should be a cause of wonder and a
miracle which man can in no wise comprehend. It is a
mysterium in the sense of a … secret that is acted and
displayed. (Ibid.: par. ***)

Whatever the source, his much-recounted dream of the turd landing

on the cathedral leads Jung to realize astonishing things about God;
and then also his manikin is a kind of repository of the boy’s
intuition of the collective unconscious. Jung confirms this in his last
chapters of MDR:
…the individual on his lonely path needs a secret that for
various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret
reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims … The
need for such a secret is so compelling that the individual
finds himself involved in ideas and actions for which he is no
longer responsible. … [He becomes] deviant from the
collective. Internal oppositions are battled with in secret…
(1963: 342-5)

In fact, the more things are hidden, the more certain he is that
realities are the opposite of what they appear to be. In this way,
Jung specifically comes to recognize that he is constituted as a
‘psychic process’ (Jung, 1963: 4) and that he is a figure in a fable.
One of Jung’s prevalent topics is the appearance/reality trope. But
there is no space here to develop this further.