Jung's Life and Work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé

In 1957, at the age of eighty-one, C. G. Jung began a collaboration with his student and secretary Aniela Jaffé and the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff on a book about his life. Memories, Dreams, Reflections would become a bestseller, yet it draws from less than half of Jaffé’s original interviews with Jung. Much of the material from these candid, wide-ranging conversations was left on the cutting-room floor. Jung’s Life and Work presents these interviews in their entirety for the first time.

Marking the 150th anniversary of Jung’s birth, this new English translation captures the cadence and subtlety of the brilliant psychologist in his own words, giving voice to a thinker and teacher who is by turns witty and intellectually daring but also vulnerable and humbled by the world’s great mysteries. It restores numerous passages that were originally omitted or heavily edited and toned down for publication, “auntified” as Jung himself put it. Taken together, these talks reveal Jung actively discovering meaningful new connections in his life’s work. He shares his impressions of notable figures he encountered throughout his life—such as Sigmund Freud, William James, Albert Einstein, and H. G. Wells—and describes his striking visions, religious and paranormal experiences, and pioneering self-experimentation. Aided by Jaffé’s skillful questioning, Jung reflects on subjects ranging from Christianity and Buddhism and the fate of the West to the experiences that led to the formulation of his signature concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, anima and animus, and the shadow as well as on karma, the afterlife, and much more.

With an introduction and extensive annotations by acclaimed Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani that provide invaluable historical perspective, Jung’s Life and Work includes previously unpublished extracts from Jung’s letters and a completely reorganized text.