The “Madame Jaffé book” My life by C.G. Jung: recollection, legitimation, monumentalization

Traditional narratives of life appear either as a discourse of unveiling or as a discourse of mystification : the autobiographical subject breaks free from the past by giving it a shape and a boundary in discourse, and by hiding, sometimes deliberately, the unbearable or the shameful, if only by omission. This article offers a reading of Jung’s biography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961) informed primarily by the question of the purpose and intentionality of writing, with an eye to how the autobiographical subject’s purposes may have competed or collided with editor Aniéla Jaffé’s, producing a complex web of intentionality seeking legitimacy and justification on the one hand, and a forum for a radical view of the tenets of Jung’s work on the other.