This autobiography is unusual to say the least. It is replete with deep, profound, mystifying, eye-opening, tantalizing personal experiences rather than mundane happenings. It reads, at times, like a fantasy novel. I'd call this powerful book an impressionistic painting of Jung's life and work. It's very personal and very revealing. It's no wonder he left it to the very end of his life. Fortunately for us, he did provide the data & it was posthumously published. It provides a depth of context for his work that is available nowhere else. It is, however, expurgated--presumably by his family who didn't want all his dirty laundry (e.g. affairs with clients etc.) made public. After all, it was published not long after his death. There is much to learn from this book--even by those offended by it. As Jung says, p.247 "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." George MacDonald said "Those don't know England who only England know." Jung asks, p. 246 "How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation." Similar to his more scientific works, this one contains innovative thinking & timeless observations.

PAST--pp. 143-4 Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic--that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division of themselves.

PRESENT--p. 131 To my mind, in dealing with individuals, only individual understanding will do. We need a different language for every patient. In one analysis I can be heard talking the Adlerian dialect, in another the Freudian. The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialog demanding two partners.

FUTURE--p. 256 Man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence...Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

If a regular person described the things that Jung describes in this biography, you'd say "this person is completely insane".

As far as I can tell, Jung was utterly insane by any definition of the term. He was having day long conversations with voices in his mind, seeing visions that you'd laugh about if someone told you. Once, he recounts going on a long trip with a friend, then decided to go home (they were days or weeks away from home, and hadn't reached their agreed upon destination) because he'd had a dream the night before. OK. You feelin' OK there, Carl? Hello? Anybody in there?...Earth to Carl!

Notwithstanding the fact he was evidently off his rocker, his ideas have been tremendously influential in a huge number of artists' lives and work, not to mention millions of "regular" folks.

In this book, he details his life long search for, and identification and exploration of the soul. He firmly believed there is a soul, and I must agree with him that those who think life doesn't have any purpose just aren't in touch. Regardless of religious belief, Jung believed the real purpose in life is to explore consciousness to the fullest during the short time we're here, and search for that little speck of light that will carry the soul into the next stage.

Mind blowing stuff to be sure. Forget about conventional organized religions. You can pray all day long to an absent God with a congregation who think they're going to "heaven" if they just do the "right thing" while keeping an angry God at bay.

But, if, on the other hand, you're on a real spiritual journey, Jung can provide your road map.

More than any other work in his oeuvre, Carl Jung's biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) takes the reader inside the mind of the eminent Swiss psychologist. Jung was both a self-admitted gnostic and an introvert, and this very personal account of his life, which he was completing at the time of his death, is correspondingly subjective in tone.

Jung had a difficult but remarkable childhood, to which he devotes a substantial portion of the text. Both blessed and plagued by heretical visions which he was unprepared to understand or interpret (among them: God defecating on a cathedral; an enormous cyclopean phallus enthroned in a subterranean chamber), Jung also found himself unable to seek advice from his father, a country parson suffering from a crisis of faith, or his mother, whom Jung believed to have a weird and "uncanny" "second personality" which only emerged at night. In time, the awkward young Carl came to believe that he had a guiding "second personality" of his own, which he perceived to belong to a mature and intellectually accomplished man of 18th century Europe (as an adult, Jung would adopt another "psychic being," whom he called "Philemon," as his personal "daimon," mentor, and guide). Already tending temperamentally towards remove from others, these experiences only acerbated Jung's boyhood sense of rural backwardness, loneliness, and social isolation.

Due to both its subjective nature and the enormous scope of Jung's experiences and speculative beliefs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the sort of book that hardline scientists and skeptics may scoff at, especially since Jung is largely concerned with discovering the liminal crossroads where objective truth, physical law, spirituality, and human psychology converge. Throughout his life, he also placed a tremendous value on the meaning of personal and collective dreams, both those he considered merely informational as well as those he considered prophetic and of a collective nature.

Throughout the volume, anecdotes abound of seances, extrasensory perception, automatic writing, "poltergeist" phenomena, "meaningful coincidences," alchemy, visitations from the dead, unidentified flying objects (which Jung, who never claimed to actually glimpse one, did not believe to be vehicles from other planets, though he didn't absolutely rule out the possibility), alternate dimensions, the Holy Grail, and, in one bizarre episode, a seemingly endless parade of merry-making phantom boys who pass by his lakeside home in the dead of night. Though Jung interprets this particular "haunting" in terms of local history, it's remarkable that he, who believes "the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays," doesn't consider the trooping fairies of Celtic and Germanic folklore as any equally likely explanation.

In another incident, he and companion, while traveling in Italy, spend hours admiring the interior of a cathedral, only to discover later that the mosaics they found so unforgettably beautiful did not exist, and never had existed.

As unlikely a collection of first or secondhand experiences as the anecdotes may represent, Jung never allows his narrative to lose its tight focus or relate these incidences to his larger theme: the nature, development, and evolution of human consciousness. However, in genuine gnostic fashion, he is quick to remind his readership that human perception is always ultimately subjective, and that, while "facts" certainly exist, no man can claim to know what the absolute truth is about any facet of reality.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was completed from notes after Jung's death by associate Aniela Jaffe, does not pretend to be a work of science (and, appropriately, is not an official volume in Jung's Collected Works), and is in fact far more concerned with ethics, spirituality, faith, and consciousness. One of the book's greatest achievements is

Jungs autobiography: Excellent as to understanding Jung's work, life and philosophies etc. This is the book to get if you are at all interested in Jung from an overall perspective i.e. from the cradle to the grave. I would also recommend the movie 'Matter of Heart: The Extraordinary Journey of C.G. Jung ' ASIN: B00028G6LC.

As regards the field of psychology, you will have an understanding of how his views came about and developed. You will also understand Jung's relationship and split with Sigmund Freud (Archetypes Vs Libido). Personally I think both have merit, but to ignore Jung's philosophies associated with archetypes, is a grave error indeed. I still ponder on how Jung collected information from mental patients and discovered how their dreams etc had a common archetypal base.

Even though I have a interest in psychology, the matters of the spirit are of greater importance to me. Jung's discovery of Archetypes, gave me a personal accepted understanding of the tree of life; a profound stepping stone upon the path from exotericism to mesotericism and gnosis. This is the greater message of Jung in my opinion.

In the early pages of his autobiography, Jung says the most important things in his life were not the actual events that occured, but rather his psychic or unconscious life (I am paraphrasing). This book is a look at that internal life. And in sooth, there were many times during the reading of this book that I said to myself: Jung was a complete looney tune! Well, perhaps (there is speculation that at one point he suffered a nervous breakdown). But I have read and continue to read Jung with great fascination and to significant personal elucidation. I found this book to be a most enlightening direct, rather than academic or theoretical, glimpse at the psyche... highly recommended for seekers.