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August 26, 2003

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections - Carl Gustav Jung

In the late 1950s, while in his eighties, Carl Jung sat down to write his autobiography, his story of how he evolved and developed insight into the pysche that now forms the basis of so much of modern pyscholgy. One cannot help but share the awe with which he holds the inner world as it unfolds before him. He writes,

"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains."
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections is a classic, first published in 1961 and every bit as modern and relevant today as then.

Posted by elise at 10:16 PM to Biography