Book Review: "Memories, Dreams and Reflections" by Carl Jung

This book was recommended to me by a friend and I'm not going to lie, I did study a bit of Carl Jung in my later schooling about ten years' ago. I was already well-aware of some of the more unethical and questionable experiments he did alongside his friendship with the weird and slightly repulsive Sigmund Freud. So, when it came to the chapter on his career and experimentations in psychology, I was already well aware of around 80% of it. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud may be respected psychologists, but neither of them are quite right in the head and I think this book entitled Memories, Dreams and Reflections really gives way to that outside of just his career.

The book rightly starts off with this strange preface in which Carl Jung tells the reader about the difficulties he faced coming to terms with his own life. Apart from that though, the real story begins when he is young and moving with his parents. He talks about being a very small child, possibly a toddler, and having strange dreams. Now, I would like to question the validity of the claims of nightmares as a toddler. There are certain studies which state that any pain physical or psychological, before or at the age of three cannot be remembered if it is not continued. Now, Jung states that some of these dreams plagued him as he got older as well, this I can understand - but he doesn't say that about all of them. My question is: is this really something that happened, or is this something that was made for the book, an embellished story to make his toddler years seem more interesting and more aboard with what he did in his life? Maybe we will never know.

When a child, Jung starts to feel animosity towards certain people who dress in all-black clothing. As later, he would explore illustrations of colour, he states that the all-black clothing made the child Jung scared and fearful, causing a sort of disconnection between him and his father. In between all the language of phallic imagery, Jung starts to make a story out of his scholling life as well. He states, just as any child that he enjoyed learning, but did not like school. He was bullied, and when he went away from school for a few months to visit another family with his own, he was more than glad to go boating with another school child off on their own. All in all, as he gets older, this does not seem like a man who was plagued by nightmares as a child. I suffer from sleep paralysis, I would know - nightmares as a child can make a person seriously suffer psychologically. This does not seem the case for the aspects of outgoing ways and especially sociable nature of the growing teen/young-adult Jung. This too, makes me think that some of the nightmares from the beginning were used just to embellish the story a bit more.

If we skip ahead to his travels, Jung writes about the way in which he went around Africa and India, looking at the different cultures and aspects of psychology that these people worked upon. I really did enjoy the way that Jung wrote these because naturally, I love travel writing. Jung does not though come across as a man who is simply enjoying going to these countries, but sometimes can come off as a bit presumptious about the way he deals with other cultures. He can seem like he thinks he is above them, or their better and this does nothing for the autobiography. Though, I still enjoyed reading them.

All in all, this is a fantastic and insight autobiography, filled with things that you either take at face value or not. I myself, cannot believe an eighty-three year old man would be able to remember a nightmare he had when he was a toddler/infant. It just doesn't work in my mind. Apart from that, the book really goes into detail about how Jung became as well-known as he was and how he built many of his theories.