Personal Development Potential

Reading this excellent biography of C.G. Jung is like virtually being present with Jung throughout the various stages of his life and participating in his intellectual development as one of the world’s seminal thinkers

We each have our own unique approaches to our personal development program; that’s one of the reasons the concept is called personal development instead of “people” development. It’s individual.

To me one of the most interesting journeys in personal growth and the creative process that accompanies such growth is the life Carl Jung, one of the foundational figures of modern psychiatry.

If you are interested in influential personalities in your study of self-improvement, and also would like to witness a great example of the creative process in action, there is a terrific biography you might want to read. I stumbled upon it in my local library. The book is An Illustrated Biography of C.G. Jung, by Gerhard Wehr, who also wrote a lengthy complete biography of Jung titled, Jung: A Biography.

For sheer interest however, I find the shorter illustrated version easier to access, both in getting to know Carl Jung as a individual personality, but also I find the Illustrated Biography does an excellent job of getting down to the essence of Jung’s ideas and the processes he went through in developing his intellectual concepts of how the human mind works.

The book is copiously illustrated with photographs, drawings, and paintings relating to the various stages in the life of Carl Jung and the development of his ideas. It starts with his early childhood and education and ends with his final years, when he had a very high output in writing. We discover, for example, how a great portion of the period of Jung’s middle years was devoted to extensive research, which is one of the reasons he was able to be so productive in his later life.

Wehr’s book is smoothly written and translated, and is presented in terminology that the majority of us can easily understand. Through this book I found I really got a “feel” for what Carl Jung was about as a person, what factors were involved in the development of his creative process and how some of the controversies surrounding his career affected him. I had read other material on Jung, but this well-paced narrative of Wehr, coupled with the many photographs of various stages of Jung’s life, really brought the man to life.

Particularly fascinating is the amount of pages the writer devotes to Jung’s life at Bollingen, a lakeside retreat in Switzerland, consisting of some rustic land and a stone house resembling a small castle that Jung designed and built largely by himself. At Bollingen, which did not have electricity or running water, Jung said he felt truly himself.

Here he chopped wood for his fireplace and stove and did his own cooking. Here he also made numerous stone carvings to express his ideas of the subconscious and other psychological concepts. Of Bollingen, he said, “In Bollingen I am at home in a way that corresponds to my innermost nature.” Here he carved a large block of stone, and chiseled into it: “Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit” – “Called or not called, God is present.”

Jung spent years in the study of ancient texts about alchemy written in the original Latin and Greek – study which helped to form a number of his ideas, based on the alchemical concept of transmutation. A chapter in Wehr’s book is devoted to this period, titled “The Encounter with Alchemy.”

If you are interested in Jung, do yourself a favor and try to find a copy of this book. It’s a virtual visit to one man’s journey of personal, professional, and intellectual growth and development.

Gerhard Wehr, An Illustrated Biography of C.G. Jung, Translated by Michael H. Kohn, Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston Massachusetts, 1989.