Coincidentally Jung

This is the 50th anniversary of the death of C. G. Jung.  I noticed this by chance a few days ago, when I saw the date of his death on the back of his autobiography: Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  I was reading passages in it, partly to prepare posts in my "Climate Inside" series here, partly as I ease into the reflections of summer and the month of a significant birthday.  I also have been looking again at some videos concerning Jung. 

But the coincidence of accidentally running into the date of this 50th anniversary a few days before it happened would probably not seem very strange to Jung.  Though he broadened and deepened and in some ways changed concepts named by Freud, he contributed several important new concepts and tools, including the idea of synchronicity: meaningful coincidences.

To me Jung is a fascinating figure as well as one of the most important voices of the 20th century.  He noted that he never wrote until he felt impelled to do so, because he was sure that what he had to say would be rejected or ignored in his own time, except by a few.  Though his reputation has grown, most of what he wrote is again rejected and ignored, though his approach to psychology is the most vital in many contemporary areas of inquiry, sometimes directly as in the archetypal psychology that was carried on by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman (and in another way by Joseph Campbell), and sometimes "coincidentally" as in today's attitudes towards ecology, Buddhism, Native American and other indigenous cultures.

Jung was remembered by those who knew him for the depth and deftness of his work with patients, and for his friendships, his fierce energies, his stories, his great laugh.  He left the tower on the lakeside that he built and where he retreated in solitude to work and to play, his sculptures and artworks.  But for following generations he left mostly his writings:  "My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way he around.  The way I am and the way I write are a unity.  All my ideas and my endeavors are myself.  Thus the 'autobiography' is merely the dot on the i."   

Update: A BBC News essay suggests other legacies of Jung, and the second of a series in the Guardian rehashes aspects of Jung's relationship with Freud, and corrects the record (as Deidre Baird did in her biography, following Aniela Jaffe and others), on Jung's stance on the Nazis.