Curating Irene Pickard's archive

When, in 2012, I was invited to look at Irene Pickard's archive of Jungian related material, I realised that it provided a very different window onto one of the most dramatic periods of European history than the ones usually presented: a community of pacifists transversing two world wars and the rise of totalitarian regimes, and doing so whilst trying to preserve their integrity. It also provided a window into the evolution of Quaker thought in the context of the modern sciences, especially that of psychology: although psychoanalysis – or analytic psychology as Jung preferred his version to be called – may not now be credited with as much status as a sciences as it was during Irene's lifetime – then it was seen as cutting edge.

The times certainly presented great challenges to any religious community to come to terms with, challenges about what religion was in the context of human life and the evolving body of the sciences – especially the science of the mind – and the emergence of atheistic totalitarian regimes that, using appeals to sciences as justification, were coercively anti-religious. Was religion something to be grown out of and abandoned, or did it contain something of fundamental and essential value? Was there a way of doing religion that fitted into the emerging picture of what it was to be human? The challenge was an existential one for religions as such, and a specific one for Quakerism as to how it might evolve in if it was to survive.

Irene and her circle had embarked on their study of Jung, at least in part, because they suspected its utility in explaining and challenging the hold that totalitarian regimes seemed to have over the minds of their subjects; a hold that not only applied to their own peoples, but one that attracted many admirers and would be imitators amongst the citizens of the world's pluralistic democracies. There was, and still remains, an allure to the apparent unity achieved by those regimes and the strength of collective purpose they appeared to have: something of an antidote to the economic and social malaise portrayed as afflicting the 'free' world at that time.

Those twin themes of peace work and the complementary the study of Jung run through the documents in the archive and clearly were going to provide the spine of any work based on it.

When first confronted with the archive I was simply asked to assess its potential value as a resource worth preserving. A short while diving into it left no doubt as to that. But then came the question of what to about it? It was clear that it should be preserved, but I also felt that it should be explored and the story behind it told.

That decision begot the next question – how to proceed. Alison Bush, the Pickard's middle daughter, had promised her mother that she would write a biography of her father's life, but beyond a short booklet outlining both her mother and father's lives, she had not felt able to do justice to what there was to tell – his remarkable career as a peace maker, and her remarkable intellectual voyages into the twin worlds of religion and psychology; nor of Irene's co-conspirators in that endeavour and their contributions, let alone the consequence for their Quaker world that would result.

There was a big story to be told. One that would require setting the archive's contents into its historical context, and one that would involve tracing the affects of that encounter with Jung on Quakerism.

Any attempt to write a book based on an archive is an act of curation. The mass of documents have to be chronologically organised, understood as to where they stand in the evolution of ideas, then selections made to present to the public that both tell and support the narrative.

Finding that narrative line was a fundamental step in processing the documents. It is what make writing a book using an archive as a source and basis different to simply cataloguing and publishing a selection, or even replicating the whole. It places the documents in their historical context, both as to how and why they were created; and in their intellectual context as to how they related to their contemporary debates, and how they contributed to subsequent evolutions.

Allowing the narrative to emerge from the documents is a bit like stringing a necklace. Gems have to be selected and placed in relation to each other, and a setting for them created. Creating that setting does mean going outside the archive into the history of the times and place in which it was created. Into why a group of Quakers were in Geneva between the two World Wars, which itself requires some explanation of what Quakerism was, how it had evolved, and what part it played in placing them there.

So the book sets the scene, introduces the main historical protagonists – Irene and Bertram Pickard, Elined Knotschnig, PW & Marjory Martin – and accounts for how they came to encounter Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas.

It then traces the absorption of those ideas as the protagonists go through five stages of learning; discovery, exploration, assimilation, accommodation and finally dissemination. The archive shows those stages quite clearly. Discovery in 1934 leading to an intense period of exploration and assimilation between then and 1936; a period in which they had direct contact with Jung himself and with his circle in Zurich; then a period of accommodation during the late 1930s, leading to a period of dissemination stretching from 1940, when their direct contact with Jung was severed by war, to the end of their lives in the early 1980s. The consequences of that dissemination being still traceable in Quakerism today.

A little like a chain reaction, that initial intellectual explosion in Geneva in the 1930s set up ripples of reaction spreading outwards, before fading away. Reactions that can be traced in further documents that lie outside the archive, especially those to be found in the Inward Light – the journal of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology – and in The Seeker – the journal of the Seekers Movement. There are also documents in other Quaker periodicals which relate to the narrative. The book, in order to be complete, attempts to embrace these – to trace the ripples.

Just as a museum will present an exhibition by displaying object surrounded by information providing both context and interpretation, so a book based on an archive does much the same. It could not possibly display all of the archive – that filled a substantial part of a filing cabinet – but attempts to do justice by selecting such parts as serve to represent a good picture of the whole, and which fit together advancing the narrative of the spread of the ideas which they contain through the wider Quaker community and, in the process, chronicling the lives of the protagonists.

Likewise a good museum display tries to relate the exhibits to the visitor's life, so the book attempts to show the relevance of the ideas entombed in the archive to the reader's lives; it is worth exploring what is in the archive because what is there is still relevant to us today. It maps out the protagonists intellectual journeys and struggles, ones which are in many ways our common lot. It helps suggest answers to those question as to what value religions might have to our lives, and specifically what might be found within the Quaker tradition and practices which can serve as a path of spiritual development and growth. To that extent it humanises religions: it touches on the overarching questions of the utility and veracity of religions and their relevance to our lives.

It is suggested by some theologians, such as Stephen Prothero, that Eastern religions are human centred as they are concerned with the liberation of the individual's spirit whilst, historically, Western religions are God centred as they are concerned with obedience to the divine will and ordinance. What the archive reveals is a humanisation of that western tradition by re-centring away from a supposed divine authority to inward psycho-spiritual processes. Jung's insights into the psychology of religion providing for the protagonists the mechanisms for that re-centring. The result is an understanding of Quakerism as a path more like that of Eastern religions and less like the more static obedience – or even abeyance – required by Western religions.

The book charts in some ways a modern Pilgrim's Progress as it chronicles the progress for some of the protagonists from the anomie of modernity with its vogue for a supposedly science induced scepticism, through a deepening of the richness of life due to the discovery and exploration of its inner, spiritual side, to a place of relative equanimity and spiritual openness.

Opening an archive, such as Irene's, allows the story of the lives and spiritual-intellectual quests of its creators to be told substantially through their own words. The archive is the primary evidence of their discovery and exploration of the psycho-spiritual side of their lives. The author's job is to act as curator displaying their words as exhibits and surrounding them with such interpretive materials and comment as might provide context or illuminate their significance. This, I hope, has to some limited extent been achieved.