Then there was Dr Esther M Harding, who died only recently in 1971 but made one of the greatest American contributions of all in volume of work and depth of character, although she was English. Her books on various aspects of psychology, literature and history, seen from a feminine point of view, have far-reaching consequences for the nature and wholeness of human awareness. Close beside her was Dr Eleanor Bertine — I speak only of those I knew personally — and many others like Elined Kotschnig and the gallant Martha Jaeger, both Quakers who laboured to carry Jung into the Society of Friends and make those indomitable “children and servants of the light” realise the the clearer the light the more precise the shadow.
Laurens van der Post: Jung and the Story of Our Time.
One of the privileges of having the luxury of spend time researching an archive, and what you can of the lives of those who created it, is the joy of discovery, and the chance to place what traces are left of their lives into some sort of historical context. Elined Kotschnig was one such discovery.
There were a few papers by her in Irene Pickard's archive of Jungian materials. They reveal that it was Elined who introduced that small circle of Quakers in Geneva to Jung in 1934, pointing out that he was a 'modern mystic' – modern in the sense that he underpinned his mysticism with his 'scientific' discoveries about the human mind – mystic in that he stressed the importance of deep, fully felt relationship with the the totality of being, not mere intellectual acknowledgement. Over rationalised relationships with life estranged and alienated people, creating the modern malaise he encountered so much in his practice as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Its antidote was discovering deeper, felt, connection.
Elined was a born in Trefeca, Wales, and was a graduate of the University of Wales and a post graduate student at Cambridge. She married an Austrian, Walter Kotschnig, lived in Geneva, Switzerland, encountered Carl Jung, becoming in time a Jungian therapist, emigrated to the United States where she was one of the founders of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology (FCRP) and long time editor of its journal, Inward Light.
Unfortunately, so much of the records of her life and contribution to psychoanalysis and Quakerism was lost after her death, when her papers were auctioned off by mistake with the furniture from her home. All of Elined's diaries, consultation notes, reflections, draft papers and letters were lost. What has survived are the few articles she wrote for Inward Light, one privately published book, Womanhood in Myth and Life, and the papers she wrote in Geneva which were preserved in Irene Pickard's archive.
There is so little reference to Elined outside Quaker circles that encountering her in van der Post's book was gratifying. She deserves to be much better know. Her synthases of Jungian and Quaker thought, extending them into a life affirming framework, was of great benefit to so many, and not just her patients, as was testified by the only person I met who met her. As a young woman my informant had attended some of the annual FCRP conferences where she had encountered Elined. She found her inspiring and liberating as well as deeply challenging: Elined excelled in confronting people with their shadow – those aspects of ourselves we would rather not see.
