Every human has a story

Jung came to the conclusion that every human being had a story, and the derangement came when that story was denied, or if the story was rejected; and it was only in the discovery of this story, enabling the patient to rediscover his personal story (within it), that the patient could be healed again.

Laurens Van der Post: BBC - Time Life film on Jung,

Untangling what it was about Jung that so fascinated, engaged and enthused a group of Geneva Quakers that they would spend the rest of their lives expounding his virtues as someone who had given them the keys to unlocking their deeper selves and vitalised their spiritual lives was perhaps the biggest challenge of my research. Between them, they had created an extensive archive of materials, contributed articles to two journals, one either side of the Atlantic, addressed conferences, written books, acted as editors, and mentored and inspired many younger people as well as their contemporaries. They had been catalysts for change and modernisation, reinforcing trends that has already been at play in the communities they were part of.

The discovery of Jung, and their direct contact with him and his circle, made them more at ease with their spiritual life, more fully engaged with it and more willing to explore it. It helped them to realise its importance to their lives in spite the pull from their being 'modern', well educated and forward thinking people. They bucked the trends and fashions of their age: the affectation of a somewhat bohemian detachment from anything over serious, allied with a cynical disparagement of old fashioned things like religion which could not possibly stand the rigours of critical analysis. Religion was the opium of the people, and was utterly dreary. The stripped down religion of a set of left over tea-total puritans, with all their earnestness, social conscience and pacifism, was unspeakable. 

But somehow, that set of young, intelligent, and highly motivated people found something at the core of the Quaker tradition; in the shared, contemplative, ruminating silence, and in what arose from it; something that inspired and liberated them; and Jung gave them the intellectual justification for opening up to it.

For me, researching their left-overs – what little survives in the aftermath of life – it meant following their spiritual journeys, and tracking their footsteps in what material there was. Annoyingly, such material is always deficient. It is like a giant dot to dot drawing, stretching over three-quarters of a century, two continents and two world wars. Sometimes the dots are years apart. Sometimes they are scattered across diverse and disperse documents, articles and books. It was a six year journey on my part, and one which in some ways shadowed their own. To comprehend their journey meant undertaking one of my own, being forced to question many assumptions about my own life and attitudes. 

In many ways they confirmed Jung's contention: they found the big story which could contain the smaller stories of their lives. I think I have yet to achieve that.

Faint traces in time: Elined Kotschnig

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.