What to do? What to do? Masses of material: many documents, papers, articles, speeches, letters, booklets, notes, drafts, etc. Add an associated library of 115 Jungian related titles. In all the product of near seventy years. A pile of stuff that Irene Pickard described as her 'compost heap' (Inward Light, No 59, Spring 1960). How best to process and present this trove? How to put over its significance? Was there indeed any coherence in the collection? Was there a narrative that would bring it together? How to relate its creation to its historical context? How to trace the lines of development within? Who were the main actors? What were the consequences of their very evident interest that brought these items together and preserved them? How does exploring and writing about it fit into public discourse? What discourse? Within which communities?
Opening an archive is rather like discovering a cave system. An unguessed at network of chambers and passageways is explored, and slowly the system is charted. Perhaps cave paintings, or remains are discovered, and natural wonders revealed. A catalogue of what is there might be created, and a guide to how to access it written and detailed maps drawn. Maybe a history of its discovery and exploration is recorded. What was unknown becomes shared and public. It becomes accessible and known, and may even be valued and added to tourist itineraries. It becomes part of the public landscape.
There clearly was a central event of importance: the direct contact in the 1930s between a group of Geneva Quakers and the psychologist Carl Jung and his circle, just at a time when Jung was developing his theories about the fundamental importance to psychological health and wellbeing of what might be termed the 'spiritual' aspect of life.
There are the antecedents to this event. Then there are the consequents. How much of each belongs in an account? Where to start and end the narrative? The choice of length and depth would very much dictate how much of each to include, as would considerations of who the likely audience might be and which discourses it might contribute to.
The question of purpose comes into all of this. What is my purpose in researching and reporting on the archive? The latter is easily answered: lacking a specific career goal, such as submitting a thesis, or building a reputation – I am post-career, retired, somewhat past such concerns – I have written about the archive and its creators because that is the only way I know of coming to understand what it contains. It has been my way of processing the contents and their relationship to the historical context. I have then felt compelled to share what I have discovered because, other than whatever contribution it might make to the historical record and the discourses around that, I think it will interest others who share my overlapping interests: philosophy, psychology, history, theology, peace-studies, ethics, Quakerism and the love of a good story. As I opened up the archive, that latter became obvious.
The main protagonists had extraordinary lives. True, that was in part because they lived in what the apocryphal Chinese curse calls 'interesting times'; but most pertinently they proceeded through those times in countercultural ways. Their history is a history of exception not of conformity. Pacifists and peace-makers in a time of war and bellicose posturing; quietly and undogmatically religious in a time of avant-garde secularism and iconoclasm; deeply and self-critically questioning in a time of assertive certainties (patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, fascism, communism); open and receptive to new and emerging ideas and pluralities, whilst remaining connected and even embedded in their reluctantly evolving and somewhat traditionalist faith community.
To top it all there were the elements of a good yarn: romance, thwarted love, danger, adventure, and the quest of a woman to find her place in a fast changing and disorientating world; and of an otherwise obscure man who became a founding member of the United Nations secretariat and who was instrumental in helping to shape the post Second World War order.
If I were chasing reputation or career, then a short, punchy account would do the job; but there would only be opportunity for one bite of this particular cherry. A definitive account would be unlikely ever to be written if a short, punchy account was chosen; however, a definitive account would take time and would be difficult to find a publisher for. What was in the archive deserved better than a hit and grab raid, as did the lives of the protagonists, so in the end its been the long haul: a definitive account.
