Toward the end of his life, Carl Jung said that he was the luckiest man he ever knew. It had nothing to do with any kind of fortune or fame, and those things would seem to be far out of reach for a psychoanalyst, even one who would influence the way we think about everything. It had to do with an inner life, one that was extremely full, often terrifying, and always exciting. He understood that his extraordinary life was also one that involved lots of periods of deep reflection, with lots of solitude, and small actions that might not appear to have any kind of great weight. A man in a room, smoking a pipe, reading and occasionally writing, is not the stuff that celebrities are made of, and that was as true then as it is now.
However, … Read the rest