This is a work of fiction based upon a case recorded, very briefly, by Carl Gustav Jung in his autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The case history is undated and curiously incomplete. I have always felt that Jung, writing in his later years, was still troubled by the episode and disposed to edit rather than to record it in detail.
I have chosen to set this story in the year 1913, the period of Jung’s historic quarrel with Freud, the beginning of his lifetime love affair with Antonia Wolff and the onset of his own protracted breakdown.
The character of the unnamed woman is a novelist’s creation; but it conforms with the limited information provided in Jung’s version of the encounter.
The character of Jung, his personal relationships, his professional attitudes and practices are all based on the voluminous records available. The interpretation of this material and its verbal expression are, of course, my own.
For the rest, every novelist is a myth-maker, explained and justified by Jung himself in his Prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “I can only make direct statements, only ‘tell stories’, whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”
M.L.W.