SATURDAY MEMORY
February 15, 2025

Hotel in Toronto. In the seventies as I recall. I leave the hotel and fetch a taxi to take me to where I will give a lecture. As the taxi pulls up, I’m aware of a man who has come up beside me. I recognize him at once and he recognizes me as well as we have met before when I have talked in Toronto. It is Robertson Davies, premier Canadian author and an aficionado of things Jungian. In the cab we got to talking about various tings and at one point he said, “Russ, do you believe in reincarnation.” The question was totally out of the blue and unrelated to what we were talking about. I told him that I did not believe in reincarnation. He said that he did not either. Everyone he met who believed such stuff he said, “had a much better life previously than the one then have now. No one has ever told me about a wretched previous life. It’s all rubbish.” I don’t remember what else we talked about, but this memory has stuck like glue.

SATURDAY MEMORY
February 8, 2025

When I was on the Board of the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, back in the late 70s, Mary Bancroft, the Grande Dame of the New York scene, took me under her wing and said I needed to meet influential people. Mary was a novelist, journalist, and a spy as well as one of the most influential supporters of the work of C. G. Jung. She had relationships with many notable men, including Allen Dulles, the main figure in American intelligence and later head of the CIA. Mary connected Dulles with Jung who developed a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.

One party at Mary’s apartment that stands out in my memory was one where she introduced me to Norman Mailer. She told me I could use some of his qualities. I had read some of his work and I knew that he did most of his writing in the bathtub. It was that I focused on in talking with him and this got us discussinhing some of the quirky habits that writers develop to facilitate their writing.

SATURDAY MEMORY
February 2, 2025

Near midnight. In a bathroom at Dallas International Airport. My last moments in Washington, D.C., were spent visiting the Library of Congress. As souvenirs I had purchased facsimile copies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They were in out-sized folders, too big for my suitcase, so I curried them with me.

As I was about the leave the bathroom, five guys came in. They spotted what I was carrying. They could see the large print on one of the folders: Bill of Rights. They started to hassle me. “You got no rights here fucker.” Each one said something similar. I tried to push my way through them, and they started to push me back and toward one of the stalls. Just as they were pushing me, a security guard came in. He ordered them out and they left.

He said, “You wanna live the night, my friend, you’d better toss those.”

I didn’t toss them, but I did turn the folder around so the words could not be seen. “I think I’ll be OK now,” I said.

He escorted me out and the toughs were nowhere to be seen.

I lived to tell the tale.

SATURDAY MEMORY
January 25, 2024

I was eight years old. I was in Dr. Dixon’s office to have my tonsils out. The operation was a success, and I asked Dr. Dixon to show me my tonsils. At first he refused, but I was insistent. He finally showed me a glass jar with a lump of tissue about the size of walnuts. I told Dr. Dixon I wanted to keep the tonsils so I could dissect them and look at them with my microscope. At that age, I was a little scientist and had a laboratory with chemistry stuff, an entomology collection, microscopes, home-made telescopes, cameras, and the like. I even published “The Tech Observer,” which included articles and pictures of various scientific projects. My buddy and I sold these issues to parents and neighbors.

Dr. Dixon said no.

So I kicked him.

The glass jar fell to the floor, and Dr. Dixon’s hand was hurt.

Though my parents always wanted me to be a doctor, even at that age, I didn’t really want to be a doctor until I had kicked Dr. Dixon. Then, I was on a path to be a doctor until my junior year in college. I was in pre-med.

I woke up one morning and was hit with the realization that no, I was not to be a doctor.

When I announced that I was changing to psychology (why this, I did not know and still don’t), my parents were hurt, and I lost my girl friend and my best friend. But I was following something I could not deny, and I did not know why. But I was impelled.

SATURDAY MEMORY

January 18, 2025

From 1961 through 1963, while in graduate school, I worked at the John Tracy Clinic. This was a clinic started by Louise Treadwell Tracy, the wife of Spencer Tracy, in 1942, to do research and establish treatment and educational programs for young children suffering various forms of deafness, in honor of their son, John, who developed nerve deafness at a young age. My work involved using the galvanic skin response (GSR) as a means of testing the hearing of the young patients brought to the clinic. My work illustrated how the GSR was a very sensitive indicator of hearing and could be used in developing approaches to dealing with deafness, particularly in relation to learning language through various means.

I enjoyed working with the kids. I also enjoyed meeting Louise Treadwell Tracy a number of times as well as Katherine Hepburn on two occasions. My conversations with them focused entirely on the research I was doing. They did not mention, nor did I ask anything, about Spencer Tracy.

SATURDAY MEMORY
January 11, 2025

It was the night my sister was to be baptized in the Mormon Church. My sis (13 years old), my brother (3 years old), me (16 years old), and my parents had arrived early, so the church was still closed. When the bishop arrived, he told us he could not find the keys to the church and was hoping there was a way in. He and I walked around the building and found a partially open window. I boosted him up and he managed to get through.

I heard a splash. He had fallen into the baptismal pool.

Dripping wet, he opened the door, and we filed in as well as others who were arriving. Everyone assembled in the baptismal room. There were several young girls to be baptized, and after a while, they appeared, wearing simple white gowns. At the bishop’s invitation they entered the pool, and he proceeded to baptize them, one by one, by immersion. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but I clearly did. The wet gowns became at least a bit transparent. I did not mind this at all. The bishop laid his hands on each girl's head and confirmed the presence of the holy spirit in his announcement.

But this is not what stands out in my memory.

My brother at the time had an imaginary friend that was a bird. Everyone in the family was used to dealing with my brother and his imaginary bird. But no one was prepared for what my brother loudly shouted out in the midst of the solemn baptismal ceremony:

“Where’s my fuckin’ bird?

Saturday Memory

January 4, 2024

I was eight. It was the summer of 1947. It was Sunday. My parents had dropped me off at the Methodist Church for my weekly religious education. The pastor was lecturing us on The Book of Revelation. Being a little scientist at the time, having microscopes, chemistry sets, telescopes, and a large bug collection, I was not so interested in the fire and brimstone of Revelation (about which I had already read) as I was in various questions related to evolution. When the pastor called on me after I raised my hand, I said, “I don’t have any questions on Revelation, but could you talk about evolution?” As I remember it, he looked at me for a long time and then said, “No, I will not talk about evolution, but I will talk to your parents.”

When my parents picked me up, he called them into his office while I waited outside. When they emerged, I asked what happened. They told me the pastor did not want me to attend Sunday school anymore.

That was my last experience of church.

Yet, I minored in religious studies in college and took several classes with the distinguished professor and Methosit pastor John Wesley Robb at USC, the best teacher I ever had. I chose him as the pastor to marry my wife and me. Later, The Book of Revelation became a deep object of study and influence on me. My fictional “lost gospel” of John the Baptist (the actual author of The Book of Revelation) plays a large part in my novel, Dreams: The Final Heresy.

For whatever reason, I have often felt a kind of gratitude to that pastor in my childhood.

SATURDAY MEMORY

December 28, 2024

I did my analytical training in the late 60s and early 70s. I was

fortunate to have met and been taught by many people who

had direct experience with Jung.

One such figure was the gnostic scholar, Gilles Quispel, an

extraordinary man. He was instrumental in securing the Jung

Codex purchased by the Institute in Zurich as a birthday

present for Jung.

The memory that stands out to me is one training seminar

in the early days. At one point, as we were discussing the nature

of “mystery,” he stopped us. He put his index finger to his lips

as if telling us to hush. Then he said something I’ll never

forget:

Mystery is not to be solved, or resolved, or dissolved. Mystery

is to be embraced and loved, and out of that will come one’s

deepest sense of life, meaning, and purpose.

I remember thinking then that dreams are a mystery and

what Quispel was saying was true of dreams as well.

SATURDAY MEMORY
December 21, 2024

Sometime in the 70s, I invited Dora Kalff to do a seminar for analyst candidates in the training program at the C. G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles. Dora Kalff was the developer of Sandplay Therapy (1950), which used miniature figures placed in a small sandbox. The therapy was useful for both children and adults to express themselves non-verbally. Kalff's method was a further and specific development of Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique (1920). Dora presented a Friday night lecture on the Theory of Sandplay and then on Saturday had the candidates do sand trays and she would point out various configurations and analyze and interpret what was presented. At one point, Dora asked me if it would be OK to continue on Sunday. She said the material had brought up so much that she wanted to explore it further with the candidates. Everyone enthusiastically agreed. So, it was arranged.

Then Dora asked me to take her to the phone. I did. She made a call. She called Johns Hopkins University. I then heard her explain that she had to cancel her scheduled lecture there because she was not finished with her work in Los Angeles. I was stunned by this. She saw my stunned expression, smiled, and said, “Russ, always go where the depth leads you.”-