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.