Jung's Life and Work

Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé

This audiobook narrated by John Telfer presents the complete interviews that served as the basis for Jung's bestselling memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Features a significant amount of material withheld from the original book

Newly translated and thoroughly annotated by world-renowned Jung expert Sonu Shamdasani

In 1957, at the age of eighty-one, C. G. Jung began a collaboration with his student and secretary Aniela Jaffé and the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff on a book about his life. Memories, Dreams, Reflections would become a bestseller, yet it draws from less than half of Jaffé's original interviews with Jung. Much of the material from these candid, wide-ranging conversations was left on the cutting-room floor. Jung's Life and Work presents these interviews in their entirety for the first time.

Marking the 150th anniversary of Jung's birth, this new English translation captures the cadence and subtlety of the brilliant psychologist in his own words, giving voice to a thinker and teacher who is by turns witty and intellectually daring but also vulnerable and humbled by the world's great mysteries. It restores numerous passages that were originally omitted or heavily edited and toned down for publication, "auntified" as Jung himself put it. Taken together, these talks reveal Jung actively discovering meaningful new connections in his life's work. He shares his impressions of notable figures he encountered throughout his life—such as Sigmund Freud, William James, Albert Einstein, and H. G. Wells—and describes his striking visions, religious and paranormal experiences, and pioneering self-experimentation. Aided by Jaffé's skillful questioning, Jung reflects on subjects ranging from Christianity and Buddhism and the fate of the West to the experiences that led to the formulation of his signature concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, anima and animus, and the shadow as well as on karma, the afterlife, and much more.

With an introduction and extensive annotations by acclaimed Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani that provide invaluable historical perspective, Jung's Life and Work includes previously unpublished extracts from Jung's letters and a completely reorganized text.

©2026 C. G. Jung (P)2026 The Estate of Aniela Jaffé and The Foundation of C. G. Jung

Extraordinary!

What a treat it is to hear C G Jung in his own “voice”!

It is as if one is sitting with him in a cozy living room and hearing him talk about his most relevant memories, dreams, and struggles, and how these shaped the development of his metapsychology and his conjectures about how the mind works. This is life well lived and therefore worth telling. And this book is an unprecedented historical document that everyone interested in Jung, analytical psychology, and the making of psychoanalysis should read.