An Elder Sitting by the Fire: My Path to Jung

Abstract

The author describes the importance of his mentors, his heritage, and early life in Johannesburg, South Africa and the effect that those formative years in a mining community (fueled by migrant labor) had on his embryonic psyche. Attending an Anglican school, he discovered the power of Christianity as a 10-year-old, holding vigil at night “over the body of Christ.” However, his first objective relationship with the psyche, the unconscious, occurred during the Second World War in the desert of Egypt before embarkation for Italy, with a second event occurring shortly after his return to South Africa, where he had been forced by circumstance to seek employment back on the mines. He explores how, despite the vicious and cruel apartheid policy above ground, all men were genuine brothers at the rock face; how the migrant labor rejoiced on reaching the surface after a shift with ritualistic thanks. He relocated to Natal where his relationship with the natural world developed, leading eventually to the founding of both the Dusi canoe marathon and the Wilderness Leadership School. On being employed by the Natal Parks Board he moved to Zululand, a true wilderness, in the early 1950s, where he was exposed to the rituals and beliefs of local tribes. He was impressed by their reliance on and their respect for the spiritual. A series of what he later understood were synchronistic events led him to both his mentors: a Jungian analyst and eventually to Jung himself.