A Walk With a White Bushman by Laurens Van Der Post

Author:Laurens Van Der Post [Laurens van der Post]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 Alas, the prohibition has been removed and the mountain has been climbed several times since; and the Chogyal, the King of Sikkim, has died after imprisonment by the Indians, so the last of royal line has been removed from the high Himalayas.

2Testament to the Bushmen, directed by Paul Bellinger and produced by Jane Taylor. A book of the same title is published by Viking.

3 A talking- or writing-board which is said to spell out messages from the spirits.

INGARET,1 WOULD YOU be kind enough to join us? It was, I know, through you that Laurens first met Jung. You yourself studied with Jung and Professor Meier in Zürich. And you were lucky enough to have made the first tape-recording ever of Jung. May I ask, under what circumstances did you go there?

INGARET: Well, extraordinary circumstances. I went alone, with only Laurens supporting my decision, to work at Zürich. I went out of a sense of compulsion. As I wrote to Laurens at the time, ‘It seems to me that people’s private and personal lives have never mattered as they do now. For me the whole of the future depends on the way people live their personal rather than their collective lives. It is a matter of extreme urgency. When we have all lived out our private and personal problems we can consider the next, the collective step. Then it will be easy but before it will not even be possible.’

Would you revise that opinion now? Or does it still hold true?

INGARET: No, at the end of the war that was the main thought that drove me to Jung: to find out all I could about myself and my own personal life in relation to what I had written. Then it so happened that there were a great number of students at the newly founded Jung Institute at Zürich. The moment inevitably came when we all had to write a thesis on dream analysis. At the end of this, out of all these people, my thesis was chosen as an example of a model analysis. Jung said it could not really be bettered. Well, this was terribly serious, almost a shattering pronouncement. It seemed to put a whole weight of responsibility round my neck, which I did not want. After all, I was a playwright and wanted to go on writing. So I went to Jung and said, ‘Look, I’m not a doctor, I do not want to put up a brass plate. I’ve got my own life which is writing and the theatre and I love it. And I don’t know what to do!’ And Jung just said, very simply, ‘When you are ready the people will come.’ And I thought, That’s marvellous! Obviously, nobody will come! I came back to London, opened my front door, and there was a letter on the mat from a woman I had worked with in the war, and it said, ‘Ingaret, you have always been interested in psychology’ – which was true of course.

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