Reading Deirdre Bair’s biographies — and the lives inside them
Biography read closely: the lives Deirdre Bair wrote, what the record shows, and where it runs out.
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How Many People Did Al Capone Kill? What the Record Actually Supports
Search this question and you will get answers ranging from a dozen to over two hundred, usually with no source attached beyond another page making the same unsourced claim. The…
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How Al Capone Actually Died
Al Capone did not die the way his reputation suggests. No rival gang caught up with him, no gunfight ended it. He died in bed, in his own house, eight…
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How Carl Jung Actually Interpreted Dreams
If you came here looking for a list of dream symbols and what they mean, the useful thing to know first is that Jung rejected exactly that idea. He held,…
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Memories, Dreams, Reflections: Inside Jung’s Autobiography
Carl Jung’s best-known book to general readers is one he tried, in two separate ways, to keep out of his own official record. He asked that it not be included…
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Was Carl Jung Religious? What He Actually Said and Wrote
In March 1959, in his own house in Küsnacht, Carl Jung sat for a BBC interview with John Freeman and, asked whether he believed in God, answered: “Now… difficult to…
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The Women Around Jung: Emma, Toni Wolff, and Sabina Spielrein
Three women shaped Carl Jung’s life and work in overlapping, complicated ways, and the historical record has treated them very differently. One got a standing Wednesday dinner and a place…
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Carl Jung’s Art: The Paintings, the Tower, and the Stone He Carved
This page is, by necessity, a gallery with most of the pictures missing. Carl Jung’s most striking visual work — the mandalas and painted figures in The Red Book —…
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Carl Jung and the Letter Behind AA’s Twelfth Step
On 30 January 1961, four months before he died, Carl Jung wrote a letter containing two Latin words that Alcoholics Anonymous still quotes today: spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit.…
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Carl Jung’s Philosophy: The Thinkers Behind the Psychology
In 1916, Carl Jung privately printed fifty copies of a short work of Gnostic theology and gave them to friends. He did not put his own name on it. The…
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Shadow Work Prompts, Traced Back to What Jung Actually Wrote
The hashtag #shadowwork has more than 2.3 billion views on TikTok. Most of it has nothing to do with anything Carl Jung wrote, and quite a lot of it is…