Lives on the Record

Jung and Alchemy: A Glossary of the Key Terms

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Jung spent the last two decades of his working life writing about alchemy — not as a historian curious about a dead pseudoscience, but because he had come to believe the old alchemists were describing, in their own symbolic language, the same psychological process he called individuation. This page defines the vocabulary that work produced, in the order he built it.

How Many People Did Al Capone Kill? What the Record Actually Supports

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 one fact that sits underneath all of it, and rarely gets mentioned alongside the big numbers: Al Capone was never convicted of a single murder. His only conviction, ever, was for tax evasion.

How Al Capone Actually Died

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 years after he had last held any real power, from a disease that had been quietly destroying his mind since before he went to prison.

How Carl Jung Actually Interpreted Dreams

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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, consistently, that no symbol has a fixed meaning independent of the specific dreamer’s own psychology and life situation — and that a book which tells you a house means family, or water means the unconscious, has mistaken the whole nature of the thing it claims to translate.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections: Inside Jung's Autobiography

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 in his Collected Works, on the grounds that he could not treat his own life as a scientific problem in the language his other books used. And he asked that it not be published at all until after his death.

Was Carl Jung Religious? What He Actually Said and Wrote

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 answer. I know. I don’t need to believe — I know.” Broadcast that October, the line became one of the most quoted things Jung ever said. By most accounts, Jung regretted it almost immediately — not because it was false, but because Freeman had pivoted without warning from a question about Jung’s childhood belief to one about his belief now, and the answer that came out was more quotable than clear.

The Women Around Jung: Emma, Toni Wolff, and Sabina Spielrein

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 at his seminars for over four decades. One was, by his own account, the reason he built his theory of psychological types at all — and was then written out of the story that mattered most to her for the better part of a century. One was murdered by a Nazi death squad along with her two daughters.

Carl Jung's Art: The Paintings, the Tower, and the Stone He Carved

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 — remains under copyright until 2031. What follows describes what exists, in words, and points to the few places you can legally see the images themselves.

Carl Jung and the Letter Behind AA's Twelfth Step

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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.

Carl Jung's Philosophy: The Thinkers Behind the Psychology

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 title page credits “Basilides in Alexandria” — a Christian Gnostic teacher who had been dead for roughly 1,700 years.

Shadow Work Prompts, Traced Back to What Jung Actually Wrote

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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 built around a journal he had no part in: The Shadow Work Journal, a self-help book by a 24-year-old author that, at its peak, outsold Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk on Amazon — nearly half of those sales traced directly back to TikTok.

Which Carl Jung Book Should You Read First?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:21:00 +0000

Almost every list of “best Jung books for beginners” recommends the same title first — Man and His Symbols — without mentioning that Jung himself wrote only one of its five parts, and died before he could see it published.

Puer Aeternus: Jung's Archetype of the Eternal Boy

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Two thousand years before anyone applied it to a grown man who wouldn’t commit to a job, a marriage, or a city, puer aeternus was a line of poetry addressed to a god.

The Red Book: Jung’s Liber Novus

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:32:00 +0000

For most of the twentieth century the Carl Jung Red Book sat in a bank vault in Zurich, and almost nobody had read it. Jung himself called it Liber Novus.

Contact

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:33:29 +0000

Write to hello@deirdrebairauthor.com.

Corrections

If you have found an error — a wrong date, a misattributed quotation, a page reference that does not check out — please say so. Corrections are made quickly. If you would like to be credited on the corrected page, say that too.

About

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:31:36 +0000

Lives on the Record reads Deirdre Bair’s biographies closely: the four literary lives — Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Carl Jung — and the two that came later, Saul Steinberg and Al Capone. It also covers the people those books are about, because a biography is only half the story.

Privacy Policy

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:21:51 +0000

Last updated: 13 October 2026

This page explains what Lives on the Record collects when you visit, who else can see it, and what you can ask to have removed. It is written to be read, not to be skipped.

Deirdre Bair

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:13:36 +0000

Deirdre Bair (1935–2020). Photograph via Atlantic Books; photographer uncredited at source.

On 17 November 1971, in the cramped lobby of the Hôtel du Danube in Paris, Samuel Beckett said something to a graduate student he had just met — a sentence she would go on repeating for the rest of her working life:

Bios

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:13:14 +0000

Biographical subjects covered on this site, read from primary sources rather than secondhand accounts.

Deirdre Bair — the biographer herself: her methods, her books, and the disputes that followed some of them.

Al Capone

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:12:55 +0000

Every biography of Al Capone before 2016 had the same hole in it: no one had spoken, on the record and at length, to the people who actually knew him. The trial transcripts existed. The newspaper morgue existed. The family did not talk.

Parisian Lives

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:08:31 +0000

The hinge of this book is one sentence, spoken on 17 November 1971 in the cramped lobby of the Hôtel du Danube in Paris, and quoted by its author for the next four decades: I will neither help nor hinder you. My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.

Books

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:02:52 +0000

Deirdre Bair published seven biographies and one memoir over five decades, working from interviews, letters and archives rather than secondhand accounts. This section looks closely at two of them — what she found, how she worked, and where the record runs out.