The Memoir of Tina Keller-Jenny

Wendy K. Swan, Editor

New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. 2011, 177 pp.

One of the criticisms that is often made of Carl Gustav Jung is that he was a misogynist. For this reason and others, this memoir by a woman who was a near contemporary of Jung’s is of interest. Tina Keller-Jenny, born of a rich family, was analysed by Jung and by his associate Toni Wolff. Keller-Jenny went on to become an analyst herself, but eventually broke from Jung and went her own individual way.

Keller-Jenny died in 1985 at age 98 and wrote part of this memoir in her 90s. She recalls her childhood in a typically Victorian household, where her parents were loving but emotionally remote. Keller-Jenny herself felt more at home with the servants because they seemed more “natural,” and similar to Marian Woodman in the film Dancing in the Flames shown recently by our society, felt that she lived a double life as a child. One was her conventional life, the other a secret life of religious fantasy. Once she married and had children she was able to break away to some extent from her highly structured background, to begin what she saw as her lifelong quest to integrate the dark side of life that had been banished from her original home.

To try to do this, she undertook analyses with Jung and Woolf that spanned 13 years, ending in 1928. The problem that brought her to analysis was what she called “painful anxiety,” despite having all the trappings of a successful modern life—a husband and children she loved, adequate financial resources, friends and family. Jung did not consider her sick, but believed that her fears were a sign that she was undergoing an individuation process.

She was very much impressed by Jung and admits to having had a transference reaction, which to her dismay was not shared by him. But she seemed to profit more from her analysis with Toni Wolff, since it was during that analysis that she began to develop dance as a way to deal with inner pressures (again, similar to Marion Woodman.) Keller-Jenny qualified as a physician, and shortly afterwards moved with her family to Geneva because her husband had taken a job there. She set up her own practice as a psychologist, but found that most patients were not interested in long-term analysis of the kind she had undergone herself. Through various training courses and reading, she developed ways of working with patients with more mundane problems.

Keller-Jenny describes an intense experience of counter-transference she had with one female patient, and the anguish she felt when the patient moved on to another analyst in another city. In 1948 she and her husband returned to Zurich, and it was then that Keller-Jenny broke definitively with Jung. Or rather, he broke with her (as she saw it) by refusing to recommend her to the Jung Institute, which had then started accrediting analysts.

Keller-Jenny opened her own practice in Zurich and began collaborating with other non-Jungian psychologists and developing to a greater extent her use of body work, both personally and with some patients. Then in 1958 she moved to California, where she stayed until 1971 and began writing this autobiography. She returned to Switzerland to spend her last years.

Her later years appear to have been happy ones for the most part, despite the death of her husband in 1963, and she certainly serves as a model of how to live the “golden years” gracefully. I was also struck by how important she found dance and body work in attaining her own psychological healing. “When I came away from such a movement lesson I felt very different than when I had earlier come from my psychological therapy sessions. These movement lessons were therapeutic because of the atmosphere that emanated from them. I went away full of encouragement and a desire for health, beauty and wholeness,” she writes. She was fortunate in finding good teachers of body work, and believed that her intuition and imagination guided her choice of these teachers.

Keller-Jenny thought that it was her destiny to meet Dr. Jung. “Nothing can change the fact that I needed this enormous challenge in order to become the person I was meant to become. ‘Individuation’ ....is still what I must accept today. Putting it in my own terms it means that I am as attentive to the voices of life from within as I am to the impulses of life from without. Only the interaction of both make up my individual life pattern.”

Despite her criticisms of Jung and her eventual break with him, Keller-Jenny was “very grateful” for her psychological work with Jung and Toni Wolff, but also for other psychological influences that reached her.

She seems to have written a very balanced account of her dealings with Jung and early psychologists. The book is well-written but somewhat disjointed, probably because it was written over a long period of time. In addition to autobiography, it includes three interesting essays and concludes with the doctor’s “Letter to my Children.” Keller-Jenny admits to having had a very difficult but also a rich life, and says that one of the strongest motivations for her struggle for individuation was the conviction that what she left undone out of laziness would become a burden for her children. So by doing the best she could to solve her own problems, she was also doing the best she could for her children.

It is hard to imagine that this very active and accomplished woman could have left much undone in her long life. Her story is a good read for anyone with an interest in Jung and the early Jungians, or just in feminine psychology.

–Margaret Piton