I only remember Tante Judith vaguely, though I remember her husband, Onkel Albert well, as he took me to see my Uncle Johnny for the last time before Alzheimer’s took him.  Albert prepared me well, saying Johnny was unlikely to remember me, but may remember my mother as he dandled her on his knee when she was six.  Mother was over sixty the last time I saw Johnny.  And that was what Johnny remembered.

I never knew Tante Cornelie at all, though I became quite close to Tante Helen when I was a young and callow lad in my early twenties.  I stayed then for a long weekend in her flat in Zürich, whilst Helen, a career counselor and psychologist for the young, conducted a battery of tests on me to determine where my career prospects lay. 

We spent hours over a table in her living room; her findings, which I returned to Zürich for a month or so later, were that I would find my strengths as an actor, or in drama in general.  Her findings were to prove true, but what she was not able to find was the lack of courage back then that most young people have to drive them to be what they were meant to be.  I had no courage then; I had allowed it to be beaten out of me.

After the Rorschach Test, she said, didn't say, that my approach to my sexual identity was up for grabs.  It remained so for two decades after that.

Tante Helen was right in that, years later, I was to have a measured success in the theatre in Hamburg which lead to some professional work, but was never to be a career.  Other fears and desires took their penance.

These were my Swiss aunts and uncles and Cornelie and Helen were patient/pupils of Jung.  Though it has now been many years since I have read Jung, (encouraged by my Aunt Jessica, the Tantes’ sister-in-law and my father’s aunt), I remember taking very much to heart his ideas about the collective consciousness, and how it serves to drive societies and tribes to a kind of mass memory and thus, perhaps, to mass culture and opinion.

Jung had a rather more global view about collective consciousness.  Yet even he, in Memories Dreams and Reflections, admits,

In this book, I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking.  It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, and with half -closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being.  If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.

I rather think that in the internet age, where we are enjoined to read less and absorb more on the basis of what our information should be, that we are more compelled to be informed by half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears.  And I fear that this is what drives American and British politics at this most crucial moment in world history.  That America will take its financial cue from another country is heartening in a global scale, but how long again before the world defines its being with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears? 

By a quirk of fate, the table where Tante Helen, in her flat in Zürich, conducted all those tests on me that postulated a future that was only later to be, is now sitting in my front hall.  It is laden with photographs of my family in various periods of our history.  It is centred with an art nouveau piece from her father's house in Zürich.  And crowned with flowers sent to me by my love.

Sadly, a photograph of Tante Helen is not there. 

But she brought me to Jung, and she brought me to me, and bringing the young to themselves was what she treasured and worked for.

And I have her table.