Joseph Henderson – Foreword to A Memoir of Toni Wolff,
FOREWORD
Irene Champernowne was a remarkable English woman who founded and directed a unique treatment center for emotionally disturbed people at a country house, Withymead, near Exeter, from 1942 to 1966.
The Withymead center had a Jungian orientation from the beginning owing to Mrs. Champernowne’s personal analysis and later affiliation with Dr. H. Godwin Baynes, who was Jung’s chief representative in England during the 1930s. Dr. Baynes appears to have encouraged his student’s experiment of introducing the insights of analytical psychology into the field of psychiatry, where diagnosis with palliative treatment, usually in an asylum, still held sole sway.
Dr. Baynes’ premature death in the early 1940s removed the inspirational support Irene Champernowne had counted upon to sustain her effort, but she was helped on a practical level by her husband, Gilbert Champernowne, and on a cultural level by a nearby progressive educational center at Darrington Hall, an ancient estate previously belonging to the Champernowne family. This center was owned and generously endowed by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst who were friendly to the Withymead experiment in its early years.
Laban’s dance movement therapy at Darrington was a resource, and a certain reciprocity existed between the two centers in sharing practitioners of art and music therapy.
Dr. Culver Barker, Mrs. Scott-Maxwell, and Mrs. Allenby were Jungian analysts especially helpful in the development of Withymead.
After World War II, Irene Champernowne turned to Jung in the hope of enlisting his support for her venture and also for herself personally.
But Jung was never interested in furthering group experiments and even refrained from becoming involved in the formation of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
Also, his professional work with patients was coming to an end after a severe illness. The last ten years of his life, from 1951 to 1961, were largely spent in retirement except for some writing, of which one book is particularly relevant to this memoir. In the late 1940s and early fifties, Irene Champernowne found what she needed from Jung’s assistant in Zurich, Fraulein Antonia Wolff, commonly known as Toni.
This nickname, however, is misleading. She was a reserved, aristocratic, and very private individual in the strongest possible contrast to Irene Champernowne with her warm, democratic, outgoing personality. In a relationship that began as a strictly analytical association, with Toni Wolff as analyst and Irene as analysand, many difficulties in communication had to be overcome. Eventually, their common dedication to the study of Jung’s psychology brought about a mutual personal regard, and one can see from this memoir how they finally became friends.
This was no ordinary friendship, however; they were, one might say, friends of the spirit. Toni Wolff was especially interested in the problems of women and their roles in society.
In this respect, she described four types of women: the mother, the hetaira, the Amazon, and the medium. Although Irene had played all these roles to some extent at one time or another, the role that this memoir most clearly mirrors is that of the medium.
This is represented in the series of paintings, here reproduced, which illustrate the period of her work with Toni Wolff. The personal interaction between the two women is vividly described, with C. G. Jung’s and Emma Jung’s occasional comments, but that is perhaps not as important as the archetypal material itself and its bearing upon the individuation process as it occurs during an analysis. Even though she continually sought to find literal, personal meaning in her images and finally succeeded in convincing both Jung and Toni Wolff that her initial painting was precognitive of her supportive relation to Toni as a human woman, their essential meaning remains for us transpersonal, expressing an important archetypal symbolism.
Two years before her death in 1976, Irene Champernowne entrusted the whole manuscript of her memoirs to me to see if I could find a publisher in the United States.
Interesting as her life story is for those who knew her or about her, the completed work, as she wrote it, was deemed unsuitable for the general public. In discussing this with Mrs. Besse Bolton, a friend of mine who had encouraged Mrs. Champernowne to send her memoirs to me, and with Betsy Garrett and Dr. Anthony Stevens, two of her closest associates in recent years, it was decided it might be of very special interest to publish an edited version of the chapter in which she describes her period of analysis with Toni Wolff.
Certainly, Lewis. Here’s the passage reformatted for WordPress Classic Editor with full sentences, italicized quotations only where appropriate, and double vertical spacing between each sentence (blank lines between each sentence for clarity and readability): As a friend and colleague of Toni Wolff (and as an analysand briefly on two occasions), I have often wished that something of her very personal dedication to the welfare of her analysands could be described. The present account gives a much more intimate and poignant picture of this than anything I could have imagined would ever come to light.
My only concern was that it might seem too intimate, and so it would for general publication; but for those who know something of analytical psychology from personal experience, it provides a welcome contribution to the understanding of analysis as it was practiced in Zurich in those early years, beginning in the 1920s, when Jung was virtually alone except for such assistants as Dr. Baynes and Miss Wolff.
Of later developments leading to the formation of C. G. Jung Institutes, and of the many analysts Jung trained during the late thirties and forties, there is little or no mention with the exception of Barbara Hannah. Thus this memoir reflects a time when Jungian analysis was still something of a family affair conducted by Jung, Peter Baynes, Toni Wolff, and Emma Jung, who became a part-time analyst in the later years. They were very personal and supportive in their interest toward all those who came to consult them; a good example is Irene
Champernowne’s description of her conversation with the Jungs after Toni’s sudden death. On my last visit to Jung in 1958, he was living alone at his house in Kusnacht.
Emma Jung had died, and he was attended only by his housekeeper Ruth Bailey and his secretary, Aniela Jaffe. During this visit, Jung talked at lunch of his great interest in the UFO phenomenon, about which he told me he was making a special study. This was published in the autumn of that year, and the following year translated into English by R. F. C. Hull as Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth. Irene Champernowne’s initial painting from the series reproduced here was placed as its frontispiece, and Jung described its meaning in the text.
Perhaps Irene’s close tie with Toni Wolff was in his mind at this time, because our visit ended with his taking me into the garden to show me the little stone bas-relief he had carved in Toni’s memory, placed under the ginkgo tree that had been given to him by students of the C. G. Jung Institute. This tree is an import from China, and on the stone four sets of Chinese characters were arranged vertically. He told me they read from above downwards:
Toni Wolff
Lotus
Nun
Mysterious
The subsequent developments in the process of individuation represented in the paintings, especially those illustrated by the symbolism of numbers, I leave to the speculation of interested readers based on the interpretation of Irene Champernowne. I am indebted to William McGuire for an editorial reading of the manuscript and to Dr. Anthony Stevens for corrections in dating and style, and especially to the Champernowne Trust and to Besse and Wilbur Bolton for grants of money to help support its publication. ~
Joseph L. Henderson San Francisco , 1980 ~Joseph Henderson, A Memoir of Toni Wolff, Page 1-4
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