Black Books

On September 20, 1910, at the age of twenty-three, Toni Wolff was brought by her mother to see Jung.

According to her sister Erna, he had successfully treated the son of a friend of her mother’s, who consequently recommended Jung.

According to Jung’s pupil and biographer, the analyst Barbara Hannah Toni Wolff was “suffering from depression· and disorientation much accentuated by the of her father.”

Her father had died the previous year.

Much later, in an active imagination with her father, on September 7, 1937, Toni Wolff said to him,

“I became ill after your death-melancholic-completely unreal and sunk in the inner world.”

Toni Wolff had audited courses at the University of Zurich on philosophy, literature, theology, and history but was not formally enrolled there.

According to Hannah,

“Jung immediately realized that she needed a new goal to reawaken her interest in life,” and so he put her to work doing some research for what eventually became Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.

She was stimulated by the material, which had a salutary effect on her depression and disorientation.

Years later, she recalled walking in her youth near the Burgholzli with her parents and thinking:

“there would be a doctor who had significance for me. Perhaps I wanted to become crazy for that reason-indeed I ended up with C[arl].

I knew exactly what I wanted from him-relationships with genuine people.”  ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Black Books, Vol. 1, Page 27