William McGuire (1917-2009)
Obituary by Thomas Kirsch

Bill McGuire was the first psycho-historian of Jung. William McGuire was born in St. Augustine, Florida, and received his bachelor’s degree in journalism. It was not long after he finished his degree that he was offered a job at the New Yorker where he served as an editor and reporter for many years. Because of his deep interest in world peace and social justice he became an all purpose writer/editor in the office of the Secretariat of the fledgling United Nations.

However, it was in 1948 when Bill accepted an offer from Kurt and Helen Wolff that his career took the direction that led him to work on the work of C.G. Jung for the next more than half century. He became an editor for Pantheon Books where they shared offices with a new foundation, Bollingen, named after Jung’s tower and funded by Paul and Mary Mellon. He was hired to edit the books which Pantheon was publishing and the first one was Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. From there he became the executive editor of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung in English.

At the time Bill was in analysis with Kurt Eissler, a prominent Freudian and the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York. When the Bollingen team traveled to Zürich to discuss the publication of The Collected Works in English, Jung was pleased to discover that McGuire was in psychoanalysis, and that he would not have transference to Jung himself. Bill enjoyed telling that story on himself. One result of this was that Bill arranged for Eissler to interview Jung about Freud. This happened in August of 1953, and the interview is now in the Library of Congress where it can be read for now only on the premises. It is a fascinating interview and a quite in-depth view of Freud. It will be made public in 2013. For the record, all of Bill's papers are at the Library of Congress, and anyone who is interested can look them over.

In addition to being the editor of The Collected Works, Bill McGuire wrote several introductions to essays and books of Jung. They are all scholarly and bring new material to the works. They include “Notes to the 1925 Seminar,” the Dream Seminars 1929-1930, Psychology of the Unconscious, C.G. Jung Speaking, and his landmark editing of the Freud/Jung Letters in 1973. The Times of London wrote “It is as if Voltaire and Rousseau, or Lenin and Trotsky...had written each other every day”. Psychology Today devoted an entire issue to the book.

He also wrote a wonderful history of the Bollingen Foundation which moved to the Princeton University Press before it dissolved. The title was Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past. Bill retired from the Princeton University Press in 1982, and in retirement continued his interest in Jung history. He was an important advisor to the groundbreaking electronic edition of the I Ching. The International Association for Analytical Psychology honored Bill with honorary membership in 2001 for all his work in promoting the publication of Jung in English.

I met Bill when he would come to San Francisco to visit his son and his family. He would often attend Jung Institute meetings and help various members with their publishing questions. He was always extremely gracious, friendly, and enormously helpful to anyone who sought him out. He became a board member of our Institute. Later we were both board members of the Jung Foundation in New York, and being members of the two boards; we would see each other several times a year and developed a real friendship. I was most interested in what he was doing in the Jungian publishing field at Princeton, and at the time I was active in Jungian politics, which interested him somewhat as well.

His wife Paula was and is an avid baseball fan, rooting for the Chicago Cubs, and Bill benignly accepted her passion for baseball, which was not one of his own.

The last time I saw Bill was about two-and-a-half years ago in Princeton, New Jersey. Jean and I went to see them at their home, and he was already failing. However, from time to time, he would perk up and be the wonderfully gracious and charming Bill that he had always been. I always remember that visit, because it was so wonderful to see him in his own surroundings with Paula and remember our wonderful times together.

© Thomas Kirsch, M.D. 2010

Letter from Antonia Boll
Chair of the Association of Jungian Analysts, London :

It is with great sorrow that I write to announce the death of Mrs Hella Adler on 19th August 2009. Her funeral will take place in the small Chapel at Golders Green rematorium, Hoop Lane on Thursday 27th August at 12.30 pm.

Hella was one of the founder members of the Association of Jungian Analysts and is the widow of Dr Gerhard Adler. She was 102 years old.

Yours sincerely
Antonia Boll
E-mail : antoniaboll@yahoo.co.uk