Growing up in a house with Jung's picture in most every room, and living in Switzerland with my parents-they in analysis and classes at the Institute, I and my sister in boarding schools in the Alps-this was my opportunity to meet the great man.
I wrote a very serious eleven-year-old's letter asking to meet him, and got an answer from his secretary that reached out, tousled my hair, and said Jung was very busy.
Then, a breakthrough: the tenth anniversary of the Institute.
HE would be there, and Barbara Hannah, my mother's analyst, was driving him.
She would tell him who I was, and that I was waiting for him out front.
The day came, I had a fever, but I braved the journey by streetcar and waited in the rain for his arrival.
The car pulled up, and out bounced a huge man whom I had only known from the neck up in photographs.
He came up to me and said, "So you're Max Zeller's son!"
I said, ''I've heard so much about you, I've. really been looking forward to meeting you .... "
He smiled, opened his arms out wide and said, "Well, what do you think?"
I was speechless (very rare even at that young age) from my first "Zen experience."
Jung's unpretentiousness, his humor and his humanness have remained with me, and indeed, have furthered me.
And though I can now claim that Jung consulted me, wanting to know what I think, I'm still formulating my answer. ~Max Zeller, J.E.T., Page 107
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