Carl Jung’s legacy on Bailey Island endures, 88 years after historic lectures

Bailey Island Library Hall has hosted countless dances, suppers, plays and lectures since it was built more than a century ago. In 1936, it was the site of a historic event: the first American lecture by Carl Jung, the pioneering Swiss psychoanalyst.

He lectured over the course of six mornings in late September 1936 to a crowd of his followers. In the afternoons he saw patients. His topic was individuation, a concept describing how a person unifies the separate elements of their personality. The lectures were based on Jung’s analysis of physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s dreams, although he kept Pauli’s identity a secret.

Individuation was a central idea to Jung, who was a contemporary and one-time collaborator of Sigmund Freud. He saw it as a lifelong process. His concepts of introversion and extroversion as personality types are among several other Jungian ideas that gained traction.

Bailey Island was already a small hub for psychoanalysis before Jung’s visit. Kristine Mann, Eleanor Bertine, and Esther Harding were physicians and early practitioners of Jungian psychoanalysis. They lived and worked in New York City.

Starting in 1926, the three spent a month each summer living together at Mann’s family home on Bailey Island, called The Trident, which stood on a bluff above Mackerel Cove. Mann’s brother Horace designed the house, as well as Library Hall.

A number of their analysands — the Jungian term for patients — would join them on the island each summer. Historical accounts report that the analysts had sessions in the morning, and everyone took the afternoons off. 

In 1944, the three moved to a house further south that they called Inner Ledge, on the cove across from the Driftwood Inn.

Harding continued the summer practice there until she died in 1971. In an essay written after her death, their analysand Henrietta Bancroft wrote that the analysands stayed first at a hotel called The Willows, across the road from Library Hall. Later, many stayed at cottages referred to as the Robin Hood, presumably on the road of the same name near Cedar Beach.

The three analysts invited Jung to come to the island on his 1936 trip to the U.S., during which he was receiving an honorary degree at Harvard University. In her biography, “Jung,” Deirdre Bair relates that Jung and his wife, Emma, were hoping the trip would be a quiet vacation, but Bertine, Harding, and Mann wouldn’t be dissuaded from their plan for a seminar.

A letter from Harding to Jung in February 1936 expresses her excitement: “I have grinned so often at your answer when I said how glad I was to have this chance to see something of you as a human,” Harding wrote. She refers to a comment by Jung that there would not be much to see on Bailey Island, but puts a positive spin on it, writing, “I enjoy the ocean and the rocks and the winds quite simply with you without trying to measure it to anything.“

Jung’s two-hour lectures, along with a follow-up series in New York the next year, were the most extensive that he ever gave in English, according to Gieser’s introduction to a book of his collected lectures, “Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process.”

His visit was not all work, however. Jung and the hundred or so attendees reportedly enjoyed singing, sketching, charades, and folk dancing. “Those who got to be his partner in the folk dancing were especially elated,” wrote Gieser.

Bancroft described “many parties, all kinds of parties.” At one reception, she wrote, as Jung was mixing with the other guests, he noticed a nametag that identified the wearer as a member of the Entertainment Committee. “Ah! That’s what I want,” he said.

Bailey Island is said to have been foggy and mild for Jung’s visit, with the sun only emerging on the last day. But Jung and his wife, Emma, reportedly managed to take several boat rides and car trips while they were here, and according to Bancroft, Jung even spotted a seal. There is no record in Jung’s writing of what effect Bailey Island had on him, except to say that he did apparently enjoy his time there.

Much clearer, however, is the lasting effect that he and his students had on Bailey Island and the Brunswick area.

One of the lectures’ attendees, Mildred Harris, helped found the C.G. Jung Center for Studies in Analytical Psychology on Park Row in Brunswick. The center has a library of books by Jung, Mann, Harding, Bertine and others, and hosts discussions, lectures and workshops.

Jungians — those who subscribe to Jung’s ideas — have continued to gather on Bailey Island periodically. In 1968, a group gathered on Bailey Island and at Bowdoin College in honor of Harding’s 80th birthday. Bertine and Mann had both died, Mann in 1945 and Bertine that January.

Bancroft reported that 200 people made the trip, and described 1968, rather than 1936, as the peak of analytical psychology on Bailey Island. A number of scholars, including Harding, gave lectures on topics related to their work.

In terms of star power, that gathering attracted many more Jungian VIPs than the 1936 lectures, according to Chris Beach, an analyst in South Portland and a board member of the Jung Center.

The Jung Center organized its own one-day event at Library Hall in late September 2011. Beach and others lectured on Jung, Bailey Island, and the analysts who brought him here. He recalls feeling on that day a sense of what the 1936 lectures might have felt like.

This coming September, the Library Hall will host another day of lectures, by Brunswick analyst and Jung Center board member Donald Kalsched, reflecting on Jungian ideas in light of more recent research on childhood trauma.

Jung’s visit also seems to have attracted some of his followers to the area. One of the attendees of the 1936 lecture, Ethel Dorgan, subsequently bought a cottage on Washington Avenue, near Giant’s Stairs, and returned there summer after summer. Dorgan would eventually leave the cottage to Nor Hall, a psychoanalyst and scholar from Minnesota, whom she met when Hall made a sort of pilgrimage to Bailey Island to see the sites of Jung’s visit. Hall still comes to the cottage.

“She essentially gifted the cottage to us if we agreed to keep the spirit of Jung alive on Bailey Island. We’ve done a lot of writing there, told a lot of stories,” says Hall.

Mann’s nephew, Phil Richardson, also comes back to Bailey Island each summer. He was born a year after Jung’s visit, and his ties to the island are through his family, not the famous analyst. He remembers hearing about the lectures, and once visiting Mann, Bertine, and Harding at the Inner Ledge house.

Growing up, Richardson says, he didn’t think about the three women much. Behind their backs, he says, his family sometimes called them “the witch doctors.” Now he sees what they were doing — three professional women, living and working together — as something more radical.

But when Richardson knew them, he says, they weren’t thought of on Bailey Island as analysts or Jungians or feminists. They were known as the three old women often seen with their fleet of toy spaniels, walking together down Harpswell Islands Road.

Sam Lemonick is a freelance reporter. He lives in Cundy’s Harbor.