Jung's apprentice

Dr Helton Godwin Baynes was C. G. Jung’s medical assistant in Zurich, becoming the eminent psychiatrist’s close friend and confidante. Baynes introduced Jungian psychology to Britain and led the English Jungian community for twenty years. He started the Jungian Analytical Psychology Club in London (APC) and laid the foundations for a Jungian Medical Society with the three aims of providing therapy, education and research. Baynes was the author of the first two major Jungian books to be written in English: Mythology of the Soul and Germany Possessed, and together with his second wife, Cary, he translated all of Jung’s earlier writings into English. He arranged for Jung to visit England to lecture at the Tavistock Clinic, at the AP Club, to the medical students at Barts Hospital, and at Oxford University. Baynes brought a greater psychological awareness to war-time Britain in his lectures throughout the UK and his religious broadcasts with Archbishop Temple. He was a giant personality. At Cambridge he read medicine; he rowed twice in the boat race and was an outstanding singer. He counted among his friends many of the leading writers, poets, musicians and thinkers of his day. He was a central figure in the avant-garde circles surrounding Rupert Brooke and Arnold Bax. Included in this fascinating account of a charismatic and larger than life personality, there is previously unpublished material from Baynes’ journals relating to his analysis with Jung as well as previously unpublished correspondence between Baynes and Jung. In the words of the composer Arnold Bax, Baynes was ‘the most all-round man of his generation’.