At the end of his life in 1961, Jung had visions no one wants to know about.
For the few details that still survive we are dependent on his closest collaborator, Marie-Louise von Franz—and an interview she gave in her rough-and-ready English almost twenty years after Jung had died.
When she was asked by her interviewer for the truth about what had happened, her answer was edgy and abrupt:
“I don’t want to speak much about it. But he tried to convey to his family some things when he was right dying, and they didn’t get the point, so he called for me. But they wouldn’t let me be called. But one of his daughters took notes, and after his death she gave them to me. There is a drawing with a line going up and down, and underneath is ‘The last fifty years of humanity’ and some remarks about the final catastrophe being ahead. But I have only those notes.”
The interviewer asked her to say how such a prospect made her feel. “One’s whole feeling revolts against this idea!”, she answered. “But since I have those notes in a drawer, I don’t allow myself to be too optimistic.”
Even so, she adds, she does try to pray that the catastrophe of humanity being destroyed along with the rest of life on our planet won’t happen—that a miracle will happen instead, because “I think one shouldn’t give up. If you think of Answer to Job’, if man would wrestle with God, if man would tell God that He shouldn’t do it, if we would reflect more, we might just sneak round the corner with not too big a catastrophe.”
And on that more hopeful note, relaxing ever so slightly, she brings the subject to a close by offering one final detail. “When I saw Jung last, he also had a vision while I was with him. But there he said, “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But, thank God, it’s not the whole planet.’ So, perhaps, that is what lies ahead.”