The archive of Cary Baynes, 1883-1977

The archive provides a record of Baynes's personal and professional activities from her early pre-Zurich days at the beginning of the 20th century up to her administrative correspondence in the late 1960s.

It consists primarily of correspondence, both administrative and personal, with the latter frequently giving insight into the development of her own ideas and of Jungian theories more generally.

Of the rest of the material, the majority consists of manuscripts and publications, either collected by Baynes or sent to her for comment or translation, while the remainder consists of diaries and diary entries.

1907-1974

8 boxes

The catalogue is arranged as follows:

• Section A - Manuscripts and Publications
• Section B - Diaries
• Section C - Correspondence

These papers were given to the library at Wellcome Collection by Sonu Shamdasani on behalf of the donors.

Born Cary Fink in Mexico City on 26 September 1883, Baynes and her sister were subsequently raised in their mother's Louisville, Kentucky home. Baynes graduated from Vassar College in 1906, where she had been a pupil of Kristine Mann, who would also go on to become a Jungian analyst. Later she received an M.D at John Hopkins University in 1911, although she was never to practice medicine.

In 1921, Baynes (then de Angulo after marriage to her first husband, folklorist/novelist and fellow John Hopkins M.D Jaime de Angulo) moved to Zurich at the suggestion of Kristine Mann to study with Jung. While there, she was personally friendly with both Carl and Emma Jung. Throughout the 1920s, Baynes was caught up in the development of Jungian analytical theory and worked with Jung on transcriptions, translations and organising seminars. She and her second husband, Helton Godwin "Peter" Baynes (a British psychiatrist and Jung's assistant), collaborated as Jung's translators for several years. Cary and Peter lived in California for a number of years where they introduced analytical psychology to the population of the San Francisco Bay area.

Throughout the 1930s she worked with Dr Olga Froebe on her Eranos Project, which was dedicated to lectures on theosophical themes and on the "Eranos Archive" - a collection of archetypal images. Baynes worked with her at Casa Gabirella, her home and lecture hall in Ascona, Switzerland, and later in the United States when the Bollingen Foundation, see below, were considering publishing her Eranos lectures.

In the early 1930s, Baynes was encouraged by Jung to translate into English Richard Wilhelm's German translation of the I Ching or Book of Changes, a classic Chinese divination text and subsequently a symbol of the American Counterculture. In 1938 she met Mary Mellon, founder of the Bollingen Foundation, an educational foundation dedicated to the dissemination of Jung's work. Baynes had just completed a first draft of the translation and was encouraged in her work by Mellon. The Baynes/Wilhelm I Ching was eventually published by the Bollingen Foundation in 1950, by which stage Baynes had also become an editorial member of the Foundation, and indeed the editorial headquarters had been moved to Baynes's Connecticut home following Mary Mellon's sudden death in 1946.

Baynes remained intellectually active up to her death in 1977.

Works translated by Baynes held in the Wellcome Library

• Contributions to analytical psychology,
• Modern man in search of a soul,
• Two essays on analytical psychology,
• The secret of the golden flower : a Chinese book of life

Sources and further information

• Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past, William McGuire, 1982.
• Analytical Psychology: Notes on the seminar given in 1925, ed. William McGuire, 1989.
• "The 'I Ching' Story", William McGuire, Princeton Alumni Weekly, September 25, 1973.

Copyright of the Cary Baynes archive is held by Baynes's family, who may be contacted via Sonu Shamdasani.

This collection has been catalogued and is available to library members. Some items have access restrictions which are explained in the item-level catalogue records.