Finding Jung

Available electronically in an open-access, full-text edition from the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Repository at http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/146844.

Frank N. McMillan Jr., a country boy steeped in the traditional culture of rural Texas, was summoned to a life-long quest for meaning by a dream lion he met in the night. On his journey, he followed the lead of the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, and eventually established the world’s first professorship to advance the study of that field.

McMillan, born and raised on a ranch near Calvert, was an Aggie through and through, with degrees in geology and petroleum engineering. As an adult working near Bay City, Texas, he was lunching in a country café when by chance he met abstract expressionist painter Forrest Bess, who was ecstatically waving a letter he had received from Jung himself. The artist’s enthusiastic description of Jung as a master psychologist, soul doctor, and healer led McMillan to the Jung Center in Houston, where he began reading Jung’s Collected Works. McMillan frequently said, “Jung saved my life.”

Finding Jung: Frank N. McMillan Jr., a Life in Quest of the Lion captures McMillan’s journey through the words of his own journals and through reflections by his son, Frank III. David Rosen, the holder of the first endowed McMillan professorship at Texas A&M University, adds insights to the book, and the late Sir Laurens van der Post, whom the elder McMillan met at the Houston Jung Center in 1979, authored a foreword to the book before his death.

This is a story that sheds light on the inner workings of the self as well as the Jungian understanding of the Self. In often lyrical language, it gives the human background to a major undertaking in the dissemination of Jungian scholarship and provides a personal account of a life lived in near-mythic dimensions.