Description

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.

About the Author

FRANK N. MCMILLAN III, an author, educator, and speaker, has been active in worldwide Jungian circles for the past twenty-five years. A former board member of the C. G. Jung Educational Center of Houston and a member of the International Association of Jungian Studies, he lives in Corpus Christi.

Praise For…

"Finding Jung is a fascinating study of individuation told in a frontier American idiom. Written in a readily accessible form, the reader is swept into a modern fable telling how passion for the psyche lead a son of Texas into a lifelong engagement with the work of C.G. Jung and the wonderful  fruit this bore for the entire Jungian community. The power of personalities and ideas nearly leap off the pages."--Joe Cambray

"This is the story of a man that had to be told – a great man from pioneer Texan stock who, lead by a childhood dream about an encounter with a lion, dared to differ, dared to break away and find himself. In doing so he left an indelible spoor on the soil of his world and the world at large, enabling, amongst many other things, the creation of the first academic chair in analytical psychology. Lovingly and masterly put together and narrated by his son, Frank, this is a moving testament to a life lived with honesty and integrity. In our modern world this is but all too rare…"--Astrid Berg, Analyst and Child Psychiatrist, Faye Lecturer 2010 and author of Connecting with South Africa