The Way Things Happen

Her father slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow; her mother was prey to inner torments that drove her into Jungian analysis; and when a suitor proposed marriage, then abruptly changed his mind, Giffard became suicidal and almost drowned herself in Malta. The author of this eventful autobiography overcame a girlhood of poverty and sexual assault in England, went on to study with Jung and Toni Wolff in Zurich, and became a lay analyst. Earlier, as a playwright in London during the 1930s, she became involved with journalist Laurens van der Post (her second husband) while each of them was married to someone else. By turns poetically precise, garrulous and genteel, this memoir includes recollections of Giffard's travels in colonial India, Sudan and South Africa. Though not a sustained Jungian self-analysis, her self-portrait has its share of synchronistic coincidences, dreams, unraveled projections and promptings of the author's inner ``voice that has called to me at all sorts of intervals and moments over the years.'' Photos. (May)