Julian David

Born in 1933, into ‘a Catholic family of excep­tional piety,’ Julian David grew up in the wilds of Mon­mouthshire. He had little schooling before going to Ample­forth as a teenager, from where he went up to Oxford in 1951 to read History. He came down in 1954.

After two years in London, trying to find a career in a world not constituted to my liking, I retired into a monas­tery and spent another two years studying mediaeval philosophy. I felt a need to go to the root of the modern world, which I knew was still in religion. In 1958 I emerged and began to teach in schools for maladjusted boys.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Mr David started teaching at Dartington Hall School and married the painter Yasmin Wishart. They bought the remote and beautiful farm in South Devon where he has lived ever since.

In March 1969, under a new headmaster, Mr David set up a course of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Dartington. From 1970 to 1973, he ran the Dartington Social Work project in Sicily Project.

In 1976, Mr David came into just enough money from his Armenian great-grandfather to study as an analyst at the Jung Institute in Zurich. After graduating in 1982, he helped to set up the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists as a new training institute in London.

In 1987, Laurens van der Post was looking for someone to be the founding analyst in a Jungian training centre in Cape Town, and chose Mr David. In January 1989, the Davids moved out to South Africa where they spent the next five years, through the end of apartheid and the first year of Nelson Mandela’s presidency.

After returning to England, Mr David became Chairman of the C. G. Jung Club in London in 2006 and took on editor­ship of its journal, Harvest.

Mr David has lectured widely around the world, and continues to do so occasionally at Schumacher College and in Cape Town. He still lives in his Devon farmhouse, not far from his three children and seven grandchildren.