Abstract
Claire Dunne's short illustrated biography is a good introduction for the general reader to the life and work of CG Jung, based on a thoughtful selection from his own words and the comments of friends, patients, correspondents. He really does seem (and in his own view) to have been a larger than life character, full of contradictions and rough edges, as well as being highly sensitive and intuitive. Like Freud, he had the complexity and openness of mind, as well as the courage, to pursue and develop controversial ideas about the unconscious mind and its influence on behaviour. The story of their brief mutual fascination is told here, and their rupture – Jung defecting even as Freud anoints him ‘crown prince’. Jung worked through the devastating effects of this loss to establish his own position, in which a religious sense of the value of meaning and the individual's experience were central – in contrast to the prevailing ‘objective’ scientific materialism.
The reader is given a useful understanding of Jung's psychological theory and how it emerges out of his own experience. From his troubled childhood, his work as a psychiatrist with schizophrenic patients, and his formative (and traumatic) encounter with Freud, Jung developed his thinking about levels of consciousness and archetypal patterning of emotional life; the meaning of symptoms; the effect of different personality ‘types’ or attitudes on the interpretation of experience; and the growth towards individual wholeness by recovery of split-off aspects of the self and parental traces from others in the environment. In this process, and it is a process, Jung stresses the therapist's task of assisting patients to find their own solution to the contradictions of their nature and situation; and the doctor's exemplary role in risking the safe distance of expertise in the service of the therapeutic relationship. He says he learned in the Swiss asylum where he was a psychiatrist, ‘that only the physician who feels himself deeply affected by his patients could heal. It works only when the doctor speaks out of the centre of his own psyche so provisionally called “normal” to the sick psyche before him that he can hope to heal…’ In Jung's basically optimistic though not idealizing view, the sick mind expresses unconscious knowledge of what it needs in order to recover a healthy balance in the imagery of its symptoms and dreams, to whose ‘language’ the therapist must be receptive. These facts of Jung's life are inspiring (others are less so), and the originality and scope of his thinking deserve proper recognition.
In my view psychoanalysis has had to reinvent much of what it lost with Jung, a way of thinking about the self and subjectivity, for example, in order to register aesthetic and religious experience. So I hope readers won't be put off by a somewhat purple atmosphere which is evoked by the Introduction, the dedication, and section headings. There certainly are aspects of Jung which lend themselves to a portentous view of him as millennial seer, alongside a serious grappling (going right back to his early desperation with his parson father's conventional faith) with such religious issues as the nature of good and evil, freedom and authority, and the necessity of carrying one's own cross rather than hiding behind Christ's. Claire Dunne may be chiefly interested in Jung the healer and spiritual man, but she doesn't leave out the awkward bits and she lets Jung speak for himself; and so one is free to imagine Jung sometimes having an irreverent chuckle (thank God I don't have to be a Jungian!) or looking back engagingly as in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: ‘The journey from cloud cuckoo land to reality lasted a long time.’
Like the best biographies this contains some telling photographs: Carl Gustav aged seven is a gripping image of a vulnerable, serious, strange little boy. There are interesting photos of his mother, a forcefully present woman with a penetrating gaze; and Jung's wife Emma and his patient, friend, and mistress Toni Wolff. The cultural icons and medieval pictures and artwork also do their bit in evoking the times and traditions which fascinated Jung and contributed to the development of his ideas, as well as embodying in this book about him his strong belief in the communicating power of images to engage and work inside us.