A Life of Jung

Rating:
Summary: From Hagiography to Denigration
Review: "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."--Douglas Noel Adams (1952 -2001)

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was the founder of analytical psychology ("synthetical" psychology seems more appropriate to me).

Hating to be called a mystic, Jung became infuriated whenever he was accused of mysticism and claimed that his work was strictly

scientific--based on objective data and empirical fact. But, as Douglas Adams put it, "If it looks like a duck . . ."

Jung wrote his doctoral thesis on seances! He was deeply immersed in astrology, spiritualism, mythology, parapsychology, alchemy, Gnosticism, theosophy, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, extrasensory perception, reincarnation, UFOs, flying saucers, and various and sundry other occult ideas and practices. Whereas Sigmund Freud was a rationalist and a reductionist, Jung was an idealist and an "expansionist." Fascinated with spiritualism, he sought to unite the wisdom of the East and the West. One wonders if he excluded anything, however far-fetched and ridiculous, from his cosmos. With Jung, all things are possible.

As I read Ronald Hayman's masterful biography, I thought of the words of Festus (which could well describe Jung): "Paul! Paul! You are out of your mind! Too much learning has driven you insane! Stark raving mad!" (Acts 26:24).

I can imagine this pointed exchange: Jung: "There are MORE things in heaven and earth, Herr Doktor Freud, than are dreamt of in your psychology." Freud: "There are LESS things in heaven and earth, Herr Doktor Jung, than are dreamt of in your psychology."

Jung professed to be a Christian, but his religion was unorthodox. He believed that God needed man to correct his (God's) deficiencies, and that Satan was Jesus' older brother. He often spoke heretically of "the dark side of God." Jung confessed that he often wrote ambiguously because truth is too complex to be captured in a non-ambiguous statement. No wonder that Hayman (and this reviewer) finds Jung's work to be vague, nebulous, muddled,confused, and confusing.

Hermann Hesse, author of DEMIAN, SIDDHARTHA, and STEPPENWOLF, said, "I have always respected Jung, nevertheless have never been as impressed by his writings as by Freud's." Although I have strong reservations about Freud's "fixed idea" of sexuality, I agree with Hesse. A voracious reader and a scholar of vast erudition, Jung so bubbled over with various (and weird) ideas that his pronouncements became jumbled in a mish-mash of mystical mutterings. His saner ideas dealt with the importance of symbolism, archetypes, personality types (including introverts and extraverts), and the collective unconscious. Like Freud, Jung was charismatic, narcissistic, and authoritarian. Although married to Emilie Preiswerk for 52 years, a devoted wife who bore him five children, Jung drew women "like bees to honey." Quite the womanizer, he became involved in so many amorous adventures that one loses count of his "affairs of the heart."

Jung believed that rationalism and philosophical materialism, incarnated in science and technology, had robbed modern man of his soul. His heroic mission, as he saw it, was to help a fragmented humanity become integrated. The yin and the yang must be united to form a spiritual whole. The trouble is that Jung's use of terms such as "soul," "spirit," "psyche," "mind," "intellect," and "the collective unconscious" are distressingly fuzzy. Anyone who respects the scientific method must look at Jung and shake his head in disbelief. Louis Breger's FREUD: DARKNESS IN THE MIDST OF VISION was the best book I reviewed in 2000. Ronald Hayman's A LIFE OF JUNG makes a strong bid to be the best book I shall review in 2001. I recommend it most highly.

Rating:
Summary: hodgepodge
Review: Although I have greatly admired Ronald Hayman's earlier biographies, I found this one disappointing. It spends a lot of time summarizing Jung's essays and books, and the summaries tend to get tedious. Worse, the chapters are not well organized. The most fascinating aspect of Jung's life is not that he developed a powerful theory of archetypes but that for many years he maintained a triangular relationship with his wife Emma and his mistress Toni Wolff. All three of them were psychotherapists. But Hayman never explains how this "menage a trois" could survive year after year or how it affected Jung's five children; in fact, the children are rarely mentioned; and the family life so central to Jung's emotional well-being seems just a shadow in this biography. Recommended only for those interested in Jung's professional life.

Rating:
Summary: hodgepodge
Review: Hayman's biography, though well researched, is a grave disappointment. First, the author fails to offer a balanced picture of the varied and complex person of Jung. Instead, Hayman engages in a reductive enterprise and reduces Jung to little more than a caricature. Second, Hayman continues his reductionist approach when arguing that Jung's work amounted to little more than scouting out archetypes in the dreams of his patients and in world mythology. In this, Hayman misses the deeper aspects of Jung's work and ignores the epistemological significance of the manner in which Jung presaged post-modern and post-structuralist thought. Third, the biography is badly focused and organized because it leaps from scene to scene and person to person without logical reasons for doing so. Fourth, the style of the biography is troublesome; not only is the prose in need of vigor, but the grammatical structures are often troubling: i.e., the books is rife with sentences that contain pronouns that have no clear antecedents. Fifth, the biography fails to discuss a key aspect of Jung's life: his relationship with his children. Sixth, many of Hayman's assertions and conclusions about Jung are unfounded, unsupported, and misguided.

Rating:
Summary: A life of Jung?
Review: I have read many biographies. This particular one was among the worst. The author proved to be pedantic with regard to his vocabulary, the book focused primarily on his 'work' and not his 'life', and the ending was poor.
The constant use of 7 syllable words by the author proved to challenge my intellect rather than inform myself about the subject.
The book was misstitled. To suggest that this particular biography was about his life is misleading. The book was about his work and gave very little attention to his family, his marriage, or his children.
Finally, the ending was terrible. His death was saved for the last paragraph of the book, with no summation, opinion and or conclusion by the author. But the worst part, the author never states when he died! I had to flip back to the chronology in the beginning of the book and note that his death was June 6, 1961.
I know that the man had a great many admirers, friends, colleagues, and contemporaries. Many of which were noted and talked about in this book but not in as much depth as I would have expected for such a well-published life. I was disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: Many books about Jung are writen by devotees who skip the human aspect of the man. This new and detailed biography of Carl Jung, neither demonizes him, nor elevates him to the status of demi-god, but seeks to reveal the man behind the theory. Jung was a facinating thinker, and revolutionized psycotherapy from the dark and limiting pessimism of Freud. Hayman creates a wonderful biography, rich in insight, and speculation, of the man and his times. Jung's beliefs are often controversial, and frequently misunderstood. Hayman presents a balanced and valued biograph of Jung, faults and all. A wonderful read and a delight to own!

Rating:
Summary: Freudian Reading Of Jung
Review: Other reviews have pointed out some serious problems with this book: the scattered telling of the story, the sometimes unclear writing, the fact that one does not come away with a very clear picture of Jung's thought even after 450 pages of summarizing his theories. But there is another reason I was disappointed in this book: namely, that Hayman is a Freudian who criticizes Jung through Freud's eyes (Read Louis Breger's "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision" for an example of how bad an idea that is). While Hayman assumes as common sense that we accept the theories of the typically modern, sex-crazed, materialistic Freud, he criticizes Jung precisely for presuming to break with Freud, thereby assuring (in Hayman's mind) that Jung and Jungians will remain in the arena of madness, rather than mental health. Hayman quotes a psychoanylist, with marked approval, who says: "If [Jung's] main life's work was in the end to be founded on a personal and scientific incompatibility with Freud, there are those who believe, like myself, that this was a disaster, and in part an illusion, from which we suffer and will continue to do so until we have repaired the damage." (p. 213) In short, the only way to be an acceptable Jungian is to be a Freudian. As many of us have found the modern ethos of sex and materialism to be a dead end, and trying to re-think spirituality in an age of the dessicated fanaticism of fundamentalist religions hard enough in itself, a dependence on Freud is surely no help. If one need not acept Jung as if he were a god -- always the problem of Freudians in relation to their master -- at least Jung has pointed the way for many people to a view of life that is compatible with a regenerative spirituality, not just Freudian myths about repressed childhood trauma and the primacy of sexuality in self-understanding. Hayman's biography has the very desirable effect of presenting Jung as a man whose life was troubled by psychosis and full of the turn-of-the-century Spiritualism that tends no longer to be accepted as factual among thinking people. Worshippers of Jung doubtless don't like this aspect of the book. For myself, I found the manner of Jung's break with Freud -- his experiences of internal dialogue and vivid fantasy, his belief that sexuality is only one factor among many in human life, his refusal to submit to the enervating Freudian materialism as a final arbiter in all judgements, his wide-ranging interest in creation myths as opposed to Freud's reductive readings of Oepipus et al, his belief that we should explore the fantasies and delusions we encounter in life in relation to the world of archetypes rather than trying to extirpate them by analysis and replace them with Freud's own truncated little fantasies -- to be more creative and productive than if he had remained a Freudian true believer. But let's not worship Jung, either: reading Hayman may not make Jung quite clear, or an acceptable object of worship, but the former (along with the implicit Freudianism) is the real problem I had with his book, not the latter.

Rating:
Summary: Dropping in on the neighborhood madman.
Review: Sometimes I feel guilty for not starting at the beginning of a book like this and reading right through. Hayman removes such guilt by the curious expediant of neglecting to put his anecdotes into any coherent form. It hardly seems to matter where you start -- the author seemed to have trouble even putting individual chapters into order. One interesting theme he mentions was how Jung served as a link between pre-modern and post-modern spirituality. Neither this nor other themes were developed. But ultimately I forgave Hayman, mostly, because much of what I found was interesting, despite the mayhem. It is like dropping in on an eccentric friend at irregular and unscheduled intervals: you do get a feel for who the man is, perhaps as much because of as in spite of the disorder.

There were times when I found myself wondering, "Why did this guy write a book about a person for whom he seems to have so little respect?" (Being, apparently, rather skeptical of the occult side of Jung.) But in other scenes, Jung comes across as sane and sensible, and his insights perhaps of value. The author doesn't explain those insights in way that makes it very clear to me, but of course Jung can speak for himself on that. At one point, what appeared psychobabble -- or at least esoteria -- to an outsider like myself, flew thick and fast between Jung, Freud, wives, and girlfriends. The author tells us what the persons involved "really" had in mind. "What happened was they had unconsciously 'swallowed' part of one another's soul." Hmmmn. At times like that, the author comes across like the friend who was supposed to stay sober at the party, but took a few sips anyway.

Overall, I found much fault with this book, but interesting tidbits, and kept picking it up, till I read it through. There's some interesting stuff on Freud and other early psychological persons, as well. I am still not quite sure what to make of Jung's theories -- and have some theories of my own by which to consider them -- but Hayman has, at least, helped me to put those ideas in rough, if not entirely coherent, context. And I enjoyed the book. ...