Book reviews

Books reviewed:
Christopher, E. & Solomon, H. M. (eds.), Jungian Thought in the Modern World.
Goldstein, R. (ed.), Images, Meanings and Connections: Essays in Memory of Susan R. Bach.
Dieckmann, Hans, Complexes: Diagnosis and Therapy in Analytical Psychology.     

Books received

Analytical Psychology Schoenl, William. C. G. Jung: His Friendship with Mary Mellon and J. B. Priestley. Psychoanalysis Murdin, Lesley. How Much is Enough? Endings in Psychotherapy and Counselling. Bell, David (ed.). Psychoanalysis and Culture. A Kleinian Perspective. Psychology Butler, Gillian & Mcmanus, Freda. Psychology. A Very Short Introduction. Miscellaneous Al-issa, Ihsan (ed.). Al-Junun: Mental Illness in the Islamic World. Edelson, Marshall & Berg, David N. Rediscovering Groups. A Psychoanalyst's Journey Beyond Individual Psychology. Ettin, Mark. Foundations and Approaches of Group Psychotherapy. A Sphere of Influence. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Hamilton, Ian Stuart. Key Ideas in Psychology. Hannah, Barbara. The Inner Journey. Lectures and Essays on Jungian Psychology. Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness.The Rider Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion. Schapira, Sylvie K. Choosing a Counselling or Psychotherapy Training. A Practical Guide. Ulanov, Ann Bedford. Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung.     

Misunderstanding Jung: the afterlife of legends

F. X. Charet's article, 'Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship', is full of errors and legends. In this article, I demonstrate the tendentiousness of his criticisms of the historical work of Eugene Taylor and myself concerning Jung's linkages with the subliminal psychology of Théodore Flournoy, William James, and F. W. H. Myers, and the fallaciousness of his criticism of my claim that Memories, Dreams, Reflections was not Jung's autobiography.     

Is analytical psychology a religion? In statu nascendi

This paper elucidates and discusses Jung's conceptions of the relation between psychology, psychotherapy and religion.     

Response to John Beebe

This paper briefly describes the history of the professional interaction between psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists in the United States. There has been little public contact between the two groups since the personal feud between Freud and Jung has beer carried forth to the present generation of analysts. The relationship between Otto Rank and Freud and his circle demonstrated many of the same dynamics that were activated between Freud and Jung, who had broken off their relationship ten years earlier; this paper highlights the similarities between Jung's, then Rank's, exile from the psychoanalytic group, Jung's interest in spiritual matters, including his interest in the nature of religious experience, and his questionable dealing with the Nazis during the 1930s have been the stated reason for the taboo set against Jung's writings. Presently there seems to be a growing realization that there are large areas of mutual interest, and both the similarities and differences between the schools need further exploration.     

Jung before Freud, not Freud before Jung: the reception of Jung's work in American psychoanalytic circles between 1904 and 1909

A review is first presented of the new Jung scholarship – that Jung is to be properly understood, not as a disciple of Freud, but as the twentieth century exponent of the symbolic hypothesis in the tradition of the late nineteenth century psychologies of transcendence. This is followed by an outline of the so-called French-Swiss-English and American psychotherapeutic alliance, of which Jung was a part, and the cross-cultural mediumistic psychology of the subconscious it promoted, chiefly through the works of William James, F. W. H. Myers, and Théodore Flournoy. Focusing on the experimental work of the Swiss-American pathologist Adolph Meyer and the American neurologist Frederick Peterson, evidence is then produced to show that Jung, before Freud, was more important in American psychotherapeutic circles. His experimental researches into the association method and the psychogalvanic reflex, his study of mediums and connection to Swiss psychiatry had numerous unique alliances with the American scene, particularly because of their similar historical relation between psychology and religion. Therefore, to understand Jung, one must consider the archetypal significance which America held for Jung's own individuation process, as well as the Americanization of Jungian ideas that followed.     

REREADING THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of bridging between religion and science accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties, but it does not explain why his overarching question was so obscure, why psychopathology and unusual experiences figured so prominently, or why he gave us so many examples and so little argument. To understand these persistent puzzles we need to do more than acknowledge James's indebtedness to Frederic Myers's conception of the subconscious. We need to read VRE in the context of the transatlantic network of experimental psychologists and psychical researchers who provided the primary intellectual inspiration for the book. Doing so not only locates and clarifies the underlying question that animated the work but also illuminates the structural and rhetorical similarities between VRE and Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. In contrast to the individual case studies of hysterics, mediums, and mystics produced by others in this network, both Myers and James adopted a natural-history approach in which they arranged examples of automatisms to produce a rhetorical effect, thus invoking science in order to evoke a religious response. Where Myers organized his examples to make a case for human survival of death, James organized his to make a case for the involvement of higher powers in the transformation of the self. Read in this way, VRE marks a dramatic shift from a religious preoccupation with life after death to a religious preoccupation with this-worldly self-transformation.     

Jung's twin brother. Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung

This paper is a preliminary communication of several years of research into the life and work of the Austrian psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross (1877–1920). Although he played a pivotal role in the birth of modernity, acting as a significant influence upon psychiatry, psychoanalysis, ethics, sociology and literature, he has remained virtually unknown to this day. Following a biographical sketch and an overview of his main theoretical contributions, the impact of Gross' life and work on the development of analytical theory and practice is described. His relationship with some of the key figures in psychoanalysis is presented, with particular emphasis on his connections to Jung. The paper concludes with an account of relevant contemporary interest in his work: the founding of the International Otto Gross Society, the first edition of The Collected Works of Otto Gross on the Internet, and the 1st and 2nd International Otto Gross Congresses which took place in Berlin in 1999 and at the Burghölzli Clinic, Zürich, in October 2000.     

From Geneva to Zürich: Jung and French Switzerland

An account is given of the constitution of several components of the Freudocentric reading of Jung and the genesis of analytical psychology, which, it is argued, has led to their mislocation in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.     

Family matters The descendants of Freud and Jung

A brief history of what it has meant to be a Jungian analyst and/or analytical psychologist in the United States and England is portrayed. At first the differences between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology were very great, and there was great animosity between the two schools. The conflict was much stronger in the United States than in England where Jungians developed a much better rapport with psychoanalysis. Recent theoretical developments within psychoanalysis, such as the development of self theory and intersubjectivity, as well as speaking about religious issues in a new way, have brought psychoanalysis closer to analytical psychology. On the other hand, analytical psychology has been enriched by an increased awareness of the importance of developmental issues and transference and countertransference. The implications for both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are explored.     

Images of the disciplining of psychology, 1890–1940

Over the course of psychology’s first several decades, the language used to convey the subject matter gradually shifted from being free and literary to being strictly constrained and disciplined by increasingly focused theoretical demands. The project described here, “Disciplining Psychology,” aimed to depict this transformation by generating images of the faces of three highly influential psychologists—William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner. Each image is composed of the words used in one of each individual’s most important books. The tightening of the disciplinary vocabulary is revealed in the differences among the three arrays of words themselves, but I have also striven to reflect it in the aesthetic aspects of each image. The method used here could easily be extended to a wider array of authors, texts, and psychological topics.     

Psychological and Religious Perspectives on Emotion

This article is devoted to examining theoretical issues on the interface of the psychology of religion and the psychology of emotion, something which recently has been surprisingly neglected. The broad range of psychological components involved in emotion, and the importance of emotional processes in religion, make it a particularly relevant area of general psychology as far as religion is concerned. The first issue to be examined is the centrality of emotion (or feeling ) in religion and the extent to which religion can be conceptualized as a kind of emotional state—an idea that can be found in different forms in Schleiermacher and James. Though both psychology and emotion are now seen as less private than previously supposed, the analogy remains potentially fruitful. The second issue arises from the notable tendency in the psychology of emotion to see emotion as functional, even rational, rather than disruptive. The view of Averill is endorsed that emotions can be psychologically creative when used appropriately. This leads to a review of attitudes toward emotional aspects of religion and religious attitudes to everyday emotions, where a positive but discriminating approach to emotions seems appropriate.     

Reviews

Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative edited by Christian De Duve
The Good Life and the Human Good edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, and Jeffrey Paul
Pragmatism and Pluralism: John Dewey's Significance for Theology edited by Jerome Paul Soneson
A Sense of the Divine: The Natural Environment from a Theocentric Perspective edited by James M. Gustafson
Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church edited by Annibale Fantoli     

Book reviews

Books reviewed:
Kirsch, Thomas B., The Jungians: A Comparative and Historical Perspective
Perera, Sylvia Brinton, Queen Maeve and Her Lovers.
Fonagy, Peter; Cooper, Arnold, Wallerstein, M. & Robert, S., (eds.) Psychoanalysis on the Move. The work of Joseph Sandler
Green, Andre, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse,
Johnson, S. & Ruszcynski, S., (eds.) Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Independent Tradition
Vaidyanathan, T. G. & Kripal, J. J., (eds.) Vishnu on Freud's Desk – A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism.     

Journal reviews

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Lothane, Zvi. 'Tender love and transference: unpublished letters of C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein', International Journal of Psychoanalysis
Berman, Emanuel. 'Psychoanalytic supervision: the intersubjective development', International Journal of Psychoanalysis
Schimmel, Paul. '"It is myself that I remake": W. B. Yeats's self construction in life and poetry', British Journal of Psychotherapy
Joseph, Betty. 'Agreeableness as obstacle", International Journal of Psychoanalysis     

Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship

The tendency to associate Jung with Freud has undergone a change and both are increasingly perceived as founders of depth psychological schools whose exact relationship is unclear. The separation of the two was largely due to Jung's rejection by the psychoanalytic community because of his perceived spiritual inclinations. Recent scholarship has emphasized these spiritual inclinations in both a positive and negative way and brought to light Jung's non-Freudian sources, while other Jungian practitioners are seeking a closer association with psychoanalysis. This conflicting development is related to tendencies in Jung himself that are evident in his own life and in research conducted into the writing and publication of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Though the status of the latter as Jung's autobiography has been called into question there remains the necessity to explain the myth of Jung's life enshrined there and the impact this has had on a public looking for meaning in a time of considerable change.     

詹姆斯心理学的现象学阐释

必须从詹姆斯的人格和他的思想作为整体及其统一性的背景出发,才能有效地理解詹姆斯心理学的真髓。詹姆斯思想的内核是彻底经验主义。他以彻底经验主义为基础的心理学思考,与胡塞尔的现象学思考作为思想态度是同质的,因而表现出明确的现象学特征。文章指出了对詹姆斯心理学进行现象学阐释的根据,并结合心理学史探讨了詹姆斯的思想方法对心理学作为整体而言的理论意义。     

Constructing an Aesthetic Weltanschauung: Freud,James, and Ricoeur

I will investigate in this paper what kind of Weltanschauung Freud suggests. Although Freud argues in the lecture XXXV, The Question of a Weltanschauung (1933), that psychoanalysis is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own, I think that he has a certain Weltanschauung, i.e., the aesthetic worldview, which involves his scientific, psychoanalytic, and artistic principles. Furthermore, I will explicate that Freud's aesthetic worldview is ultimately related to the Weltanschauungen of William James and Paul Ricoeur. I will focus particularly on their terms, sympathetic and poetic, which are the crucial elements that constitute the aesthetic Weltanschauung. Finally, I will briefly present my intention in drawing this aesthetic Weltanschauung. I will conclude that throughout the aesthetic Weltanschauung we may accept that everything is precious, pertinent, and worthy to be viewed as a part and a whole, and as home (Heim).     

Psychic energy and synchronicity

Given Jung's interest in physics’ formulations of psychic energy and the concept of time, overlaps and convergences in the themes addressed in analytical psychology and in quantum physics are to be expected. These are informed by the active intersections between the matter of mind and mindfulness re matter. In 1911, Jung initiated dinners with Einstein. Jung's definition of libido in the pivotal 1912 Fordham Lectures reveals the influence of these conversations. Twenty years later, a significant period in physics, Wolfgang Pauli contacted Jung. Their collaboration led to the theory of synchronicity.