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Freud and Jung endure as the two titans in the history of psychoanalysis. We are heirs to that history. They both created a climate of opinion, as Auden said Freud did, nay, universes of meaning and their own psychoanalytic movements, schools, and an ever growing secondary literature about them and their works. Compared to Jones's monumental biography of Freud, or Peter Gay's more recent one, nothing similar in scope and scholarship has been published about Jung. This void has now been filled: Deirdre Bair's splendid new biography easily outshines its predecessors and is a treasure trove of information. The book breaks new ground and sets a standard as an indispensable reference work. A noted literary journalist and biographer of Beckett, de Beauvoir, and Anais Nin, and a former fellow of the C. G. Jung Center in New York, she gives the reader a thoroughly and meticulously researched and balanced view of Jung's personality, warts and all, and the background indispensable for understanding his ideas, thus providing an intellectual biography as well (the notes alone run 202 pages). It should be read in tandem with Jung's 1961 autobiography, Memories Dreams, Reflections (an apocryphal book still excluded from the canon of Jung's Collected Works) and The Freud / Jung Letters (McGuire 1974).
We follow with fascination the story of Jung's beginnings in the bucolic atmosphere of his father's parish house, nurtured in the romantic European tradition of his paternal grandfather, the first Carl Gustav Jung, an illustrious physician and author, said to be the bastard son of Goethe, and his ghost-mongering maternal grandmother, Preiswerk, who boasted of having two personalities. She had a powerful influence on Jung's mother and Jung's own two personalities, as well as his penchant for the occult and for the collective, or mythopoeic, unconscious. These influences would become the seed of his fateful split from Freud. His choice of a medical career would be determined by his iden