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The publication of the letters between Carl Jung and Fr Victor White, the English Dominican theologian and psychotherapist, is a major landmark in Jungian studies. It has also been a long time in coming. But at last we have them, and in a beautifully produced and meticulously edited edition, supplied with copious footnotes and six appendices which provide much background and contextual information. Ann Conrad Lammers, Adrian Cunningham, and Murray Stein deserve the warmest congratulations and thanks for their devoted and scholarly labour of love in finally bringing The Jung-White Letters to print.
By a happy coincidence, 2007 also saw the publication of the first book-length biography of Victor White: Fr. Victor White, O.P.: The Story of Jung's ‘White Raven’ (Weldon 2007). Readers of The Letters who wish to know more about this remarkable priest, whose sometimes impassioned discussions and arguments with Jung helped to inspire - or, maybe, to provoke - Jung's works Aion (1968) and Answer to Job (1969), will appreciate this authoritative exposition of White's personal and intellectual development. Together, The Letters and Weldon's biography of White greatly enrich the picture painted by Ann Conrad Lammers in her earlier study, In God's Shadow: The Collaboration of Victor White and C.G. Jung (Lammers 1994).
Why might we want to read these letters? Most obviously, I guess, if we are interested in the dialogue between Jungian psychology and Christianity; or if we are seeking another entrée into the many-faceted character of Jung. But to say this is to give no inkling of the richness of these pages.
As his semi-autobiographical memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung 1963), revealed, Jung - a clergyman's son - was preoccupied, from the time of his lonely childhood, with the problems raised by religion; but it was only when he was in his 70s, meeting Victor White, that he encountered a theological soul-mate who was able to understand his psychological po