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In this informal review — possibly one of the last of a book published in 1985 — I deliberately decided not to read any of the voluminous reviews that came out last year, thereby adding yet another formal one to the list, but to concentrate instead on a personal view of Jung and the Post-Jungians. The term ‘post-Jungian’ presumably refers to any analytical psychologist surviving Jung by at least a few weeks after his death in 1961 — or born after 1961 — who has been published, read by Andrew Samuels, and is interesting to him to quote. Samuels acts rather as if he were a zoologist in classifying Jung's followers quantitatively (rather more than qualitatively) on the basis of published works; one is tempted by the pun on ‘post’ to think of a mail-order catalogue of choices for Jungians to consider ‘buying’ in their uneasy orientating efforts among themselves.
Within the book one can find reductive quotations from many source papers; sometimes that summary may be only one sentence. None the less this is a well-written-catalogue of Jungian material and often the brevity of description leaves open to the reader his own choice of reaction, counter-reaction and integration of the continual summary of published Jungiana. To an analyst it is as fascinating to learn which writers are included as it is to see which published works were not used or mentioned by the author.
In general, Andrew Samuels' book has avoided the hubris-trip into which so many London Jungians fall and from which they again and again take off these days, and I would have welcomed even more