Paul Bishop (ed.), Jung in Contexts. A Reader.: London and New York:  Routledge, 1999.  294 pages. Thomas B. Kirsch, The Jungians. A Comparative and Historical Perspective. London and Philadelphia:  Routledge, 2000.  276 pages. Mario Jacoby, Jungian Psychotherapy and Contemporary Infant Research. Basic Patterns of Emotional Exchange. London and New York:  Routledge, 1999.  206 pages.

Each of these three books offers a different perspective on Jungian psychology, which at present enjoys a relatively well-established status as a therapy, theory, and social movement. What is especially interesting for a historian of dynamic psychology is that the last decade witnessed the first truly historical studies of Jung and his analytical psychology since Henri F. Ellenberger's massive The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). One of the leading Jung scholars today is Paul Bishop, a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow and an author of The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung's reception of Nietzsche (1995). Bishop has edited a very useful collection of articles that places Jung in the historical, intellectual, and literary context. Most contributions were originally published in small Jungian or psychoanalytic journals, and Bishop has done a real service to students of dynamic psychology by making these articles easily available. As he writes in the Preface, “Jung in context is a collection of the most important essays on Jung and analytical psychology over the past two decades” (xix). The fact that Bishop himself has written two large essays for the volume could make his statement appear a bit self-satisfied, but he is not far off the mark.

Bishop's own contributions deal with Jung's relationship with Thomas Mann — whom Jung met once — and Nietzsche. Besides pointing out that there are some striking resemblances between the ideas of Jung and Mann, he argues (in his Nietzsche essay) that “Jung's psychology makes most sense when read as aesthetics” (236). By emphasising the aesthetic nature of Jung's approach to the Unconscious, Bishop challenges the main thesis of Richard Noll, the well-known author of The Jung Cult (1994) and The Aryan Christ (1997), whose large essay on the influence of Mithraism on both Jung's theoretical ideas and his fantasy life is included in this collection. Noll has argued that Jung's psychology was suffused with national-rom