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The publication of this book provides psychoanalysts with a chance, perhaps the last chance they will have, to come to terms with Jung. If we fail to come to terms with Jung we are self-proclaimed partisans, partisans in a false cause.
Jung was a being, a real person, one who happened to live in Freud's time and who inevitably met Freud. The impact of their meeting provides material for serious study, and the manner of their parting is no less interesting to the student of human nature. Psychoanalysts can choose to line up with Freud, and to measure Jung against him, or they can look at Jung and look at Freud and allow the two to meet and to go together and to separate. In the latter case they must know their Jung, and the value of this book is that it allows us to know Jung as he was when entirely unaffected by Freud and all his works.
By 'this book' I mean the first 115 pages. These first three chapters are genuine autobiography. Here is an autobiography to take its place with the other really convincing autobiographies; one has no doubt about the value of these chapters as a truly self-revealing statement. My review will concern itself with these important chapters, and mostly with the first chapter: 'First Years'.
I am sure that every psycho-analyst must read these first three chapters and so meet Jung as he was, and that no analyst who has failed to read them is qualified to talk or write about Jung and Freud and their meeting and their ultimate failure to understand each other.
In discussing these early details of Jung's life I put myself in the category of people who in Jung's words: 'always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded' (p. 28). In spite of this I must go ahead using the rich material Jung has supplied in order to look closely at the man Ju