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This book by a Belgian Jesuit is both expository and critical. Part I first expounds, and then criticizes, Jung's methods, hypotheses, concepts, and views in general. Part II follows the same procedure with regard to their particular concern with religion.
Others better qualified must assess the reliability of the exposition. But most of it seems to be conscientiously, painstakingly, and sometimes brilliantly done. Hostie presents a chronological account of Jung's work which sets in relief its progressive development. Although he claims personal contact with Jung and his “closest collaborators”, he deliberately confines both his exposition and his criticism to “Jung's official publications”.—a surely legitimate procedure. Only in one particular have we noticed that this restriction (aided by some misapprehensions borrowed from Medard Boss) has led him astray in a manner which analytical experience might have corrected. The objective and subjective interpretations of dreams have not indeed been very satisfactorily explained in the “official publications”. but in practice they do not seem to give rise to such a “failure of method” as Hostie detects, and on which he bases some subsequent criticism. Jung has never of course maintained that dreams were either objective or subjective in themselves; on the contrary he has always insisted that objective and subjective are categories of consciousness which do not belong to the participation mystique characteristic of the unconscious and its manifestations. (It might be added that they appear to be indispensable categories of consciousness, a fact which Boss and the phenomenologists favoured by Hostie are unable in practice to evade.) It is certainly true that the selection of the kind of interpretation to be adopted cannot be determined in advance by any “standard”, but nor does it depend (as Hostie supposes) upon the therapist's “own decision” or “preference”. It usually seems to emerge quite spontaneously in the analytical