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Jolande Jacobi has gained a considerable reputation as an expositor of Jung's theoretical formulations, in which she is well steeped, and so we can expect an authoritative account of them in any book that comes from her pen.
The first part of this volume contains chapters on complex, archetype, and symbol, and these live up to her reputation. They are especially characteristic in that she gives numerous quotations; indeed, in his Foreword Jung remarks: “I am gratefully indebted to her for having spared me the labour of having constantly to refer my readers to my own writings.” Mrs. Jacobi draws a very sharp line of demarcation between Jung and Freud, sharper than her references warrant, and there are further a number of replies to other critics than Freud; she is at pains to refute them all.
But the book is rather more than pure exposition and defence of Jung; in the section on archetypes particularly, there are references to comparable studies such as those made by the Gestalt psychologists and some continental biologists, and there is a section on the development of Jung's concept of the archetype showing how it has undergone considerable change over the last thirty years; it has expanded and in doing so has become more abstract. Besides this, in the section on symbols there is an interesting discussion on the relation between symbol, sign, and allegory that is not, I think, to be found in Jung's writings, at least they have not been collected together before or stated so clearly.
The second part consists of a short discussion of Jung's method of dream analysis, followed by the amplification of a dream which an eight-year-old child gave to her father as part of a series which composed a Christmas present to him. It is a good example of the kind of symbolic dream which children sometimes have, and Mrs. Jacobi makes the best of her opportunity. She collects myths from many sources; these fill some fifty pages, and they leave no doubt about the evidence on which the nat