Aniela Jaffe: Der Mythus vom Sinn im Werk von C. G. Jung (The myth of meaning in the work of C. G. Jung). Zürich,  Rascher, 1967. pp.  176. Sfrs 11.50.

The author aims to describe Jung's search for meaning in contradistinction to meaningless life. There is no scientific answer to the question of meaning; every formulation is a myth created by man to give an answer to the unanswerable. Hence the author's choice of title. It was Jung who first saw the vital importance for the psychic balance of man that he be in connection with a myth. Neurosis is, in the last analysis, a ‘suffering of the soul, not having found its meaning’.

The author's procedure, in dealing with a complex and many-sided problem, is enormously successful. She first gives an account—rare in precision and clarity—of the theoretical basis concerning the unconscious and the archetypes. One chapter is dedicated to the task of bringing Jung's method and way of writing nearer to the reader's understanding. In subsequent chapters, ‘The hidden reality’ and ‘The inner experience’, she not only collects quotations from Jung's work but incorporates other fields of modern thought, including the theological ideas of Paul Tillich, the biological views of A. Portmann, and those of the physicists Pauli and Heisenberg. By critical comparison of these different points of view, she succeeds in penetrating Jung's thought from new angles and puts it into a wider context. Another chapter deals with Answer to Job. After an intelligent comment on this provocative book about the dark side of God, she tries to meet some attacks on it, based often on misunderstanding, which arose after its publication.

The last decisive chapter bears the title ‘Meaning as myth about consciousness’. The author shows how, in the course of his life, Jung saw more and more that human consciousness was the meaning-creating factor. God, nature, the unconscious, are in themselves meaningless if not reflected by human consciousness. Meaning is man's conscious creation, the second theogony. Search for meaning is therefore the most important, unique human task, man's specific destiny and religio; because