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: Analytical psychology. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York, Pantheon; Toronto, Random House, 1968. pp. xvi + 224. 305.
Jung was a fascinating speaker who knew how to hold his audience. It is fortunate that the quality of his talk has been preserved in a verbatim record of five seminars given at the Tavistock Clinic in to some 200 doctors—a varied group of psychiatrists, psychotherapists, analysts and general practitioners. There is little, if anything, in these lectures which has not been published elsewhere, but it is of interest to see precisely how far Jung had developed his basic concepts and principles at that time.
In his introduction Jung describes the topics to cover as follows: (a) concepts concerning the structure of the unconscious mind and its contents; (b) the methods used in the investigation of contents originating in the unconscious process. The latter is divided into three parts: (1) the Word-Association Test, (2) dream analysis, (3) active imagination. However, at the request of his audience Jung modified his programme by giving his last talk on the problem of transference. I shall devote the major part of this notice to the last topic, a controversial one among analytical psychologists.
Jung stresses his view that ‘diseases are disturbed normal processes and not entia per se with a psychology exclusively their own’ (p. ). It is notable how burdened he feels by the ‘distressingly complicated’ nature of his subject-matter: the psyche ‘being the object of scientific observation and judgment and at the same time its subject’ (p. ). This remark betrays Jung's ambivalence about theories and his reluctance to acknowledge their value because of their only relative validity. It was many years before research workers in this and other fields recognized the importance of this view.
Discussing the significance of consciousness, Jung expresses himself vividly: ‘Consciousness is a condition which demands a violent effort …’ (p. ). ‘Nothing can be