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This is a delightful book to read: it starts and ends with meditations on a cock-crowing man entering a Zürich tram, ‘the conductor, neither demanding a fare from him nor putting him off, ostentatiously pretended not to see him’. ‘The fool among us is a perpetual link to the light and life in that darkness’ and the cry of the cock means deliverance and the rebirth of imagination. What more contrasting backcloth to that rebirth than a Zürich tram could anyone possibly imagine!
Dr Willeford is a widely educated man and as such, and in his capacity as a graduate of the Zürich Institute, he is able to demonstrate a function of analytical psychology, i.e. to link various branches of knowledge with the help of a common denominator, an archetypal image. He does so with great skill and deep insight. Thus, we find historical, anthropological and literary evidence brought together in a convincing way. Whether experts in these fields would always agree with the author I cannot say. But there is no doubt that the fool is an abstracted and personalized ambiguous figure. He functions when he relieves us of the persona, the king of his sceptre and when he permits us to