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This book contains the quintessential experience of a senior analytical psychologist who worked closely and continuously with Jung over many years. As she herself suggests, her theoretical assumptions have been moulded by Jung, so that they can perhaps be said to be in the best sense of the word ‘traditional’.
At the same time she has made these assumptions uniquely her own, and has assimilated them into the context of her own personality and of her English cultural background. The pattern of the individuation process, its characteristic dynamism and symbolism, are demonstrated in the material of a number of creative English personalities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since these personalities were also all novelists, their literary works are available for interpretation. Miss Hannah treats the novels together with the lives of R. L. Stevenson, the Brontës and Mary Webb, assuming the novels to be projections of the authors’ inner lives. The central theme is the emergence of the ego from original unconscious wholeness of the psyche, and its journey through inner and outer vicissitudes towards varying degrees of conscious wholeness.
There are striking similarities in the experience and fates of the writers Miss Hannah deals with, but perhaps none more so than that they all died relatively young. Nevertheless the implications of these similarities are not restricted to the purely personal experience, fate or even health of the subjects as individual organisms.
There are also profound cultural and religious implications. Miss Hannah sees in the individuation processes that she is demonstrating the response of the human psyche to