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We may sympathise with the Editors in their task of producing this volume of the Collected works—the last except for the General Bibliography and the General Index. To quote the jacket cover: ‘Originally planned as a brief final volume in the Collected works, The symbolic life has become the most ample volume in the edition and one of unusual interest.’ The selection and arranging of the contents must have presented considerable problems; they appear to have been dealt with very well. (We do not know what has been left out, but what has been included hangs together well, considering its extraordinary range).
The first three parts of the book are the Tavistock Lectures; ‘Symbols and the interpretation of dreams’ and ‘The symbolic life’. In the rest of the volume, the material is grouped in parts, each relating to the contents of an earlier volume of the Collected works. Although the arrangement is sometimes arbitrary, as the Editors point out, it works quite well. The index is very extensive and this helps.
The material ranges extremely widely. For one thing, it comes from Jung writing (and talking) over a period of sixty years. Then there are the forms: they include letters,