You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Brome's biography has been long awaited by those who have known it to be in the making, and expectations have been high. To this reviewer, with no more knowledge of Jung, apart from his own works, then Barbara Hannah's informative memoirs and the hearsay of colleagues, Brome's book has been exciting, compulsive reading. For the general reader with scant knowledge of Jung, a more fascinating bedside gift book would be hard to find. But more erudite Jungians cannot afford to overlook it and I doubt whether anyone who purchases it to read and later give away will do the latter. Brome's documentation and annotation are too helpful to lose once acquired.
It is tantalising that so many of his sources are personal ones to which others will have little access, but his findings are checked from one observer to another, especially in controversial matters. As I have read, I have found myself with a perpetual marker at the relevant page of his ‘Notes and Sources’. Worldwide, Brome has sought and interviewed about twenty members of I.A.A.P. or of Jung's family. In addition he alludes to consultations with Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Lancelot Whyte, Alexandra Adler, Michael Balint, John Freeman, J. B. Priestley, Charles Rycroft and others listed in his preface. His bibliography is attractive in that it is carefully selected and, therefore, short: hardly more than fifty authors of books, followed by several references to newspapers, periodicals, seminar reports. His record of fifteen interviews of Jung by journalists and BBC men is probably unique.
Brome first met Jung in 1938 in Oxford, when Jung turned the tables on his interviewer by cross-questioning Brome about H. G. Wells, who was the subject of a Brome biography at that time. Together in this typically Jungian mutual cross-examination, Brome and Jung began to know one another. Nearly twenty years later, in 1957, Brome decided to study Jung in earnest with a view to writing his biography. This was the result of an encounte