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Dr Gerhard Adler's collection of eight essays is presented in a psycho-logical sequence, starting with a didactic paper on the ‘Basic concepts of analytical psychology’, followed by four essays amplifying and exemplifying from his leitmotif: the teleological and constructive processes of the self. The importance of unconscious psychic reality is then demonstrated by an account of the author's ‘Personal encounters with Jung and his work’, and in ‘Depth psychology and the principle of complementarity’ an explanation is given of the ‘personal equation’ that accounts for his metaphysical position, thus helping us to understand the premises, viewpoints and values underlying his approach. Finally, there is a relatively longer and more scholarly paper, ‘Remembering and forgetting’, which is ‘in many ways the synthesis of all other papers in this book’ (p. iii). The essays were written between 1950 and 1976, but ‘a common subject underlies all of them: the creative powers of the psyche and of the workings of the self, and of the process of individuation’ (p. i). Except in the last paper, Adler presents no new, alternative or modified models of the psyche and its dynamics other than those conceived of by Jung. This ‘orthodoxy’ is, however, explicitly what the author wishes to utilise, for he is at pains to stress that the psychotherapeutic experience of individuation via the dynamics of the self is a radically and essentially Jungian objective, and one which is also fundamentally religious. All eight essays re-state and elaborate this theme, though well grounded in case examples and dream material.
Although the book can well be read in the order as presented, especially by students new to Jungian psychology, I feel that others, particularly analysts, might benefit from starting with ‘Depth psychology and the principle of complementarity’, since it defines the premises on which Adler bases his own practical and theoretical concepts. The paper, originally written in 1968, prese