Books Received

GUGGENBÛHL-CRAIG, A. Eros on Crutches: Reflections on Amorality and Psychopathy. Dallas, Spring Publications Inc., 1980. Pp. 126. $7.00.

This book, written with the same honesty and directness he brought to his Power in the Helping Professions, is the English language edition (well served by the translator) of the author's Seelenwusten: Betrachtungen über Eros and Psychopathie. Readers of this journal may be struck by the parallel between much of what he says and papers we have published by R. Ledermann. Though he does not make the similarity explicit, he describes, rather from an ‘archetypal’ than from a ‘developmental’ standpoint, the so-called narcissistic personality disorder and its extremity of manifestation in psychopathy. His chapter on the ‘Archetype of the invalid’, for example, and his warning that the ‘fantasy of health fills the analyst's practice’, is especially fine, particularly in the width of focus and depth of compassionate humility to which it exhorts its readers. In another chapter, ‘The missing morality’, he presents a well-made case for seeing morality not as a quality, sprung from the self, but rather as an activity of Eros; where the personality is incapable of, or crippled in relation to Eros, its relation to itself, others, and the world, will likewise be crippled. There is much in this short book—unhappily marred by the lack of an index—to stimulate reflection and to merit further discussion.

G. Robinson

AVENS, R. Imagination is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jong, Hillman, Barfield and Cassirer. Dallas, Spring Publications Inc., 1980. Pp. 127. $7.00.

The author, a professor of philosophy in a U.S. college, has written what the publisher's blurb calls ‘the first comprehensive essay to place archetypal psychology [sic] within a major tradition of modern thought, the tradition of mythical thinking’. Very much in the stream of ‘post-Jungian’ attitudes, the book sees the work of Jung rather more as the foundation of a school of