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The main point of this book is that both Freud and Jung, without fully realising it, were hermeneutic thinkers, concerned primarily with interpretation and with meaning. Freud's ‘scientific’ and Jung's ‘spiritual’ approach are two poles of hermeneutic method. As such, the book's conclusions are not particularly shocking to contemporary analytical psychologists —nor, I would imagine, to psychoanalysts of the non-classical schools. But the weight and tone of the book are useful in forcing us to consider the two main ways in which the Freud-Jung break-up can be apperceived. First, as two halves of a single whole that could not survive the tension in such apparent opposition. And second, seeing Jung as building on Freud's foundation but, in some ways, going beyond him.
It is now becoming clearer that Jung stands more in the mainstream of the therapeutic tradition than had previously been realised. The stress on interaction in therapy and analysis, the search for meaning and significance rather than causes, the valuing of the products of the internal world and the recognition that, dispute it as we may, our lives are patterned—all these have some origin in Jung's work.