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This timely book, written by a man just over thirty years old, is a courageous effort. Rape, like viruses, meets us everywhere, if not in its most violent expressed form, then as an indigenous phenomenon. Though the author is certainly well-informed and widely read, the bibliography is limited, where Jungian matter is concerned, to literature from Zürich and the other side of the Atlantic, with one exception—the paper by John Layard on ‘Homoero-ticism in primitive society as a function of the self’, published in this journal in 1959. Notes and a glossary of Jungian terms will make the volume acceptable to a wide public. The list of contents is clear and, like a signpost, it points in the direction of the goal. The roads vary from major to minor roads. Quite suddenly a footpath appears and permits recollection, a breath of fresh air, a rest from the hectic pursuit. As a study it is fascinating; as a book it is frustrating and does not belong to that category of literature which can be laid down and picked up again later. There is something strangely static here, despite the challenging title and theme.
Increasingly, ritual is considered old-fashioned, meaningless, stereotyped, useless. It is, however, discarded at great risk—the emergence of autonomous complexes, archetypally and environmentally conditioned and facilitated, and of criminal acts. In the United States the ‘Big Four’ violent crimes are, we read, murder, armed robbery, assault, and rape, and, as we follow the words, the enormity of the crime penetrates ever more deeply, so much so that this reader almost decided to opt out of analysing or being therapeutically active, as it is in these activities, the goal of which is individuation, that we meet it: we cannot escape it, working as we do, in the field of self-object psychology.
From chapter one (The crime of rape, its two parts subtitled, ‘A problem for men’, and ‘Limitations of the feminist hardline’) I pass to chapter six, ‘The rape fantasy and individuat