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Dr Roland Cahen, who in 1943 was the first to edit and to translate into French Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, has been provoked in the Preface of the ‘nth’ edition of this
book, almost forty years later, to reflect about the value, meaning and impact of the book on individuals and on whole cultures.
Although the vast number of editions of the book marks it out as being quite particularly appealing to people in the second half of the twentieth century, Cahen, in this short article, discusses it in terms of the effects produced, he believes, by the discoveries of the depth psychologies in general.
In doing this, he does not shirk the experience of disquiet and disillusion, even of a sense of tragedy, as he contemplates the faith which Jung expressed in man's capacity to develop himself and reach out to greater goodness, tolerance, understanding and control of his violence. This may be compared with the explosion of shadow qualities which we witness in our own days—commercialisation, the triumph of mediocrity, banalisation of language and thought, dogmatism and facile generalisations, the claim to professionalism of untrained or semi-trained people, the proliferation of phony new psychotherapeutic methods (there are supposed to be 400 of them presently in the U.S.A.), and the in-fighting between the two or three original schools of depth psychology which continues unabated to the delight of the cynics.
In fact, Cahen wonders whether depth psychology has not itself contributed to the instability in the world of today, a suspicion that has been expressed once or twice already by, for example, Bettelheim. But it would have been interesting if Dr Cahen had shared with us these suspicions in greater detail and depth so that we could follow more closely his thoughts; for this is surely a matter of utmost importance, and we may all have to take a more active part in combating what may be false understanding, leading to unnecessary and undesirable consequences.
He does