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These nine papers have been published as a collection to mark the seventieth birthday of their author, who has been director of the Zurichberg Clinic since its beginning in 1964. They have all appeared elsewhere, though only one in English: ‘The Lambspring figures’, published in The Well Tended Tree, edited by Hilde Kirsch (New York, Putnam's, 1971). These figures, a series of alchemical pictures, alerted Fierz to the potential value of images and their relevance in psychic development, and they thus form, in a sense, the psychological core of the book. The papers reflect Fierz's struggle to bring together the approaches of analytical psychology and of psychiatry. His work and that of the Clinic continue the tradition of Jung's pioneering work at Burgholzli.
The papers are grouped under three headings: diagnosis, therapy, and analytical psychology and society. Considering the first theme, diagnosis, Fierz compares the labelling methods of traditional psychiatry which focus on symptomatology with the alchemical approach which, by paying attention to dreams and images, tries to understand the inner being (das Wesen) of the patient. The compensatory function of dreams is stressed, together with the need to view them in their entirety: focusing on details can be a sign of resistance in both patient and analyst. In an interesting passage Fierz shows how resistance, that ‘devilishly difficult’ problem in analysis, can be constellated in the form of the trickster creating countless diversions; at the same time, however, the trickster, by preventing a ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’ analysis, acts creatively in promoting the individual development of the person as a person, that is, as other than ideal.
The papers in the second section show Fierz at work with patients, many in hospital and many seriously ill, in states of psychotic depression or of archetypal possession. Fierz makes it clear that even, indeed particularly, when working with severely ill patients it is important to recog