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This is a welcome and most outstanding book for which the right time has come. The reader gets an extremely well-founded exposition, not only of Jung's essential ideas and of their modifications by the different ‘schools’ of post-Jungian thought, but also of some more recent developments within post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus one could call it a comprehensive survey of contemporary analytical psychology which is, however, free of any hint of the dryness of academia. Its enormous body of knowledge serves only as a basis for Samuels's own comparative approach, his stimulating search for parallels and divergences. One of his concerns is to find common denominators in the apparently wide differences, even splits, which fuel polemics between present-day Jungian analysts. The author also wants to do something about the credibility gap which still partly surrounds Jung and to show where and to what extent psychoanalysis and psychotherapy today are ‘Jungian’ without their exponents realising it. He gives a list of fifteen essential points which demonstrate that recent changes and developments in Freudian psychoanalysis reflect a ‘Jungian’ reorientation, in line with Roazen's statement that ‘few responsible figures in psychoanalysis would be disturbed today if an analyst were to present views identical to Jung's in 1913’ (p. 9).
In the state of analytical psychology today, Samuels distinguishes three main post-Jungian schools. At one end of the spectrum he places the Developmental School, inspired mainly by Fordham in London, and at the other Hillman's Archetypal School, with the Classical School and its stated objective of ‘teaching Jung's psychology in an undiluted form’ (G. Adler, quoted on p. 14) in the middle. At the same time, the author takes great pains to avoid any rigidity in this classification by stating that the schools overlap to some extent, that individuals may fall between schools, and that differences of opinion may be found within the schools themselves.