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Professor Meier has devoted much of a long life-time of scholarship to conveying Jung's work to readers who wish to understand him without themselves sifting through his voluminous writings. It is scarcely surprising that this ambitious work runs to four volumes.
The strength of Meier's presentation, for those who still need convincing, lies in his repeated demonstration of the positive importance of all that is unconscious. Jung, in the excitement of his fertile thinking, wrote so voluminously that his readers may be forgiven for getting the impression sometimes that unconsciousness is, after all, a chaos to be avoided rather than a frightening and scarey goldmine of discovery to be approached with courage and hope. Professor Meier, by contrast, woos his readers: he reminds them of the ‘bright ideas’ (p. 9) of many a famous person, ideas which stemmed from dreams, ideas which were clearly associated with emotional upheaval, even with agonising states of mind; nevertheless, these experiences time and again lead to important discoveries.
With this emphasis on the importance of the unconscious, Meier sets the scene for a lengthy chapter which can be regarded, to some extent, as a handbook version of the first part of Volume 2 of the Collected Works, which is devoted to Jung's ‘Studies in Word Association’. Meier calls the chapter of his book ‘The association experiment as developed by C. G. Jung’, but it takes careful reading sometimes to disentangle Meier's own work and that of Riklin and others from Jung's.
Chapter 5, called ‘Soul and body’, finds Meier struggling with two associated preoccupations, one being ‘the Zurich school’ and the other ‘psychosomatic medicine’. There is a certain wistfulness in his attitude to the Zürich school as though it were more of a ‘has been’ than an ‘is’. This attitude, I assume, is a factor of Meier's mournful memories; there are few of us who do not look back from time to time with nostalgia on the ‘good old days’. Earlier, however, (p