You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Murray Stein subtitles his book ‘The psychotherapy of a religious tradition’ to make it clear that he means ‘treatment’ in the psychotherapeutic sense. The theme of this excellent book is that Jung, at first rather unconsciously, but with steadily increasing consciousness of purpose, undertook the treatment of the religious tradition of our Western culture.
West and East, people have recognised the avatar, the culture hero, he whose life-energy seems peculiarly dedicated to the transformation and ‘dreaming onwards’ of the cultural myth. As psychotherapists we all encounter something of these collective cultural problems in every one of our patients (as well as in ourselves) and each of us, in greater or lesser measure, is carrying on therapeutic work with the culture as well as with the individual patient. Jung, however, was impelled more than most to act as therapist to that huge ailing patient, the wounded Amfortas, Christianity—whose sickness inevitably pervades every individual patient. Such an impulsion is not devoid of personal components. Stein has interwoven a thoroughly researched, clearly constructed, and well-written tapestry in which the warp is Jung's personal experience and the woof is the way he rose up and responded to these personal experiences. In Stein's book, as in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, there is this fascinating duality, a sense of an enormous father complex that has to wipe out the father, and at the same time the sense of striving to heal, to make a whole. Stein's painstaking work goes far in illuminating the articulation of these two aspects.
The book has five chapters: the first, entitled ‘Jung's interpreters’, is a brief review of the many books and articles which have concerned themselves with Jung and Christianity. It is a good and necessarily rather pedestrian introduction to the remainder of the book. Chapter 2, called ‘Jung's method of psychotherapeutic treatment’, in 42 pages, is the best brief account I have read of the develop