The One and the Many: Jung and the Post-Jungians

The present paper arose out of two experiences. The first one involved the writing for and editing a book called Jungian Analysts: Their Visions and Vulnerabilities (14), in which a dozen senior Jungian analysts, all of whom had contact with Jung, wrote personal documents in answer to a request to describe the evolution of their work. I and an advanced trainee, Joe McNair, commented upon these papers and elicited replies. The twelve major contributions—from three continents, five countries, seven cities—were remarkable in their candour, depth and individuality. I think Jung would have been pleased with them all.

The second experience came in the reading of a book by Andrew Samuels of London, called Jung and the Post-Jungians (9). Samuels may be said to belong to the third generation of analysts since he says, in his response to my own paper in the Visions and Vulnerabilities book, that he was only twelve years old when Jung died in 1961. In his book he carefully describes what he sees as three ‘schools’ of Jungian psychology—classical, developmental and archetypal—and compares them with each other and with branches of psychoanalysis.

Here are two books which consciously aim at eliciting and respecting a variety of viewpoints within analytical psychology, and here are two authors who consciously wish to perform a ‘bridging’ function among them; yet how different the approach and the outcome! The ‘Post-Jungian’ book takes a classificatory approach, addresses ideological differences and similarities, and is almost wholly clinically oriented and objective, whereas the ‘Visions’ book is individual, subjective and depth-oriented.

At first glance, one might say that the difference is one of extraversion and introversion, or between a ‘Developmental’ person, as Samuels describes himself, and a ‘Classical’ one, as I would imagine he would describe me. Yet in the ‘Visions’ book there are several