Critical Notice

HUMBERT, E. G. C. G. Jung, the Fundamentals of Theory and Practice. Trans. Ronald G. Jalbert. Wilmette,  Chiron Publications, 1988. Pp.  xix + 147. Paperback £10.95, $12.95.

There are many remarkable features and aspects of this book which to enumerate all at once would be to risk falling into adulation, and that would betray the spirit in which it was written by the author and translated by Jalbert. On the other hand, justice cannot be done to either Jung or Humbert with a pedestrian approach. So a middle way must be found between the two responses that reading it has activated in me: reflective thought and enthusiasm.

Since Elie Humbert worked with Jung for three years (1957-1960), he has now become one of the few remaining ‘first generation’ analytical psychologists. He is an analyst of outstanding intellectual eminence, with a finely tuned sensitivity to emotions and to concepts which derive from experience. These characteristics stand out from virtually every page of his book. It is presented in a deliberate way but, in a personal communication to me, he wrote that he wanted to bring out both the measured and the poetic, the orderly and the non-rational, qualities of Jungian analysis. He needed to do that in order to present both the internal logic—the guiding threads of thought in Jung's writings—and the lived encounters with the unconscious, which Jung saw, literally and metaphorically, as conveyed to consciousness through the medium of images.

Humbert is explicit about the reader of Jung's works not being able to find in them a theory of psychology, let alone of psychic mechanisms, and he modestly writes that this present book ‘seeks only to give a useful approximation of his work’. In the event, that is an understatement. The book is in two parts: ‘Confrontation with the unconscious’—introduced with a valuable consideration of three conscious activities to which I will return—and ‘Reflections on the relations between consciousness and the unconscious’. In the co