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Dehing uses the criticisms of some of Jung's so-called ‘opponents’ as a medium through which to focus on certain shadow aspects of Jung and of analytical psychology. He draws on the work of six psychoanalytic writers: Glover, Jones, Dayan, Winnicott, Lacan and Khan.
Two major issues raised by Glover and by Jones are that Jung did not recognise the unconscious, and the central place of sexuality in the Freud/Jung debate. Dehing sees these issues as linked. He quotes the point made by Dayan, that Freud held the sexual sphere to be coextensive with the unconscious. Jung did not hold this view: for him the self, not sexuality, was the organising centre of the psyche, and this led him to a concept of the unconscious which was intrinsically different.
A key element in this fundamental disagreement was the idea of incest. Freud had tackled the incest fantasy as a component of the Oedipus complex, a conflict in the psychology of an individual. The Oedipus legend is not discounted by Jung: rather it becomes, as Dehing puts it, a true legendum, a ‘text which must be read’ because it is a carrier of meaning. Quoting Humbert, he shows how incest points to something beyond the mere sexual attraction between family members: to ultimate intimacy, to non-differentiation and unconsciousness, against which Freud had tried to establish a bulwark in the form of the ‘controlling, paranoid ego’.
Dehing allows that the reproaches often levelled against Jung on account of his tendency towards non-differentiation were sometimes justifiable. He agrees that, in the absence of a well-established symbolic function, incest (that is, symbolic incest) can lead to a disturbing fusion ‘ranging from a delusional enthusiasm to physical or psychic death’.
Dehing takes up Winnicott's objection to Jung's broad use of the term ‘transference’. Winnicott insisted that change can be effected only by the occurrence of’new instinctual experiences … in the transference neurosis of an analysis’, but, as Dehing point