Correspondence

I appreciate Samuels taking the trouble to respond to my paper, ‘The one and the many: Jung and the post-Jungians’, as I requested, and also his invitation to me, in turn, to reply. The reader is rightly informed, in his response, that he came to my lecture to the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists in London. What the reader is not told is that Samuels got up out of a sick-bed to attend and, despite fever and discomfort, contributed mightily to the discussion which became, as he says, a ‘meeting’. I thank him for this.

The emotional interest generated suggests that we are touching upon not only a complex in Jungian psychology, but also a matter of some importance. That ‘something’, I think, is the question of the religious attitude toward the psyche—whether this is central to our work as Jungians or not—a theme to which I shall return, presently. First, however, I will respond to several points of difference that Samuels discusses.

1. That I overlooked Samuels's carefully worked-out critical method in the classification of analytical psychology in order to evaluate the differences within the field. I do not think that I overlooked it nor did I object to it; I contrasted it with an opposite kind of presentation as shown in the ‘Jungian Analysts’ book, the revelation of individual differences which were difficult to categorise. Both approaches, it seemed to me, as I said, were valuable yet limited; even the typological interpretation of this difference seemed inadequate. I remarked that both Samuels and I were trying to achieve a ‘bridging function’, yet we each turned up such divergent content. Indeed, the awareness of the contrast led me to search for the deeper myth which might underlie it. Hence my addressing the theme of ‘The one and the many’.

   Samuels, in the second edition of his book (which I have not read), evolves his steps to the point of seeing the separate strands or schools as existing in the mind of a single analyst. This sugg