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John Beebe's excellent choice of selections from Jung's major passages on the masculine make this anthology a particularly accessible inner survey of Jung's concern with phallic masculinity as the basis and precursor of initiation to the inner alchemical marriage of anima with ego consciousness. This is the real ‘stuff’ of male psychology and its maturation.
Jung's evolutionary and soul-fulfilling view of the masculine developmental process is clearly revealed in Beebe's approach to, and understanding of, his choices and headnotes to the volume's contents. He is to be congratulated for his intelligence and sensitivity to what Jung has actually said. I cannot agree with the opening of his otherwise distinguished introduction, however, when he temporarily reduces Jungian psychology to Jung's ‘personal confession’ as if he were blinkered only to the patriarchal world of the rich suburban Zürich of his time. Nor can I agree that Jung's personal experience is the boundary of what lies hermetically sealed within the depth of the archetypally masculine. The masculine is still more than any psychologist has yet described or ever shall; feminist reduction of what is masculine is totally rejected here for the ultimate search for masculine totality of self. For a reference along these lines see my own paper, ‘Some plain talk about men’, Harvest 1989, vol. 35, pp. 9-31.
What I do admire in Beebe's introduction is his very clear exposition of anima as archetype, as concept, as soul and soulmate to man, and as positive and negative to men's inner and outer relationship to the feminine. Here I would like to interject a personal intrapsychic experience. When I first visited Bollingen, Jung's weekend