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It was a pleasure to be asked to review this collection of occasional papers by one of the most respected figures in analytical psychology today. As the author himself asserts, the diversity of the papers is perhaps the best reason for their being gathered together under one cover. But this makes an interesting critical review difficult to achieve. The contents of the book are divided into seven sections, and this division is fairly arbitrary (except for the section of film reviews which is simply that).
Dr Henderson was born in Nevada, educated in the eastern USA, analysed in San Francisco, and in Zürich by Jung, medically trained in England, and married to a Cornford. He practised as an analyst in New York before settling in San Francisco. It is clear that he is a broadly cultured and pleasing writer and that his abiding interests as an author have been firstly in transcultural studies, integrating these with his analytical work and formulating his conclusions for teaching and training purposes. In this book his own experiences and dreams, and his experiences as an analysand and follower of Jung, are liberally scattered and are both relevant and entertaining. For example, he describes a joint seminar of Jung's with a prominent Indologist on the subject of Kundalini Yoga. The Indologist presented his material in the traditional Indian way, describing the progress towards the highest centres. The lower centres are left behind, a higher consciousness is attained; the instinctual, the materialistic, the obsessive, and the emotionally disturbing elements of oneself are cast off. When Jung's turn came to speak, he expressed great appreciation for Professor Hauer's viewpoint, coming ‘like a Yogin from above’. However, his own viewpoint, he said, was from below, where the lower chakras are a necessary and enriching part of psychic experience, or at the very least are regions to which we must periodically descend to find elements which give us depth and help us avoid inflat