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Marilyn Nagy has been a student of theology, then went on to train and practise for twenty-four years as an analytical psychologist. In the last ten years she has combined this with a study of Jung in the context of his place in the history of ideas and of Western culture. In private correspondence she highlights the emphasis on the individual as a moral being. She regards this as a key to Jung's psychology,
which, she thinks, even includes a view of the individual as necessarily counter-cultural.
The tripartite format of the book examines, first, Jung's epistemology, second, the archetypes, and, last, the concept of individuation; because it is inter-disciplinary, a dialectical approach to the organization of the text is used throughout. Accordingly, in each of the three parts, Jung's ideas are initially presented as they stand in many of his texts, including Aion, Psychological Types, Symbols of Transformation, ‘On psychic energy’, ‘On the nature of the psyche’, etc. These ideas are then situated in their relevant historical and philosophical context; in conclusion, some points are selected for more detailed discussion.
In this way, Jung's resistance to philosophy can be seen as a reaction to the fact that psychology had achieved its independence from philosophy only at the turn of the century. Around that time, while still a student, Jung delivered the Zofingia lectures in which he passionately advocated a vitalistic versus a mechanistic view of reality.
Jung's moral and subjective epistemology is, among others, derived from Kant's a priori postulate for the existence of God as a basis of his moral order. Schopenhauer's emphasis on the subject as primary, with the object in phenomenal or secondary relationship to the perceiving subject, also greatly influenced Jung, as did Paracelsus' ‘Lumen Naturae’, which pointed to knowledge of God being found not in dogmatic faith but in pagan nature; this opened the way to the psychology of alchemy. Jung felt a strong bond wi