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J.J. Clarke loses no time in informing his readers where his book ‘comes from’. Unlike Freud, he writes, Jung, ‘though founder of a world-wide therapeutic community, and despite a powerful impact on theology, and a high reputation amongst “New Age” thinkers, has for the most part been looked upon with disfavour, and even with contempt, by the academic guardians of our culture’ (pp. xiii-xiv). He shortly returns to and expands this expression in hoping that his book ‘will be read by those guardians of our culture and intellectual life who have tended to view Jung as a deviant disciple of Freud, sunk irretrievably in obscurantism, and who are invited to give Jung a fresh hearing at the very least’ (p. xv). In case we have not been aware of the extensive derogation of Jung's writings, we are quickly informed of their contemptuous dismissal by Eysenck, Masson, Hearnshaw, Fromm, Peters, Glover, Rycroft, and Ernest Jones, among others.
Given this barrage of criticism, much of it intemperate, which centres upon charges of ‘mysticism’ and downright unintelligibility, Clarke sets out to defend Jung by showing in a concisely systematic way that the Collected Works comprise not, to be sure, a system, but a coherent and scientifically plausible theory of human nature. Let it be said at once that Clarke, a philosopher, does his job bravely and well. He could hardly hope to convert the Jung-bashers into disciples - a title to which he would not himself lay claim, for he is an astute critic of Jung's shortcomings, including inconsistencies and serious gaps - but he has carefully exposed a number of Jung's central motifs and beliefs (a word Jung despised) and showed them to be at the very least tenable and important.
Clarke first attacks the notion that Jung is no more than adeviant Freudian, showing that well before he ever met Freud, much less before he was designated as Freud's ‘heir apparent’, he had laid down the foundations of a distinctive position. To be sure, Freud's The Int