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I enjoyed this book for its fresh and unintimidating exposition of familiar but difficult concepts. Rosemary Gordon brings into relationship ideas which tend to be kept separate; she bridges gaps, sometimes abysses. The style is simple, direct, sometimes tentative when comments are qualified by ‘I feel’, ‘It seems to me’. This may soften the argument, but it also brings a personal tone of shared experience to difficult subjects.
The book is composed of papers on a number of themes arranged in succession of three parts, I. ‘Bridges: intrapsychic structures and functions’, II. ‘Bridges broken: clinical experience and practice’ and III. ‘Bridges built: creativity and the arts’, with a substantial prologue. Some of the chapters are already familiar having been published previously as individual papers in journals or books, but all have been revised and they make a continuum.
In the prologue Gordon takes a fresh look at the conflict and separation of Freud and Jung which she sees as a vital stimulus to the development of the theories of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. She reviews the importance of inner conflict and its potential for evolution into the dance of creativity. She examines the moral values which underlie psychodynamic theory and practice and the effects of the impact of psychoanalysis on the ethical climate of society.
Part I is concerned with intrapsychic structures and functions, especially the concept of the archetype. Here Gordon draws on her study of anthropology, comparing the myths of the idea of God in various tribal systems. She suggests that there is a close analogy between our psychological model of the psyche, self, deintegrates and ego, and the apparently universal conception of a supreme but remote God, his sons and messengers and the world of men. Gordon compares the qualities and functions of innate release mechanisms, the theory of the ethologists, Fordham's deintegrates and Jung's archetypes, in the light of Jung's insistence that ar