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Ann Lammers's book touches me both personally and professionally. In 1955-6 in California, as a Dominican student brother, I was in analysis with White, who had come from the English province, and read his first book on Jung and theology, God and the Unconscious. Jung wrote an Introduction to this book in 1952, the year his Job was published. In it he commented on their differences based on White's metaphysics and Jung's science. Yet he felt that their ‘discrepancies mutually animate and fertilize each other’ as long as good will preside. We did not know in 1955 that much of the good would be lost, until we had at our disposal the C.G. Jung Letters in the 1970s and now Lammers's book.
Lammers has obtained permission from the English Dominicans and the Jung family to read the entire correspondence between these two men. We learn that White taught at the Zurich Institute during the summer of 1955, then was ‘banished’ to California by the Order, much like Russians to Siberia. The introverted White breathed no word of his differences with Jung, even as his Jungian teachings were transforming our lives. As an English friend said, he was ‘laconic to the point of muteness’. (p. 271).
The C. G. Jung Letters enabled White-Jung followers to catch a deeper glimpse of their difficulties following Job. White's angry review in 1955 of Jung's book recognized Jung's compassion for a mankind wounded by a failed Church, yet also called Jung ‘a spoiled child’ with a ‘paranoid system’. (Lammers, p. 103-5). White wrote to Jung, apologizing for his unfeeling tone, but charged Jung with ‘a cathartic outburst that was making a public parade of splenetic shadow … so unlike the real you’ and accused him of compromising White's efforts to reconcile Christianity and Jung's system. Jung responded that he was seeking to awaken human beings to ‘impending world catastrophe … in our infernal epoch’. Still, he recognized that White was ‘in a hell of suffering’; that he, like Jung, suffered the antinom