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‘Call the world … the vale of Soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world…’
The analytic world has been under attack for many years from every direction, including academe, science and the media. Analysts (Freudian and Jungian) have on the whole responded defensively, and patient numbers are well down in the US and many countries in Europe, except amongst the Jungians in Switzerland. Competition from short-term therapies and the withholding by medical insurance companies of payment for analysis have added to the difficulty.
None of this malaise is directly addressed in Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments, edited by Renos Papadopoulos, although the reader will detect both change away from, as well as criticism of Jung's ideas in many of the papers. Papadopoulos is ideally suited to be the editor of this magisterial work as he is himself a scholar and skilled clinician, and he has exercised sensitivity and judgement in his choice of 100 essays from analytical psychologists (mainly) to reflect Jung's life-long contributions as clinician, scholar and mytho-poetic figure. One can only guess at the mountain of invisible work on the part of the editor that lies behind the final product.
These four volumes form part of a series of critical assessments of leading psychologists and sociologists including Freud, Piaget and Max Weber. The first has a useful chronology of Jung's life and works, including a list of the twenty Collected Works. Each of the four volumes starts with a brief commentary by the editor, who has also included an excellent summary at the beginning of each section of the contents of all the papers in it.
There are sixteen sections in all which include Jung in the context of earlier philosophy, of his contemporaries and of different theoretical perspectives. Further sections are devoted to functions and types, the development of personality, collective unconscious and individuation, complex (a term first coined by Eugen Bleuler at the B