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In writing this book, billed by the publishers as ‘Self-Help/Psychology’, Verena Kast intends to fill what she sees as a gap in Jungian literature: a full examination and description of mother and father complexes. She also aims to redress a balance, by focusing on ‘the originally positive mother complex’ which, she maintains, has been neglected in favour of an emphasis on the ‘devouring mother’. In consequence, values inherent in the mother complex are devalued, while ‘male-centred’ values are confirmed in a world ‘decisively formed by the father complex’ (p. 3). Kast concludes that ‘It is the father complex world which has led to our desperate struggle to achieve at all costs, which hinders the development of our full humanity, and which causes a great deal of difficulty in our relationship to ourselves, each other and the world’ (p. 166). She perceives a growing collective longing, particularly among women, for ‘the rlm of the positive mother complex, of participation, of anima’, which is still considered ‘dangerous, threatening, devouring, chaotic’ (p. 167). Kast's intentions for this book do not rest here, as her subtitle indicates: her emphasis is on ‘freeing ourselves from the complexes that bind us’
This multiplicity of aims seems to me to reduce the book's effectiveness, and Kast might usefully have devoted a volume to each of them. In attempting to augment the Jungian literature by detailed examination of mother and father complexes, for example, she might have targeted the rather more sophisticated readership of, say, her Dynamics of Symbols. However, with a self-help readership in mind, she addresses herself primarily to an audience who require some rather basic instruction in adolescent development and the need to separate from parents. This conflict of purpose is betrayed in Kast's inconsistency of voice: the second chapter, for example, is much more academic in tone than the first and some later chapters. Moreover, at times, Kast departs from her lay r