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This book has a clearly defined aim: to explore how analytical psychology is adapting to the realities of the post-modern world. While clearly demanding respect for an extroverted attitude, the work presents a variety of perspectives, and there is an inner-outer connectedness apparent in the work of all the authors, most of whom draw knowledge and ideas from their own clinical practice.
With diverse contributions from 13 prominent figures throughout the Jungian world, there is no attempt to reach a consensus view about the Jungian community today, but rather to celebrate the pluralism and range evident in the work of practitioners and theorists from different trainings and with varied cultural backgrounds. The writers are post-Jungian, not just in a historical sense but also in their acknowledged ability to stand on Jung's shoulders and reach further, illuminating an area of personal interest or of numinous experience. This personal dimension is a strength of the book and suggests that the writers were given free rein in choosing their subject matter and approach though it also means that the contributions fit uneasily within the mainly psychological and sociological categories into which the chapters are grouped.
The two most prominently recurring themes are, first, aspects of the collective unconscious and, second, problems of identity. Considerable space is given to the collective unconscious in its progressive, creative and destructive aspects. Mara Sidoli sensitively confirms the archetypes as organisers of infantile experience. The editor, Ann Casement, who writes a very comprehensive introduction, also contributes a reflective chapter which highlights the archetypal trickster father realized in the lives of Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud. Verena Kast describes her use of the fairy tale as a transitional object to activate internal figures in psychotherapy while Hayao Kawai draws on the same archetypal resource to understand the process of vertical splitting, inclu