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James Astor's paper arose from a joint meeting of Psychoanalysts and Analytical Psychologists in 1996 at a conference around the theme of the Oedipus myth. The paper carries on the impetus of that meeting but goes far beyond the theme of the conference and is a ‘personal and Jungian reflection’ on the ‘direction in which Jungian thought has been moving, … and compares current clinical approaches as exemplified by established practitioners’ (p. 697). The significance of this paper for me, however, is that it speaks from a Jungian perspective to a primarily non-Jungian readership. It combines elements of our analytic histories, the misunderstandings and myths that surround the split between Freud and Jung, psychoanalysts and Jungian analysts, and gives examples of Jung's ideas in relation to psychoanalytic and object relations theories.
In the opening section James Astor gives an historical perspective to some sources of misunderstandings about Jung and gives examples of the ways in which they have arisen. It is refreshing to read the straightforward observation, ‘evidenced from personal discussions’, that ‘psychoanalysts do not read Jung’ (p. 698) and are therefore often unaware of how Jungian thought, concepts and clinical work have developed from the early 1900s. James Astor cites the example of Wallerstein, who based his comments on Jung on a 1902 paper which was written before the Freud/Jung split and before many of Jung's ideas were developed. This is clearly linked to the politics of our forebears and the version of history that views Jung's break with Freud as a betrayal rather than that Jung was developing a ‘complementary system’ (p. 701) which was based on a different concept of the workings of the mind.
The paper goes on to consider how theoretical concepts which have arisen out of clinical experience and infant observation have promoted development, and sometimes convergence, in the ideas of both the psychoanalytic and the Jungian world. James Astor quotes