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Those familiar with the works of this writer such as Ego and Archetype and The Living Psyche will know how he illustrates psychodynamic points richly and imaginatively with reference to myths, poetry and philosophic writing. In these new books, produced posthumously, we observe him at work primarily with his sources. The order is reversed. Here he delineates the thought of the early Greek philosophers and early Church fathers and proceeds to show how the key ideas and concepts from these sources underlie and illuminate analytical psychology.
Each chapter is the product of a lecture. The two lecture series were given in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1994. The benefit of this format, which conveys the author's message in small, distinct sound-bites, is that these volumes form a potentially valuable source of information for those interested in discovering or elucidating the psychological relevance of key thinkers at the dawn of western civilization. I can imagine a student enhancing a thesis both by using the material presented, and by further exploration of the themes which the material might well stimulate in anyone who is alert to the potential of the world Edinger opens up for us, that is, a psychological view of spiritual and cultural phenomena.
I found it easy to relate to his picture of the early Greek philosophers as visionaries gripped by the numinosity of certain archetypal images. Philosophy was not abstract intellectual discourse, but the ‘phenomenology of the psyche expressing itself in a naïve way’. As it evolved, it changed from an initial preoccupation with nature to a preoccupation with the spiritual world beyond nature. These philosophers were the first to articulate certain ideas and images that are central to the western psyche. I found particularly stimulating the chapter on Heraclitus, Jung's favourite among the Greek philosophers, who was inspired by the concept of opposites, and of enantiodromia within human life. His doctrine of p anta rei (panta rei