I beg to differ

I am grateful that The Journal of Analytical Psychology has given me the opportunity to respond to Sonu Shamdasani's comments on my ‘Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship’ that appeared in the April 2000 issue of this journal. I have but a few comments to make and stand by what I have written. Mr Shamdasani has not yet persuaded me to do otherwise.

Mr Shamdasani, as any student of Jung's life and thought knows, has published a number of important articles and a book on Jung, often taking issue with the research and conclusions of others. In his article ‘Misunderstanding Jung: the afterlife of legends’ he has taken me to task for perpetuating ‘errors’ and offering up an ‘idiosyncratic account of Jung scholarship’ that ‘is littered with erroneous statements and repetition of worn out legends’ (p. 459) In fact my article should have been excised by a generous use of ‘red ink by the editors of this journal and the experts on Jung history that one assumes reviewed it before publication’(ibid.). My crime, according to Shamdasani, is that I am practising ‘“History Lite” or evidence free history’ (ibid.). Moreover, and this seems to be the real reason for his immoderate outburst, that I have dared to comment and call into question some of the conclusions, to me suggestive but premature, he and Eugene Taylor have come to about the sources that influenced Jung as well as Shamdasani's claims about the status of Memories, Dreams, Reflections as an autobiography (Charet 2000, pp. 206-11).

For the reader's benefit I would like to clarify that, in contrast to the impression that Shamdasani gives, most of my article dealt with other scholarship and more important issues about Jung than the publications of Shamdasani and Taylor. I presume from Shamdasani's remarks that this other scholarship, like mine, and the place of Jung's spiritual inclinations in his life and thought, are also ‘fallacious’ or insignificant and unworthy of comment. Instead we are given a rehash o