Books received

SCHOENL, WILLIAM. C. G. Jung: His Friendship with Mary Mellon and J. B. Priestley. Wilmette:  Chiron, 1998. Pp.  xiii + 94. Pbk. £13.99.

William Schoenl is a professor of modern history at Michigan State University and was granted access to unpublished correspondence in the Jung archive. He has produced a slim volume divided into two parts linked by ‘the synchronicity’ of Mary Mellon's death in 1946 and Jung's acquaintance with J. B. Priestley in the same year. The title is misleading as the focus is on disseminating Jung's ideas rather than on friendship. It is an account of this process mediated by the Bollingen Foundation founded by Mary Mellon in America and through an inspired broadcast by J. B. Priestley for the BBC. Schoenl's style is fresh and novelistic. The narrative does not discriminate between details of life in America and Switzerland during the war years, family news and formal correspondence about publishing rights. The book is informative on the events leading up to the joint publication of the Collected Works by the Bollingen Foundation and by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The key players, Herbert Read with Michael Fordham as editor-in-chief and Gerhard Adler as the translator from the German, all get a brief paragraph.

The second part of the book offers a lively résumé based on the script in the BBC Archives of J. B. Priestley's talk in June 1946. This is followed by Jung's broadcast ‘The Fight with the Shadow’ in November 1946. Schoenl is less impressive when he strays out of his chosen field. He diagnoses Mary Mellon as suffering from a classical animus transference with Jung as father, lover and prophet based on two dreams quoted in the correspondence. Jung writes to Mary Mellon requesting financial support for his work ‘for the spiritual welfare of this godforsaken world’ and Mary Mellon agonizes over the danger of losing herself in Jung. Schoenl states that the correspondence provides clear evidence of Jung's anti-Nazi stance dur