Reply

The integrity of historical work depends upon the consideration of evidence and the drawing of due inferences. If the documentation put forward is considered insufficient, then it should be countered with new documentation and detailed argumentation, and not with spurious character analysis, such as F. X. Charet has presented in his response to my ‘Misunderstanding Jung: The afterlife of legends’. If such defamation and smears are the embodiments of the civility and courtesy that he recommends, then it is clear that we understand these virtues in antithetical ways. I regret that The Journal of Analytical Psychology did not grant my request to reply to Charet's ‘I beg to differ’ in the same issue, thus legitimating such defamation and allowing it to stand unchallenged.

In my response, ‘Misunderstanding Jung: The afterlife of legends’, my critical remarks solely referred to Charet's paper and not to his person, and I provided documentary evidence supporting my arguments and detailing his errors. Charet contends that I do not consider that ‘others may understand and interpret the same material differently’ (Charet 2000b, p. 474). I do not contest anyone's right to have different opinions or interpretations, but simply stress the difference between opinion, interpretation and documentation, and request that arguments are accurately represented before being dismissed. I commenced my response by writing ‘In the following, I will restrict myself to false, mistaken and egregious comments about my work’ (Shamdasani 2000a, p. 459). I do not see how anyone could imagine that what followed claimed in any way to be a review of Jung scholarship. There are no grounds for Charet's false assertion that I consider the other works he discusses ‘and the place of Jung's spiritual inclinations in his life and thought … [as] also ‘fallacious’ or insignificant and unworthy of comment’ (Charet 2000b, p. 473).

He claims that my response served to ‘dismiss all other views of Jung’ (ibid.). This