A final reply

I am grateful to The Journal of Analytical Psychology for allowing me a final comment on Shamdasani's response to my reply to his response that appeared in the July issue. In spite of the length to which Mr. Shamdasani has gone to clarify his research and views on Memories, Dreams, Reflections and other aspects of our exchange I find myself being put in the position of having to repeat what I have already written. And since I see little value in doing this I will offer only a few general remarks.

My article ‘Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship’ was intended to draw to the attention of readers certain aspects of Jung's life and thought in some of the recent scholarship on Jung and its ramifications for analytical psychology. It was expressly not intended as a survey of Jung scholarship or even as a survey of all aspects of Jung, spirituality, and biography. On the other hand some of the material that I did cover and the questions that I have raised has generated an interest in The Journal of Analytical Psychology internet forum and in the critical responses by Sonu Shamdasani. In Shamdasani's response in this issue he seems to feel that he has both been misunderstood and misrepresented by me in my initial reply that followed his response in the July issue of this journal. In the face of the various critical statements he made about my own article in his ‘Misunderstanding Jung: the afterlife of legends’ I find this assertion rather disingenuous. And instead of addressing the answers I provided to his questions and criticisms he now offers us another synopsis of his labours among the inadequate accomplishments of others: ‘Jung's works were incomplete and not wholly reliable’, ‘dozens of unpublished papers’, some of the Collected Works ‘did not exactly correspond to the manuscripts’, only ‘10%’ of Jung's correspondence has been published and so on. All of which is, of course, leading to the inevitable conclusion that most of what is written about Jung,