You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A biography of Jung which aims, in four hundred pages, to do justice to his life, his work and the content of his ideas is an ambitious work, to which a review of this length cannot fully do justice; hence this reviewer wishes to state at the outset that she is offering no more than a subjective impression of Hayman's work.
My first reading was difficult but deeply involving, because of the immense richness of detail which makes it possible for the reader to get alongside Jung at the level of his everyday life. This brings us directly into contact with the contradictions and paradoxes of his personality: his straightforwardness, his capacity for welcoming and listening to his visitors, his love of life demonstrated in laughter and partying; yet alongside this his roughness, impatience and the great costs imposed by his personal emotional investment in his work. Specifically, this last seems to have led him, through his involvement with collective aspects of the unconscious, to over-value an archetypal level of understanding to the detriment of personal aspects of his relationships.