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As a Freudian-by-lineage, I am both honoured and embarrassed to have been invited to comment on Thomas B. Kirsch's The Jungians: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. Honoured, because it is a splendid, welcome book; and embarrassed, because it is a history with which I have been virtually unfamiliar, except for those early-years events which cross-over into the Freudian canon. Kirsch's book reads like an analytic treatment: a strong narrative is repeated many times, with each iteration adding new details, new affect, new personalities, and old personalities in a new light, until, near the end, it is suddenly clear that a story of congruent complexity and depth has been assembled.
The story is an old and familiar one, the fate of ideas developed by a charismatic personality. Its music, which refuses to stay in the background, is conflict, the clash between the original and his heirs (in this case, not really ‘the original’ but his most fiercely loyal adherents), the classical and the new, the archetypal and the developmental. This conflict can also be seen as the difficulty of a meeting between two modes in which we learn, what can be called the ‘identificatory’ and the ‘introjective’ (Vida, in press; Vida & Molad 2000). In the identificatory mode, we try to stay as close to the original as possible, imitating, emulating, transmitting, wearing it virtually as a garment, an easily recognizable garment. In the introjective mode, we take in, digest, and absorb the original, we are transformed from the inside in a unique and unpredictable fashion, and we will confound efforts at categorization. In the identificatory mode there is idealization, and in the introjective our self is made larger from within. But we must beware the temptation to dichotomize - none of us is a pure culture of either, but varying admixtures of both.
At Versailles, in July 2000, at a meeting of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis, Thomas B. Kirsch was invited to spea