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. C. G. Jung and Literary Theory. The Challenge from Fiction. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 235. Hbk. £42.50.
Susan Rowland is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich, London. She has a research interest in feminism, postmodern spirituality and post-colonialism. This book is a one-woman crusade to elevate Jung to the deconstructed Olympus with Freud, Klein and Lacan. She wishes to kindle a romance between the psychology of Jung and post-ructuralist literary theory. Jung the humanist transforms into post-structural Jung. Rowland's main axioms are that the literary text verifies psychological theory and that the ‘authority of Jungian theory needs to be reconstructed and its textuality reinstated’. She uses the texts of Lindsey Clark's The Chymical Wedding, Michelle Robert's In the Red Kitchen, Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters and Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos to prove her point. This is an innovative contribution though the neophyte needs to be armed with patience to decipher the often dense prose. Rowland is refreshingly original and interesting when she throws off the shackles of jargon and reverts to her own lyrical language. The chapters on literary criticism are a good read.
& . Prophets, Cults and Madness. London: Duckworth, 2000. Pp. + 246. Hbk. £18.00.
Stevens and Price elaborate the evolutionary explanation for schizophrenia first presented in Evolutionary Psychiatry in 1996 (revised edition this year). They ask why cult leaders proliferate, what are the evolutionary advantages of irrational beliefs and why people are credulous and easily seduced into a phantasmagorical world. They wage a crusade against the existing medical model of mental illness and predict a paradigm shift or ‘a collective mazeway resynthesis’. The evolutionary perspective illuminates the darker recesses of human nature that the social and cognitive sciences cannot reach.