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Christopher Hauke's extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging book is a challenge to a reviewer in two ways: on the one hand there are the variety of authors cited and currents of contemporary thought explored which challenge the understanding of any reader without a similar breadth of knowledge; on the other, there is the contradiction that a book review is a particularly modernist way of approaching what is an explicitly postmodern text. There is an irony that the book cannot be contained in a review which attempts to impose its own order and understanding as the book itself is very much about the futility of such an attempt. With this caveat in place, perhaps I can give a response to the book rather than a review as such.
The cover of the book shows a picture of Jung in early middle age, looking directly into the camera with a confident, but unsmiling gaze. The photo is cropped so that we just see most of his face and right shoulder. There is an impression of layering on the cover as though this fragment is just the uppermost of many other images, and in itself is an arbitrary one. Those familiar with Jung's life will recognize the image as being part of a portrait of Jung standing with his family at the Château d'Oex, near Lausanne, in 1917, where Jung was the commandant of an internment camp for British soldiers who had escaped into Switzerland. As such, the partial image suggests two things: firstly, that the Jung described in this book is someone divorced from family - ‘Jung’ as icon, as object, free-floating in a world of competing realities; secondly, that the year 1917 is significant. This was the year that Jung discovered the containing power of the mandala, having found himself soothed by drawing sketches of circular patterns each morning; these images, he felt, represented a pattern of order, a symbol of the self by which psychological conflict and chaos could be contained. It was also shortly after he had finished writing The Transcendent Function, which wa