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This is a very fine book, written with erudition, conviction and a point of view that is always clear, without being dogmatic. It is not only an essential read for any American with a curiosity about our ‘national character’, but also for citizens of the rest of the world who want an in-depth, accurate portrait of the American psyche.
As I first began to read this volume (and it takes time and work) I had misgivings that it might turn out to be an exercise in Jungian reductive thinking with its central thesis being ‘America: A Case Study of Puer/Senex Psychology’. But Dr Gellert is far too flexible a thinker, far too gifted a writer, far too keen an observer, far too good a historian and far too insightful an analytical psychologist to fall into a simplistic, reductive trap in the Jungian mode. Puer/senex psychology with its interplay between youth and authority runs throughout the study, but always in the context of very specific historic and contemporary examples so that analytical psychology never outweighs or gobbles up American political and cultural history. Gellert is as equally comfortable with Adams and Jefferson or Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan as he is with Jung and Hillman.
An idea that I have been developing in collaboration with others is the careful extension of Jung's theory of complexes to the cultural level of the psyche. Of course, the seeds of this are in Jung himself. As Gellert quotes Jung:
A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little