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.
It has taken Jungian thought some time to get a foothold in Scandinavia. Judging from this recent anthology in Danish, the ice has been broken finally and Jung has arrived in the North. Eleven fully trained analysts participated in the project and they must have felt that what they were producing was more than just another book about therapy. Rather, it is the proof that Jungian ideas are now an integral part of the cultural milieu in their country, perhaps Scandinavia as a whole.
As the title suggests, the book is divided into three sections titled ‘Symbol’, ‘Analysis’ and ‘Reality’, and within each there are clearly very different approaches to doing analysis. Some of the contributors deal with their subject using a distinctly Zürich vocabulary, others seem to have their allegiance with the London School and its more developmental perspective. However, there is also something uniquely Scandinavian in their approach. Perhaps the choice of topics, the interest in myth and fairytale is the uniting element, but that is not all. There is also a quietly independent voice coming through.
Pia Skogemann, the editor and moving force behind the project, at least in the fore-word to the anthology, strikes a characteristically humble tone. Its purpose, she states, is to give ‘a broad and nuanced picture of the theory and practice of analytical psychology in Denmark’. Later, in one of her own contributions, she is less humble. Addressing the question of what is essentially Danish, she ponders what the ‘archetypal tendency’ of democracies may look like. As far as the Danes are concerned, although she finds them democratic, they are still surprisingly tribal. Like the Elgonyi in Kenya, whom Jung visited in the 1920s, she sees her land's men and land's women as identified with certain rituals, seemingly conscious acts, still in their essence collective and unconscious. Thus, Danes still have many religious rituals and beliefs, yet they are very tolerant and they have a stubbornly de