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Sonu Shamdasani is a historian of psychology and a Research Associate of the Welcome Centre Trust for the History of Medicine at University College London (formerly the Welcome Institute for the History of Medicine). He has written extensively on the birth of modern psychology and particularly on William James, Théodore Flournoy and C.G. Jung. He is currently developing a scholarly edition of Jung's famous ‘Red Book’ at the request of Jung's heirs, which will be eagerly awaited and which, following the thesis of this current book, will be confusing and confounding to those who thought they knew who Jung was and what the nature of his psychological project consisted of. In his researches over the past two decades, Shamdasani has uncovered the ‘other’ Jung—the one left out of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the one misrepresented by both adherents and enemies, the one only partially represented in the Collected Works, and the one whose two-volume Letters encompasses only a twentieth of his correspondence available to scholars. This commitment to discovery and explication makes any publication by Shamdasani a welcome event and this current work is no exception.
Shamdasani explicitly has a number of theses to set out, and he is clear that he has no conclusion to offer—in a way this is in fact another thesis: that the current state of development of psychology in general and understanding of Jung's work in particular is still too slight to allow conclusions to be drawn. This, in turn, was also Jung's conclusion about his own project, and Shamdasani says he is being faithful to this for similar reasons.
That Jung was not attempting to develop a psycho-therapeutics but a unified psychology which, because it had the ability to describe and represent the inevitable human subjectivity underlying all scientific activity, was to be the over-arching science for the 20th century.
That because of this, ‘Complex Psychology’ (the psychological study of complexity and