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Despite the excellence of this absolutely splendid new biography, Jung studies still have a long way to go. Partly this has to be a consequence of the limitations that appear to be inherently a part of the biographical form. Nobody who has not undertaken to write a serious biography can know, I believe, how much hard work goes into such an effort, and Deirdre Bair's previous track record, with fine books on Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Anaïs Nin, makes her a leading contemporary practitioner of her craft. While biographies remain a chief means by means of which history gets transmitted from one generation to the next, within university life biographies do not seem to have much standing; so in history, psychology, as well as my own field of political science, biographical endeavours are consistently looked down upon, as if they were some kind of inferior-level intellectual enterprise. And if they prove commercially successful that can be all the more reason for jealous academics to be disdainful of them.
In addition to these anti-biographical biases, unusual prejudices against Jung are remarkably tenacious and influential. The first two sentences of the review of Bair's book for the daily New York Times illustrate part of the current climate of opinion.
Carl Gustav Jung was an insufferable egotist, cruel to his family, a womanizer, with bad table manners to boot. He was a founder of psychoanalysis, but today his teachings have little importance in the treatment of mental illness.
Although the Times journalist, not a regular book reviewer, also maintained that ‘it is unlikely that another biography can ever equal this in its scrupulousness and the depth of its research’, she cooked up the attention-grabbing opening sentence based on her own personal reactions to Bair's narrative, and proceeded without known professional qualifications to concoct the shockingly dismissive second sentence. One wishes, for example, she had read the admirable 20