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.
Recently I started on Deirdre Bair's biography of Jung, beginning with Chapter 35(‘Why Men Had to Quarrel and Leave’), because it's where she deals with Victor White. A friend had written to me that this chapter depressed him, and I can see why. Bair is determined to avoid hagiography, which is fair enough; but in bending over backwards not to idealize Jung, she seems to have lost some of her zest for her subject. In this chapter, at least, I get no sense of the wildness and humour and joy that were part of Jung's life.
I do not think she likes him, actually. (Why use a word like ‘brutally’ to describe how he sent away uninvited guests when White was visiting in Bollingen?) She sees only hostility, competition and pettiness in Jung's relationships with most of the men and many of the women around him. She describes their group endeavours as if they were siblings fighting over an inheritance. It's a dreary, seamy, somehow flat-footed account. For example, her account of White's and Jung's friendship captures little of their excitement and intellectual risk-taking.
Sloppiness about the dates of published writings renders Bair's whole account of the Jung-White relationship opaque. Granted, I have closely studied only five pages in a book of 851, but how many similar errors does the volume contain?
Bair is strangely confused about the sequence of events in the Jung-White story, and therefore wildly mistaken, at times, when she speculates about their motives. She says that White's 1949 review of Jung's lecture ‘On the Self’ was ‘a last warning salvo’ to Jung not to publish Answer to Job. This makes no sense at all. White's review of ‘On the Self’ was published well before Answer to Job was even started. And I do not know where she gets the idea that White would have issued a warning to Jung by means of a negative review. (In his letters, as it happens, White never warned Jung against publishing Job. On the contrary, prior to 1954 he expressed only enthusiasm for its publica