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There have been a number of collections of Jungian papers coming out at regular intervals over the past few years and most of them seem to be directed to the professional analytical community. This volume positions itself as a text ‘evaluating new ideas’ and presenting ‘a critical view of theory and practice’. The husband and wife team who have produced this book have done a lot of work to ensure that the contemporary ideas are worked into the subject-matter of the articles presented. The dominating idea of the volume is ‘emergence’ and many of the authors link their clinical material to this concept, described by Weber as follows:
Emergence occurs when new properties appear in a system that were not present in, and could not easily have been predictable from, the components of the system. Emergent phenomena obey laws that arise with the novel properties. Emergent phenomena impose conditions on their constituents that depend on the nature of the emergent phenomena.
The first person into this field in the Jungian community was David Tresan, publishing in the Journal of Analytical Psychology and he has been quickly followed by contributions from George Hogenson and Jean Knox. These last two making an appearance in this volume with variations on a theme, to which both have made substantial contributions. And in a way this is the problem for this volume of papers. To whom are they addressed? The editors in their introduction assume the reader will have ‘a basic familiarity with core Jungian concepts’. Many of the papers read as familiar contributions from their authors, e.g., John Beebe on types, and some have in one form or another appeared elsewhere (Cambray, Kirsch, Knox, Stein, Solomon) which left me wondering whether the editors’ intention was to attract readers who do not usually read the Jungian literature, but may have attended some introductory lectures on analytical psychology. If this is the case then this can be seen as a valuable work of reference