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The author of this book has read Jung carefully, spent time in Africa meeting knowledgeable people, who understand the customs of the ethnic group Jung ‘studied’ on his safari, and has assembled the whole into a narrative account of the Bugishu Psychological Expedition, as Jung's African journey in 1925-6 was grandly titled. Of all Jung's travels this five-month journey was one he returned to in his writings and seminars, and for all his protests that inner events were always more important to him than outer ones, this safari ‘may be considered the most important “outer” event in Jung's life’. Burleson claims ‘the Jung safari of 1925-6 stands as the one central outer event which shaped his paradigmatic life and revolutionary thought’. He goes on to say that in Africa ‘Jung found his raison d’être, his life “myth”, [and that] Jung was one of the first post-modern men’ (p. 17). His post-modernism is further associated with the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, ‘the interdependence philosophies of Buddhism, the yin-yang polarities of Taoism, paleontological discoveries on human origins, Northrop Frye's literary hermeneutics’ and more besides. This is Burleson at his most reverential.
His other side recognizes that Jung had a superficial knowledge and understanding of the ethnic group he investigated, that he did not speak their language, and that his preconceptions and imperialistic assumptions coloured his account.
The most valuable parts of this book are those where the author is able to bring his own knowledge to bear on Jung's findings and subject them to critical examination. The weakest parts are where the author strives to be a good Jungian and give weight to alternative interpretations for Jung's enlightenment, behaviour or dreams. An example of this is the tenuous link to the puer aeternus and Europeans who went to Africa, such as Denys Finch-Hatton. This theorizing sits awkwardly in the text. Another consequence of this striving after Jungian explanation