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Readers familiar with the post-Jungian movement and its literature will find in Susan Rowland's Jung as a Writer an attempt to demonstrate ‘…Jung's contribution to literary and cultural theory in autobiography, gender studies, postmodernism, feminism, deconstruction, ecocriticism and postcolonialism’ (publisher's description). Older readers may fondly recall The Encyclopaedia Britannica of fifty years ago where one could find transparencies over the bodies of a male and female image. By carefully lifting the transparencies and placing them back over the figures a reader could discern the circulating system, the organs etc., of the human body. In an admittedly expansive metaphor, this is something that Rowland rhetorically attempts to do over the body of Jung's writing. But instead of transparencies, Rowland employs a panoply of contemporary critical theorists and their conceptual frames as rhetorical arguments to demonstrate what Jung as a writer is revealing as a scientist, psychologist, and aesthetician. In her penultimate sentence of the book, Rowland writes: ‘While Jung's texts are limited by his own prejudices, his writing is yet to be fully appreciated as an experimental process of cultural healing” (p. 195).
Beginning with what the book intends to do in the first sentence above and concluding that Jung's writing can more fully be appreciated as ‘an experimental process of cultural healing’, Susan Rowland as a writer explores Jung as a writer. The pairing is interesting in that it almost approaches that of analyst/analysand. Rather her essays are the treatise of a critic/author dyad, and the journey that Rowland takes with her reader is a challenging one. Yet, the object of her dyad, Jung, in the end enigmatically remains something of a sphinx with a riddle all of his own.
Rowland begins Chapter I by observing that she is interested in how Jung wrote his works and why attention to his writing style is revealing, poised as Jung is, in Rowland's judgement, between