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Agnel, Aimeé. Jung: La Passion de l'Autre. Toulouse, France: Les Essentiels Milan, . Pp. 63. Pbk. $ 5,50.
The collection, Les Essentiels Milan, aims at introducing to a wide audience some of the different cultural and social problems that confront us in our modern world. A precise and succinct text, accompanied by appropriate illustrations and tables, a glossary and a short bibliography, permits the reader to approach difficult and profound themes without in any way reducing their complexity. The 237th book in the series, dedicated to Carl Gustav Jung, Jung: La Passion de l'Autre (Jung: The Passion of the Other) is the work of Aime Agnel, Jungian analyst, author and past President of the Societe Francaise de Psychologie Analytique.
One of the problems of any short exposition of, or introduction to, Jung's thought is the non-linear, confused and sometimes even contradictory nature of his writings. As Agnel points out in his introduction, throughout his long life, Jung constantly re-worked his ideas and thoughts on the nature of the psyche through a kind of evolutionary process whereby initial intuitions gradually underwent secondary elaboration and became enriched by accruing amplifications. As he tells us, ‘in order to study a Jungian concept we should always try to take into consideration the different transformations it has undergone before it arrives at its final form’ (p. 3), and this is exactly what he manages to do in a very interesting and successful way.
Agnel (pp. 8-9) shows us how the themes elaborated intuitively in the Zofingia Lectures of Jung's student days (the existence of an immaterial and intelligent psychic principle which is independent of space-time, the need for theories of knowledge that give validity to subjective experience, the idea that it is always possible to overcome conflict and the tension between opposites through the recognition of the essential unity of the world) run like a thread right through his work until the final texts dedicate