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From Mary Ann Mattoon's perspective as longstanding Zurich-trained analyst, psychologist and university level teacher, ‘there have long been excellent introductions to Jungian thought’ but ‘still none congenial to a non-technical style, to say nothing of a truly popular style. This book is meant to fill that gap’ (p. ix). I think that such a task is paradoxically deceptively simple and it is questionable to what extent this book succeeds in its entirety.
As becomes clear from the chapter headings, this relatively slim volume represents something of a cross between an introduction to Jungian psychology and, intentionally, a self-help manual. In its attempts to be both comprehensive and understandable, it covers a huge amount of ground, of necessity, succinctly. For example, Chapter 1, the ‘Introduction’, in sixteen pages including the helpful ‘Recommended readings’ at the end of each chapter, has sections on the ‘Origins of Jungian psychology’, ‘Jung's life’, ‘Jung and Freud’ and ‘Analytical psychology and other psychologies’. This latter section is itself divided into subsections on psychoanalysis, academic psychology, Adlerian psychology, humanistic psychology and, finally, the scope and significance of Jung's work.
Following the introduction, the early chapters describe the make-up and development of the psyche. Chapters 2. and 3, ‘The visible psyche’ and ‘The hidden psyche’, go from the surface to the more interior, from persona to collective unconscious, including the contents and nature of the collective unconscious, with subsections on archetypes, instincts and alchemy. Chapter 4, ‘Becoming who we are’, takes both a developmental and, less familiar to this reviewer, archetypal perspective, with relatively long sections devoted to both female and male psychology, the former encompassing the contributions of Emma Jung and a paper by Toni Wolff on structural forms of the female psyche, together with Guggenbuhl-Craig's variations on these forms—he enumerates nine, a