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When a new dictionary appears, my first question is: for whom is it written? This short dictionary of Jung's terminology, written and published in French, is claimed by its publishers to address three levels of enquiry. The first section within each entry is aimed at the complete newcomer to Jung's thought and the second to readers already familiar with his ideas. A third part of the entry aims to be discursive rather than defining, offering links between different Jungian concepts. This dictionary is one in a series which treats in a similar fashion about a hundred (mainly continental) European philosophers. Freud and Lacan are included. I assume that its main target readership will be the educated general reader of Jung in French, who will currently have access to a part, though not yet the whole, of the Collected Works in French translation. I imagine that some of these readers will be interested in Jung's ideas from a mainly intellectual or philosophical point of view. Others will have had some contact with Jungian analysis, and so may approach Jung from a more experiential or clinical interest.
If this is the book's aim, to what extent have the authors succeeded? Anyone coming newly to Jung's work would need a working definition of ‘archetype’, and the two-page entry under this heading does exactly what the publishers say they set out to do, offering a concise and clear definition, followed by a longer section referring to the evolution of the concept in Jung's thought. A third section concentrates, rather oddly, on refuting the misapprehension ‘that archetypes would be transmitted through heredity’. There is, however, no discussion of the clinical application of the concept—what the archetypal might look like in an analysis or how it might feature clinically. Nor is there within this entry a list of the main archetypes identified, named and discussed by Jung. Under the heading ‘Transference’, following a concise one-sentence definition, the more detailed entrie