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My prolific teacher, Irving Janis, famous for his work on ‘groupthink’ and how the lack of anxiety before an operation leads to catastrophic reactions afterwards used to say, ‘A page a day, is a book a year’. The psychoanalyst Robert Langs has taken this motto to heart and produced at least a book a year. A review of an earlier work of his by William Goodheart (San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1, 4, Summer 1980) led the latter to formulate one of the most important and least known Jungian conceptualizations of the interactive field shared by analyst and patient in terms of the persona-restoring field, the complex-discharging field and the secure symbolizing field. Typologically, these earlier works were characterized by a dogmatic thinking orientation. In this book, Langs discovers death anxiety saying, ‘on the deep unconscious level of experience, life is essentially about death … like a ruling tyrant armed with secret service agents, deep unconscious death anxiety stealthily governs our life’ (p. x; italics in the original).
Langs confesses he became a psychoanalyst to escape a confrontation with death he had as a medical student. Out of his denial of death, he discovered religion and writes of it with the fervour of a convert, paraphrasing Mark Anthony, ‘I come not to bury religion, nor to praise it—I come to understand it’ (p. ix). As a classically trained Freudian psychoanalyst, spirituality and religion were not on his radar screen. Not surprisingly, he discovered Jung, the Archetypes and the Wisdom of the Unconscious, a process begun in other recent work.
From that perspective, we Jungians must feel gratified. Yet, this is a very problematic book and one that I cannot recommend to the reader. Like all writers who work in unfamiliar fields, Langs thinks he is providing profound insights when he is writing out of ignorance. He is unfamiliar with literature on psychoanalytic approaches to the Bible, despite a section so named (for an overview, see Abr