Bishop, Paul. Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics. Goethe, Schiller, and Jung. Volume 1. The Development of Personality. London & New York:  Routledge, 2008. Pp.  xiv + 233. Volume 2. The Constellation of the Self. London & New York:  Routledge, 2009. Pp.  xii + 221.

This is a thrilling book to read, but one that, like a carriage passing through a vineyard, yields the rich vistas it surveys not at a glance, but at a gathering pace. It moves with 18^th century leisure in the first volume, where one frequently has to read a sentence more than once to see, through the window of one's limited access to the sensibilities of that period, what one is expected to take in. The logical connections between sentences overlap like gnarled, dry vines trailing through the thoughtful landscape that is being so patiently revealed. They can seem to be nothing more than dense dry wood that is there simply to point the way through this complicated chapter in the history of ideas. Bishop has to tease out for us a philosophy nearly unknown to English-speaking readers, the aesthetic principles of classical education's chief humanizers, Goethe and Schiller, who working in Weimar did much in their day to shape the German attitude toward education that we find in Jung and can sometimes seem precious to an Anglophone. It won't after reading this book: no one else has exposed the psychological premises of the Weimar view of education as a lifelong acculturating project in such detail and with such warm, infectious empathy. By the time we get to the second volume of this work (and the volumes are not long, just comfortably sized), we are going at an increasing pace, first at a canter and then at full gallop, as Bishop's passionate sentences quicken to press their points home to our rapt attention. As his sentences deliver their astonishing evidence for the way Goethe has (to use a word the poet himself might have used) anticipated Jung, they seem to hurl themselves forward with our own anticipation of their vitality: the argument develops leaves, even bloom on its dry vines and becomes increasingly animated.

It culminates, only after we have fully savoured its efflorescence, in a final, satisfying image of fruit—grapes served by Goethe himself at an 1828 banq