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Susan Rowland's writing has an infectious way of opening the mind. This book reads like a living hologram of Jung's opus, expertly moving over a very complex terrain at once familiar and new. She examines Jung's impact as a creative writer on the arts and literature, religion, myth, alchemy, politics and gender. From the first chapter we already have the benefit of the author's understanding of Jung's mature work and by the end we have met a Jung freed from the obscurities, polemics, and conflicts that arise from trying to explain what he is saying rather than moving with him as he circumambulates an unknown centre. Rowland identifies this as Jung's uniquely ‘spiral form’ of writing and speaks to the psychoanalytic criticism of his writing as obtuse by adding ‘other more evocative, artistic, metaphorical and even playful kinds of language are needed to let the psyche breathe in writing’ (p. 30). She pivots the text around Jung's awareness of the ‘holeness’ in wholeness and the ‘gap in meaning’, which must remain at the centre of all post-modern discourse for meaning to emerge. This book is both a brilliant introduction to Jung, cleared of positivist and essentialist readings, and a deep re-minding of his most radical re-visionings of human consciousness for well-versed students of Jung as well as analysts.
Rowland's multi-layered, multi-voiced text mirrors the richness of multiple voices of the psyche that she finds in Jung. She includes commentaries on some of Jung's key essays, as well as discussions on Jungian arts theory and criticism. In addition there are chapters on myth and history, gender and politics, Jung's work with alchemy and re-visioning of religion, and finally his conversation with and contribution to science through synchronicity, paving the way for a new alive and grounded holism in the 21st century. Each chapter is followed by a list of further readings. All this is entwined with notes about Jung's life and the development of his thought. The book