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Frances Gray's book is written in clear and lucid prose, engaging and directly addressing us when it serves her purposes (and ours). This is an important work for many reasons.
My first reaction to her proposition that Jung and Descartes have much in common was instinctive rejection: the French rationalist and mathematician does not seem a proper antecedent. Perhaps this reaction was intensified by my studies of the work of Giambattista Vico, a powerful critic of Descartes and a philosopher who James Hillman, for one, points out has close affinities to Jung. However, after reading Gray's work, I see that Vico's objections to Descartes are different from those of the scholars she alludes to. And, finally, Gray is persuasive in showing affinities with Jung by using considerations of phenomenology and previously disregarded aspects of Cartesian material.
Gray first establishes that contemporary Jungian scholars' view of Descartes as committed to a separation of mind and body is outdated, particularly earlier work by Roger Brooke on phenomenology and Robert Romanyshyn's discussions. Using more recent scholarship and her own analysis based on Pierre Hadot's work, as well as careful assessments of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she points out how Jung fits into this tradition. We soon see the importance of insistence on the Cartesian idea of the relationship of mind and body.
What is pertinent, according to Gray, is the method by which the body is bracketed and the phenomenological technique of epoche (suspension of judgement) rather than the sheer isolation of the body as a way to an epistemological position: it is here that she finds Jung and Descartes might show similarities. Descartes posits, in some ways similarly to Jung's analysis, she claims, a new psyche/body which is posited for methodological purposes—a