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This is a ‘Jungian’ book—not necessarily in the sense that it was written by a dyed-in-the-wool Jungian (the author calls Jung a ‘borderline psychotic’; p. 77)— but that it is Jungocentric, as it were; that is, it takes what Jung wrote (and said) as the starting and the end point of an interpretative endeavour. This is perfectly legitimate, of course, but its consequence is that an outside or historical perspective is suspended, left out, for that enterprise. See Jung from ‘within,’ it seems to say, see his (re)sources and how he drew on them, fought and digested them, see what he came up with. And how he put that into words: ‘the figure of Jung that really matters’ is more ‘the textual Jung, … the Jung that expressed itself through texts (in the form of the Collected Works, in lectures, seminars and correspondence) and that arose through encounters with texts, than the biographical Jung’. In other words, this book is intended to represent ‘a biography of Jung in books’ (p. 21; ital. in orig.).
Paul Bishop takes us through Jung's reading list: from Goethe, Kant and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, from the literature on somnambulistic states, notably Kerner and Flournoy, to Janet and Freud, and so on and on, in adding interpretations (and sometimes associations) of his own. But of course he cannot avoid having recourse, time and again, to the biographical Jung.
It is here that the book is weakest. First of all, we do not learn anything new, nothing that has not been known before. No new archival sources have been tapped, no new research undertaken. This, too, is quite fine for a book that wants to give a condensed overview. It is all the more regrettable, however, that when the author does present biographical, historical ‘facts,’ he gets so many of them wrong, even in the light of the published documents.
To give but a few examples: Transformations and Symbols of the Libido is said to be Jung's ‘first major publication’ (p. 14), thus omitting the groundbreaking book on the