You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Roger Kennedy, writing from within the Independent tradition of British psychoanalysis, aims in this short book to show how a notion of ‘soul’ helps us to feel at home in the world. In his working definition, ‘… the soul is essentially an intersubjective entity, emerging from interactions between human subjects, not just an entity involved in a magical “interiority”’ (p. 7). Thus Kennedy aims to do for the soul what Jean Knox (2003) did for the archetypes by redefining an a priori given as a developmental acquisition. The phrase I have quoted suggests that Kennedy might be less than comfortable in the terrain of ‘magic’ and ‘interiority’, and this puts me in mind of Jung's (1952) suggestion that ‘… new points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name.’ Jungian readers, especially those now conversant with Liber Novus, may regret that Kennedy backs away from magic and the interior just at a point when Jungians are beginning to reorientate themselves to the themes of the analyst as magician and to ‘The Spirit of the Depths’; these featured in Jung's refinding of a soul which he certainly did not regard as an intersubjective acquisition.