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As I thought about this review, two background issues immediately presented themselves. First, the interpersonal and the Jungian perspectives have historically had little publicly to say to one another. The reasons for this lack
of mutual engagement are many. As an avowed interpersonalist with a deep interest in Jung, my wish is that this review might play a small part in moving toward a more fruitful relationship between these two approaches. The second issue is that I usually find it difficult to review a book of articles by different authors (thirteen in this case). I will be hard pressed to do justice to the wide range of contributions in this volume.
The interpersonalists (Sullivan, Fromm, Thompson) began as a rebellion against many of the Freudian theoretical rigidities that Jung and Jungians have also rebelled against. But the interpersonalists were most interested in relationships, in the here-and-now of living, and in therapeutic approaches, and less interested in the life of the mind, of myths and dreams. While both groups were devoted to issues of cultural influence, interpersonalists paid attention to the significance of social interconnections, while Jungians looked deeper within the archetypal realm to the life of the collective unconscious. This mutual interest in cultural variables might have led to some interesting collaboration between the two schools, but this was not to be. While the interpersonalists were too caught up in the struggle to best Freud in the clinical realm, the Jungians seemed to have little interest in focusing on and staying with the mundane, day-to-day struggles of ordinary patients.
The interpersonalists have never been particularly aware of Jung’s strong interpersonal bent (documented by David Sedgwick in ‘Jung as a Pioneer of Relational Analysis’, presented at the IARPP Conference in New York City in March, 2012) and the Jungians, for their part, have scarcely been inclined to study the iconoclastic and richly clinical and so