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The book consists of 476 of Jung's letters, most of them written between 1951 and 1961, the year he died. They were written to a number of famous recipients-Ernest Jones, Romola Nijinsky, Herbert Read, Philip Wylie, Upton Sinclair-as well as to less noted friends and to strangers who wrote seeking advice. Eminently readable, the letters intertwine philosophy, theology, and Jungian psychological theory so richly with the mundane that those interested in Jung's thought will certainly want to read the book.
Many of the letters hold professional interest for the practitioner of modern psychoanalysis. For example, in a letter to John Weir Perry, Jung says of schizoid cases that they
as well as neurotic ones very often repeat their personal infancy story. This is a favourable sign in so far as it is an attempt to grow up into the world again as they had done before, viz. in their infancy…The insistence of the Freudians upon making people revive their past simply shows that in the Freudian analysis people don't naturally take to living their past again, simply because they have resistance against the analyst. If you let the unconscious have its natural way, then you may be sure everything the patient needs to know will be brought up, and you may be equally sure that everything you bring out from the patient by insistence on theoretical grounds will not be integrated into the patient's personality, at least not as a positive value, but maybe as a lasting resistance. (pp. 148-149)