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In his preface to this enormously important book, its editor, Murray Stein, president and one of the guiding spirits of the recently founded C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, writes:
In the popular view … Jungian analysis still retains an esoteric aura, bearing the overtones of a cultic experience and a “mystical” approach to psychological life…. Persons who enter Jungian analysis are often surprised to find that it is analytically tough-minded and mostly devoid of cultic or mystical qualities, that it is not always supportive of lofty spiritual strivings, and that it is usually geared more toward mundane psychological conflicts than toward purely symbolic inward journeys.
A major goal of this book is to spell out how Jungian analysts actually work, and how they understand what they are doing. As the reader will see, these accounts have the effect of distancing Jungian analysis from the mystical and occult traditions with which it has been too closely identified by misguided or misinformed lay persons and professionals, and of relating it to the
Page 99broad spectrum of modern psychotherapies and to other schools of psychodynamic thought and research.
It is perhaps a reflection of just how identified with the mystical and occult traditions Jungian analysis has actually been (and not only mistakenly perceived as being), that, while to the Jungian reader this text will seem a long step away from those traditions and towards the broad mainstream of psychological thought, to the professional at home in that mainstream I suspect it will persist in seeming quite mystical and occult. The distance that remains to be covered may be appreciated by considering the large number of Jungian analysts practicing today who think of the Jungian approach not primarily as a better kind of psychotherapy but as a spiritual path for our time.
In the hopes of closing that distance, Jungian Analysis sets for itself three related objectives, each of vital importance, it seems to me, to the future of Ju