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Theories and movements of human liberation tend to become repressive themselves. The grander the vision of all-encompassing liberation of humankind, and the firmer the conviction of the ‘Truth’ found, the more terrible the consequences for those who do not underwrite that Truth. Nobody questions simple truths (water runs downhill, the sun spends light), while millions have been killed over so-called higher Truths. So it is refreshing to read a book trying to demystify the grand, supposedly liberating concepts of four important psychologists of the twentieth century. But it is also disappointing to see that the book falls short of its promises.
Its basic message is that Gross, Jung, Reich, and Fromm, those ‘modern-day psycho-alchemists’ (p. 30), were the creators of untrue, but ‘good’ or ‘healing’ myths (pp. 209, 126, passim), revolving around the assertion that man is essentially good, and that this goodness is buried within us, but prevented from coming to the fore by various reasons (modern society, for example). If we change those conditions, utopia will emerge. Thus, it would be possible to ‘create a society where people identify with their so-called Authentic Self (the original unspoiled source of good)’ (p. 6). Respectively, those authors believed that problems of modern man could be solved by ‘Gross's Matriarchal Communism, Jung's Archetypal Cosmos, Reich's Orgonomic Functionalism and Fromm's Socialist Humanism’ (p. 6). Although, according to Pietikainen, these are false, ‘untrue’ views, some good may come from such psycho-utopian beliefs in that they can create self-fulfilling prophecies, so that these positive illusions may be beneficial for mental health and well-being after all, and help to avoid ‘depressing realism’ (p. 211). ‘Thus, to live in a world of facts is not enough, because we need healing untruths to give our existence a glamour and, thereby, to avoid sometime unbearable mental suffering’ (p. 127).