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This extensive and interesting book is without doubt the most lucid and intelligible presentation of the Jungian psychiatry yet to appear in print. The painstaking thoroughness and erudition of the author are admirable and enviable, and, if one grants the central point of view, the work is an important contribution to the problem of schizophrenia. Indeed, even without this fundamental
agreement, the clinical material presented and the frequent illuminating insights considered quite apart from the central thesis, would make this work of great scientific value to the psychiatrist.
The book represents a consistent application of the Jungian psychology to the clinical data of two patients, these data consisting of material from interviews concerning mainly the dreams and drawings of the patients. Some fifty or sixty of the latter are reproduced. The psychoanalyst is immediately alienated from sympathy with the author by reason of the dogmatism of his interpretations. There is no working through of material with a view to arriving at interpretations: what free association is done by the patients is utilized merely to confirm an interpretation already firmly fixed in the author's mind. Where the associations do not clearly give this confirmation, they are ignored or the dissidence is explained away in some manner. The author is so convinced of the fundamental truth of his central thesis that he finds no need to retest or to verify it.
The central thesis stems from Jung's formulation of a racial unconscious, a hypothesis which has also proved fascinating to Freud (cf. his Moses and Monotheism among other works). Mr. Baynes visualizes the individual unconscious as containing material largely of an antisocial or asocial nature inherited from primitive ancestral sources and having no derivative relation to the individual's own experience. This material exists in a state of dissociation from the remainder of the individual's psyche and constitutes what he terms 'the