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Even today Jung remains a difficult figure to assess. A good part of the problem in appreciating his work comes from the sectarian way in which so many of us have been educated in the history of depth psychology. At least in the early stages of one's interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, it has been common to dismiss Jung as a rejected, if not despised, rival. Even among the most ideologically emancipated contemporary psychoanalysts, relatively few are familiar with Jung's clinical contributions.
The difficulties in understanding Jung do not stem simply from the narrowness of the reading lists at most training centers, although that surely is a good part of the problem. Jung was, to begin with, not so great a literary stylist as Freud. And professional Jung studies have necessarily been late in starting. As long as the Jung family, for example, persists in refusing to allow a full-scale authorized biography to be undertaken, so that all Jung's private documents can be explored, writings about Jung's life and career are bound to retain an unfortunate, amateurish flavor. Furthermore, certain publications—such as an existing second volume of Jung's autobiography—have been embargoed by the Jung family, so that independent historians are bound to feel frustrated about the state of appreciating Jung's work. Even the editing of Jung's texts has been, compared with all that James Strachey did for Freud, decidedly on the perfunctory side.
It is perhaps a lot to expect busy clinicians to exert the effort necessary to explicate Jung's contribution. And so we have had a whole series of books that attempt to orient the beginner to what Jung had to say. Clarke's In Search of Jung is admirable in that he approaches his task from the standpoint of an intellectual historian. The book is primarily an attempt “to locate Jung's thought within