Tabooed Jung: Marginality as Power by Christine Gallant New York:  New York University Press, 1996,  v + 185 pp., $37.50

What does it mean to make something or someone taboo? The word originates in Polynesia and, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it was originally an adjective indicating that something was excluded “from use, approach, or mention because of its sacred and inviolable nature.” Freud (1913), of course, introduced the term into psychoanalytic history and theory in Totem and Taboo where he speculated on the fate of the murdered father in some primordial time past, and implicitly, on his own imagined fate at the hands of the band of brothers gathered around him. Freud certainly succeeded in establishing himself as the totem animal for the tribe of psychoanalysts, but was he also taboo?

As Christine Gallant argues in this enlightening book, the notion of taboo applies not to Freud, but most directly to the figure of C. G. Jung. This state of affairs, and the reasons for it, continue to be central to our understanding of the history of psychoanalysis, not the least because theoreticians and historians working out of the psychoanalytic frame continue, by and large, not only to ignore the intricacies of the relationship between Freud and Jung, but also to accept at face value the remarkably distorted representation of Jung's work perpetrated by the early Freudians. Not the least of the virtues of Gallant's book is a brief but pointed review of a number of contemporary writers on psychoanalysis, including, among others, Fran$cCois Roustang, Reuben Fine, John Gedo, Peter Gay, Jay Greenberg, Robert Wallerstein, and Stephen Mitchell who all display, at least in their written work a striking lack of familiarity with Jung's actual thought (pp. 24-25). This lack of even passing familiarity with the work of Jung, and the associated tendency to assume that it consists of nothing but mystical musings, appears to be as necessary now, for the maintenance of