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A friend and colleague trained in a Freudian tradition commented to me recently that like many other ‘Jungians’ that he knew, I had ‘gone over’, meaning that he detected little difference between the assumptions, clinical and theoretical, that he held compared with mine. His assumption and the comment that it gave rise to, like others over the years in a similar vein, was the occasion for mixed feelings for me. On the one hand it is gratifying to find common ground and shared perspectives; on the other hand there is disappointment that the provenance of at least some of these shared ideas is unknown or unacknowledged. In the end I suppose it does not matter very much, but as Richard Carvalho comments in Chapter 2 of this book the concept of an unrepressed unconscious is ‘only one aspect of Jung's legacy that is in danger of being assimilated seamlessly and without acknowledgement into psychoanalysis’ (p. 31).
In Britain, since the 1930s at least, a tradition has evolved of close contacts, clinical, personal and professional, between some analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts; these exchanges have continued to both link and differentiate the ideas of Freud and his successors and those of Jung and his. For some analytical psychologists, this has arisen out of a spirit of regret that the disagreements between Jung and Freud ended in acrimony and split, arguably to the detriment and impoverishment of the contribution each had to make – notwithstanding important differences between them – and something of this spirit I think permeates this book.
The book provides a cross section of the contemporary work and preoccupations of a number of analytical psychologists who are mostly, but not exclusively, members of the Society of Analytical Psychology; all chapters reflect a tradition which values many of Jung's ideas, clinical and theoretical, but has also sought to extend and develop these. Several of the authors, for example, draw extensively upon the work of Michael For