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The flow of publications by Carl Jung continues almost unabated. Almost each year sees the publication of several volumes by the Swiss analyst. His pupils and followers continue to be almost equally as prolific but none seems to possess his particularly poetic, vivid, and clear style.
His German is most pleasant to read even when one cannot always subscribe to his ideas. He remains the best and clearest exponent of his own ideas—the writings of many of his followers showing far less clarity, comprehension, and are often far more mystically fuzzy than those of their teacher. It is always best to refer to Jung's own publications rather than those of his school when discussing his ideas.
The volume under review is a second somewhat revised and augmented edition of a work published in 1928. The first edition contained four essays, three of which had previously appeared in English in Jung's “Contributions to Analytical Psychology.” Those were and are entitled “On Psychic Energy,” “Instinct and the Unconscious” and “The Psychological Foundations of a Belief in Spirits.” The fourth one (not translated) was “On the Essence of Dreams.” The present edition contains all these plus two more papers—one on “The General Aspects of the Theory of Complexes,” and the other “General Viewpoints for a Psychology of Dreams.”
Jung, of course, still maintains his well-known position that Freudian ideas are not sufficient, do not adequately explain either neuroses, dreams or the phenomena of the unconscious. He maintains it is the task of medical psychology (analysis) to discover the important compensatory relations between the conscious and unconscious mind on which some understanding of the total psychology of the mind can be built. This he does with the aid of his ideas concerning archetypes and mythology. All this is of course nothing new. But it remains a fascinating problem in mental gymnastics to observe how all this is done—smoothly, skillfully and poetically. One is almost convince