Book Notes and Reviews

Jung, C. G. Development of Personality. Vol.  17 of Collected Works. Bollingen Series XX (New York:  Pantheon Books, Inc., 1954. Pp.  viii + 235. $3.75).

This volume of Jung's collected works contains eight chapters on child psychology and education. The last paper, “Marriage as a psychological relationship”, contrasts childhood with adulthood. One of Jung's specific scientific concerns is the emphasis on compensatory striving, i.e., on the patient's attempt to find a positive and constructive way out of the anxieties and unconscious conflicts which disturb and debilitate him. In his system the conscious and the unconscious are dynamically related and influence each other. The papers reprinted in this volume, and illustrated with pertinent clinical examples, demonstrate Jung's approach very well. The nineteen page index, covering solely this medium size book, is extremely helpful.

We are now in a period of rehabilitation of the ego and of a study of the ways in which the rational ego functions control and modify the influence of the unconscious upon behavior and adaptation. This should lead to a narrowing, if not bridging, of the gap between the Freudians and the Jungians and to a renewal of great interest in Jung's ideas. Writing before the relatively recent rehabilitation of the ego as a causative factor Jung formulated the difference between his and Freud's views on child psychology in these words, reproduced in this book: “I do not regard the thinking function as just a makeshift function of sexuality which sees itself hindered in its pleasurable realization and is therefore compelled to pass over into the thinking function; but, while perceiving in infantile sexuality the beginnings of a future sexual function, I also discern there the seeds of vital spiritual functions. The fact that infantile conflicts can be resolved through concept-building speaks in favor of this, and also the fact that even in adult life the vestiges of infantile sexuality are the seeds of vit