Books: Feeling Jung

JUNG AND THE STORY OF OUR TIME by LAURENS VAN DER POST 276 pages. Pantheon. $10.

If Sigmund Freud was the Moses of Old Testament psychiatry, Carl Jung was its presumptive Joshua. Freud led modern man to the promising territory of the unconscious mind, but, destined to play the Wandering Jew, he was denied his share of milk and honey. Instead, there was the bitter pessimism of his Civilization and Its Discontents. Jung, the son of a Swiss Protestant clergyman, was born with a spiritual sweet tooth. He had a craving to heal the soul’s wounds, to make a oneness of good and evil, darkness and light, masculinity and femininity.

Jung rushed in where Freud feared to tread: into an exotic Zion built on scientific method but furnished by the ages. There was a place in Jung’s world for the philosophy of ancient Asia and classical Greece, for the Gnosticism of early Christianity, for medieval alchemy, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, for Romanticism and the occult.

As a clinician, Jung pioneered in word-association techniques and dream analysis. The characters in his own dreams included Salome, Siegfried, Elijah, and once, Freud as an Austrian customs agent. Jung the theoretician made his name synonymous with such terms as archetype, introvert and extravert. Jung the religious healer believed the goal of psychiatry was to release and develop the divine within each individual. He broke with Freud by placing unsatisfied spiritual hungers rather than repressed sexuality at the center of personality disorders. Freudians could always counter that those pangs are just another symptom of stifled libido.

The best known of Jung’s psychoanalytic heresies is his formulation of a collective unconscious−a timeless, unbounded level of awareness that exists outside history and culture. It is a kind of mother lode of mankind’s mythologies and symbols, not rationally conceived but intuited through dreams and visions. A vast scholarship supported these theories. Whether or not one accepts them in the mystical sense, there is no denying the energy and intellect behind their authorship. Jung had the capacity to treat the universe as if it were an enormous crossword puzzle. Everything was interrelated; starting at any point, he could fill in all the blanks.

Since his death in 1961 at the age of 86, some of the most challenging parts of what is called Jungian seem to have slipped from public attention. This is hardly surprising; Jung is a larger-than-life figure in an age that prefers its gurus bite-sized and unit-priced. The novelist and explorer Laurens van der Post, who was a friend of Jung’s, would probably agree. In fact, his book seems an impassioned missionary effort to portray Jung as an angelic messenger from the gods, communicating in a series of dreams, omens and thunderclaps. On the very afternoon that Jung died in Zurich, writes van der Post, “lightning struck his favorite tree in the garden.” Van der Post was on a ship bound from Africa at the time. Unaware that his old friend had died, he had a vision of Jung atop the Matterhorn. He was waving and calling out, “I’ll be seeing you.” Some years later, van der Post was filming a documentary at the Jung house in Zurich. “When the moment came for me to speak directly to the camera about Jung’s death,” he recalls, “and I came to the description of how lightning demolished Jung’s favorite tree, the lightning struck in the garden again.” Van der Post’s achievements as a lucid and reliable journalist make it difficult to dismiss these strange experiences out of hand. One may simply accept or reject his version of the events.

Too Narrow. The rest of the book, however, cannot be handled so easily. As biography, Jung is far too narrow and restricted. The psychoanalytic revolution frequently exists as a backdrop for the author’s efforts to treat Jung’s life as heroic, supernatural drama. The account of Jung’s professional association with the Nazis during the mid-1930s is narrated with deliberate vagueness. Instead of an analysis of the analyst, the disciple uncritically labels Jung “one of the greatest universal personalities since the Renaissance.” That neon statement distracts from Jung’s true contribution: the provision of a balance for the reductive scientism that has made 20th century man feel smaller than he is or wants to be.