Book reviews
Edited by Linda Carter and Marcus West

Fay Lectures Book Series: 20th Anniversary
Reviews by David Tacey, La Trobe University, Australia

KAST, VERENA. Joy, Inspiration and Hope (No. 1, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M Press, 1991. Pp. xx + 175. Pbk. $16.95.

Analytical psychology is no laughing matter, but Verena Kast argues that in psychology we have not paid sufficient attention to laughter, mirth and the emotions of elation. She writes: ‘Joy has to do with a lifting of ego boundaries, a relaxation of defenses, permission to be and to reveal oneself, an opening of the self that is best expressed in the giving of a gift’ (p. 50). Further, she argues that joy’s way of relaxing our boundaries is important for individuation; we must recall that individuation can only be achieved if the ego is relaxed enough to allow the symbols and directives of the transpersonal Self to be heard. Joy, inspiration and hope are crucial for the individuation process to be fulfilled. Indeed, she argues that this process cannot be successfully conducted if we are contracted, anxious and closed in our emotional lives.

Her argument is simple, straightforward and written in an easy style for readers who have had no exposure to analytical psychology. The book has a glossary of terms and the language is relaxed and conversational. This is what is called a crossover book because it fits the popular or self-help market, and yet shows evidence of scholarly activity and learning. The first few chapters are light and read like pop psychology but the book becomes more scholarly and intriguing toward the end. To my mind she has saved the best for last.

Kast writes: ‘It is astonishing how little has been written about joy, inspiration and hope – the emotions of elation – in the field of depth psychology’ (p. 3). This is an under-researched area since analysts tend to write about clients’ immediate concerns by tracing their complexes and neuroses. Patients do not come into therapy because they are happy or joyful, or want these emotions analysed. However Kast’s argument is that many of us are suffering from neuroses precisely because we have not allowed ourselves to be joyful enough, or have been unable to ‘remember’ the joyful moments once the gloomier emotions make their claim on us. Some chapters are concerned with the ‘biographical reconstruction of joy’, that is, a strategy whereby clients are asked to reconstruct their life-story in terms of joy and exhilaration rather than trauma and anxiety. It is as if Kast seeks to supplement the talking cure with the laughing

This is the second and final part of the Fay Lectures Book Series Reviews. Some of the books have been reviewed previously or will be reviewed at greater length in the JAP. An introduction to the reviews was published with the first part in the April 2010 edition (Vol 55, 2, pp. 300–12).

0021-8774/2010/5504/576                          Copyright, 2010, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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cure. This is in the spirit of Jung’s psychology because he said that humour and mirth are important for grounding us in the body and releasing embedded feelings. Kast has provided a method for ensuring that the clinical encounter does not get overly preoccupied with negative emotions. Perhaps I am conditioned to privilege the negative because I keep thinking that Kast’s strategy was in part designed to avoid the difficult emotions of therapy.

Towards the end of the book, Kast tells us how and why she became interested in this subject. As she was working on a project on Dionysus, she began to wonder how we might be able to release Dionysian energies in our lives. Rather than discuss this god in literary, philosophical or religious terms, Kast wanted to explore the meaning of the god in psychological terms: ‘The Greek god Dionysus can be seen as a symbolic expression of the cluster of emotions that includes enthusiasm, inspiration, intoxication, and ecstasy, on the verge of becoming hope’ (p. 6). Her concern was to explore the emotions that Dionysus might engender in the body-mind rather than focus on the thoughts or ideas he might induce. If we move toward Dionysus with a receptive heart, we can experience healing, but if this god invades us unexpectedly, we might only see his barbaric or destructive aspect.

Although it starts with a strong recommendation that we open ourselves to the forces of joy and ecstasy, the book presents a darker picture of the elated emotions as it draws to a close. Kast points out that the Dionysian festivals of the past were dangerous as well as renewing. ‘Ecstasy carries us beyond our limits, killing our normal personality. It can fragment us so that we do not know how, or if, we are going to return’ (p. 122). As she turns to those who have been preoccupied with this god inmodern times, such as Nietzsche, Otto and Kerenyi, her earlier light-heartedness disappears, and she becomes circumspect about recommending ecstasy as a pathway to healing. In a strange way, the book reverses its opening premises. ‘We cannot stimulate the unconscious or allow it to flood the gates of the ego without allowing the free entry of our problems as well. We are wary of ecstasy because we know that huge portions of what we have repressed can emerge in its wake’ (p. 121).

As the clinical replaces the popular voice, her mode shifts from generous invitation to critical discernment. However, I appreciate the ending as it shows that maintaining ego boundaries and inviting contact with the numinous are by no means mutually exclusive. ‘The more defined the ego boundaries are, the greater their permeability is’ (p. 120). The ideal as Kast sees it is to create a stable yet porous ego, which allows the archetypal currents of ecstasy to flow through us, without washing us away. This is a curious book which reveals how difficult it is to stay pop in a field which forces us to become serious and introspective.

BEEBE, JOHN. Integrity in Depth (No. 2, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 165. Pbk. $16.95.

With Integrity in Depth John Beebe points out that most of us aspire to integrity of character and he is sympathetic to that aspiration. Definitions of integrity emphasize such attributes as consistency, reliability and uprightness. Beebe quotes Cicero as saying that the essence of integrity ‘is that we really should be what we want our fellow human beings to think we are’ (p. 13). This makes integrity sound earnest and stoical, a bit like Polonius’s advice to Hamlet. It could be a prescription to set us up for hypocrisy and failure. How then do we square these values with those of depth psychology? After all, analytical psychology forces us to become aware of the shadow, to realize our internal

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contradictions, to see that we are not ‘what our fellows think we are’, nor even what we think we are. We are not identical with the persona, or with the conscious ego, but are made of many parts, complexes and internal figures, some of which are conflicting and discordant.

A central feature of Jung’s work is the high evaluation of the other and the need to allow the other to intercept and transform the ego. It would seem, then, that integrity defined as consistency or sameness would not fare well in depth psychology, which might expose ‘integrity’ as the condition of an armoured ego that refuses to change. But Beebe is working with integrity in a different way. He leads to this new place by quoting Robert Grudin: ‘Integrity is not a painfully upheld standard so much as a prolonged and focused delight’ (p. 17). Beebe provides what he calls ‘an eros spin to the idea of integrity’ (p. 18), taking it out of the context of mere duty and performance.

Beebe’s concern is with ‘integrity in depth’, and he plays on this title, referring both to his ‘in-depth’ approach to the subject and to the ‘deeper’ self to which we must be true. Integrity from the standpoint of psychotherapy is not a matter of holding up a charade to the world, fooling others or oneself about who one really is. ‘Integrity in depth’ is the sense that one is living one’s life according to the character that has been ordained from the beginning, as one’s destiny. To live one’s destiny with acceptance releases joy, and it affords a sense of fulfilment that no charade could deliver. Moreover the delight that integrity releases is not just from the ego: ‘By entering into a loving relation to it [the self], we delight the self, and the self’s delight passes through us as a pleasure we can feel and enjoy’ (p. 18). Only sensitive minds can articulate such things, and Beebe is profoundly attuned to the reality and presence of the other, as the ultimate source of the joy that we might experience. If we feel this higher joy, it is only because something greater than us is being fulfilled.

What Beebe calls integrity seems to be what Jung calls the regulating function of the Self. Integrity is that which balances and restores, that which steers us out of difficulty and reminds us that things are not as they should be. Beebe’s integrity remindsme of the transcendent function, in that it serves to unite incommensurate parts of the personality and seeks to get various parts talking to each other in such a way that a democracy is established. ‘Integrity implies an ecological sense of the harmony and interdependence of all the parts of the whole, a felt sense of the entirety of any situation’ (p. 32). What comes across in Beebe’s work is the felt experience of the regulating psyche, and his practical insights into the subtleties of these feelings are crucial, especially for psychotherapy. It is not enough to enter this terrain with a cognitive or abstract knowledge of the ‘functions of the psyche’. We need to know how self-regulation feels in practice and how to identify it in the clinical situation. Beebe is a reliable and trustworthy guide in this regard. He seems to be feeling everything he thinks, and to be capable of doing both at the same time. As such, reading the book is a therapeutic experience. We are not just ‘reading about’ the topic, but are being taken through it in a fully experiential way.

Beebe’s work is helpful in showing how we come to our integrity through losing it and usefully points to the role of anxiety in making us aware of our alienation from the Self. The sudden onset of anxiety, he argues, ‘is the sign of an unconscious perception of separation from the self. Pursuing this uneasiness is the most frequent way that we stumble upon the fact that there is something there to lose’ (pp. 34–35). He makes us aware of the daily ‘niggles’ and ‘nagging unease’, the bodily symptoms that are signals that we are losing touch with our wholeness. Beebe describes these as ‘symptoms of integrity’. We would not have these reactions if there were not a controlling authority, the Self, which is attempting to regulate and balance our lives. Moving toward wholeness is knowing how to read the signs, at bodily and emotional

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levels, and learning how to trust their guidance. This is a remarkable book, possibly the best in the Jungian literature to convey the felt experience of the Self rather than simply ideas or theories about it.

STEVENS, ANTHONY. The Two Million-Year-Old Self (No. 3, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 140. Pbk. $16.95.

Anthony Stevens provides a clear, concise reading of the evolutionary perspective in Jungian psychology. It is virtually the ‘lost’ perspective in Jungian studies, the perspective that many of us are happy to forget or overlook. Stevens puts the evolutionary challenge at the beginning of his book (p. 3):

At the heart of Jungian psychology is the idea that beneath our conscious intelligence a deeper intelligence is at work – the evolved intelligence of humankind. By personifying this phylogenetic component of the psyche as an archaic being, or ‘the two millionyear- old man that is in us all’, Jung lay himself at the mercy of any beady logician wishing to accuse him of falling into a homuncular fallacy – namely, that he believed he had a little old man in there sitting at the controls.

Jung’s biological argument was attacked by scientists as a Lamarckian fantasy in Jung’s lifetime. They saw it as bad science, based on guesswork, conjecture or false reasoning. Social scientists saw Jung’s theory of mind as politically dangerous, a first cousin of Social Darwinism. The idea of an ‘evolved intelligence of humankind’ had already been fused with the notion of genetic superiority and used to justify such gross injustices as eugenics, world conquest, fascism and genocide. Jung was seen as having Nazi leanings by daring to use these discredited ideas. In our time many Jungians have backed away from Jung’s biological arguments, politely or impolitely side-stepping his biology in favour of his psychology. Those who have stood up for Jung’s theory of the evolved intelligence of humankind, such as von Franz and Erich Neumann, have been roundly attacked by fellow Jungians such as James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich.

After reading Giegerich’s attack on Neumann and the ‘biological’ Jung, ‘Ontogeny = Phylogeny? A fundamental critique of Erich Neumann’s Analytical Psychology’ (1975), I thought the evolutionary perspective had been laid to rest. As a non-scientist, I was happy to defer to others to make the decision for me, and I went along with the tide. But Anthony Stevens rises up in this setting like the return of the repressed. His view is that just because evolutionary biology has been abused in socially reprehensible and pernicious ways there is no reason to throw the whole thing out. He begins his book with fighting spirit, offering a swift attack on James Hillman. To Stevens, Hillman’s dismissal of evolutionary biology as a ‘mere fantasy’ of Jung’s thinking is unfair and ignorant. Stevens accuses Hillman and his kind of trying to maroon analytical psychology on a tiny island called ‘the imagination’. Stevens has a passion for science and he does not like the way in which archetypal psychology, in particular, has attempted to abandon the scientific enterprise and place Jungian thought solely in the humanities and arts. For Stevens, post-Jungians such as Hillman, Giegerich and others are incapable of scientific thinking and are trying to deprive the Jungian tradition of its foundations in the sciences.

Thus when Jung writes: ‘Together the patient and I address ourselves to the two million-year-old man that is in all of us’, Hillman and Giegerich read this as one of

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Jung’s primary archetypal fantasies, while Stevens reads it as a scientific fact that can be proved with the aid of evolutionary biology, ethology, sociobiology, neuroscience and psycholinguistics. Stevens brings all these disciplines to bear on his argument, and his reading and scholarship are impressive. He accuses Hillman of ‘psychic parochialism’ and ‘agoraphobia’: a fear of other disciplines and new knowledge. Stevens is writing from the position of one who fears he is losing the momentum of the Jungian world, which is drifting toward Hillman’s position. The reader is drawn into an internecine war between factions of the tradition. Personally I enjoy these spats and think they help to define the field. Hillman would probably reply that each of them is gripped by a different fantasy about archetypal studies. Stevens’ approach is governed by the heroic spirit of scientific empiricism which seeks to offer proof and evidence, and, as such, it is a very ‘English’ approach to Jungian thought. If he had a chance to reply, Hillman would dismiss Stevens as ‘British rationality’. Hillman’s vision is Orphic and Dionysian, and he sits beside Romantic poets, philosophers and neo-Platonic thinkers, finding his belonging among Americans such as Emerson, Thoreau and William James.

In my view, Jung’s ideas offer a larger and transcendent perspective that holds the views of Hillman and Stevens simultaneously. Jung is the genius of the field of analytical psychology and we are his squabbling children, each one of us claiming to represent the true lineage and denouncing the others as illegitimate. Jung had an empirical desire to provide a scientific basis for his observations, and Stevens is entirely justified in representing this view. But Jung had an equally poetic or mythic desire to link his observations with art, philosophy and cosmology, and, in this regard, Hillman gets Jung right. The war between scientists and philosophers is an exaggeration of an intrinsic tension within Jung’s original point of view. Few of us are able to hold those tensions together, partly because few of us are masters of arts as well as of sciences. We tend to sit on one side or the other, unable to see both points of view. Stevens’s is an intelligent and erudite voice that must not be silenced by those who are ideologically opposed to his position.

Reference

Giegerich, W. (1975). ‘Ontogeny = Phylogeny? A fundamental critique of Erich Neumann’s Analytical Psychology’. Spring 1975, 110–29.

KAWAI, HAYAO. Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy (No. 5, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A&MPress, 1996. Pp. xv + 161. Pbk. $16.95.

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Kawai’s writing is direct, honest and self-effacing and it can be quite confronting to read. The author seems to want us to relinquish our props and furniture, and gently insists that we sit in quiet emptiness with him. To me, this book is an elaboration of the spirituality of subtraction; we gain by sloughing off and throwing overboard what is known. Kawai starts with himself: he says he knows nothing about psychotherapy and nothing about Buddhism. Is he joking or in some way profoundly serious? Do any of us know anything? That is why the experience of this book is quite unnerving, because one feels oneself seated with Kawai in a therapeutic situation, in which he seeks to throw out old props that we believe are holding us together. If we throw them out, will there be anything left? There

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were moments of panic induced in me while reading this utterly profound work. But my responses, he would suggest, are typically Western.

Kawai, who died in 2007,was the first Jungian analyst in Japan and the author of fifty books. He had trained in Western psychology and felt himself becoming thoroughly Western. Then he was introduced to Jungian psychology, and his Asian self came back to him. Ironically, the things he had lost from his Japanese heritage returned powerfully through his exposure to Jung’s theories of the psyche. Jung helped him to recover his Japanese soul and to become who he already was. A further irony is found in the fact that Jung himself often warned his readers away from the East, since he felt that Westerners should stick to their own civilization and help it through its present turmoil and crisis. But there was enough ‘Eastern’ psychology in Jung to enable Asians to find their way back to their own culture. The subordination of the ego to a greater reality, the deep reverence for nature, the sensitivity to the oneness of the world and to synchronicity, the awareness that the striving heroic nature was not the true self; all this seemed to speak to Kawai of the Japanese psyche and its cultural heritage. There is a deeply Buddhist element in Jung, especially the refusal to literalize the psyche or its contents, the awareness that the true state of being is a form of emptiness, that myths and gods are emanations of the soul; all this was known to the East long before Jung arrived on the scene.

We know of Jung’s struggle with the East, his desire to embrace it and devour its knowledge which resided alongside his fear of the East and desire to push it away, lest it claim his soul in a terrifying fashion. Kawai understands all of this perfectly, and although he calls himself a Jungian analyst, one feels that he is the master and Jung the pupil, at least as far as East and West are concerned. Kawai thinks that Jung did not import his ideas from the East, but he used the East to elaborate the ideas and intuitions he already possessed. It was one of his main sources of amplification and richness. Jung already had an ‘Eastern’ soul, and that was why he needed to hold the East at bay, because he feared being flooded with Eastern contents. Kawai began as an Asian teacher, then turned to Western science and psychology, and then through Jung came home to himself. It is an astonishing story of cross-cultural dynamics and psychological complexity. Kawai rejected Buddhism as a youth, and even found it embarrassing during his scientific phase. But he felt it coming back to him as he explored the contents of his unconscious. He became a spiritual teacher, a sensei, through his unconscious not through his conscious. He was not very Buddhist, but something in him was very Buddhist and it had to shine through.

The extraordinary and heart-warming feature of this book is to see how one’s fate can manifest itself through the unconscious, even if one has pushed it away. Kawai became himself because he had turned away from his true nature. Then, in turning toward his true self he met with dangers and false moves. He found himself ‘trying’ too hard to be a wise Buddhist, a sensei, and something inside stopped him from this pretentiousness. Then he felt compelled to erase that false move and go back to beginnings. It involved allowing what was interior to express itself. His ego had to cooperate with the process but it could not take the lead since it was coming from a different centre of personality. The reader gets the sense that Kawai was a master therapist precisely because he had turned himself inside out. He knew what it meant to allow a process to unfold, to nurture it but not to control it. He was able to make things happen by not trying too hard. As he matured, he said less and less in therapy sessions. He said he tried to make himself become a stone, but a stone that listens and reflects. Sitting beside that stone, his clients would undoubtedly have been led to their own deeper natures.

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ZOJA, LUIGI. Ethics and Analysis: Philosophical Perspectives and their Application in Therapy (No. 13, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii + 126. Hbk. $23.95.

Luigi Zoja’s Ethics and Analysis is an edgy, risk-taking and exciting work. It is almost a practical experiment in the transcendent function, in that it works the field of ethics to see if a reconciling position can emerge from the interaction between two distinct imperatives. On one hand, he points to the imperative to maintain vigorous ethical boundaries in today’s clinical culture, as in the world at large. On the other hand, as a depth psychologist, he is aware of the need to integrate rather than suppress or repress the shadow side of the personality. These imperatives might be seen to be moving in opposite directions: How can one be honoured while respecting the other? Rules and regulations, he writes, establish a clear black and white contrast, whereas psychological understanding operates in the grey zone. Rules emerge from Enlightenment rationality, but clinical ethics proceeds from choices and thus cannot be given in advance or be satisfied by black and white reasoning. Zoja puts all of this on the line, out in the open. He does not approach the book with a preconceived outcome as to the ethical dilemmas of contemporary practice. Instead he seems to workshop the ideas, and his reflections are refreshingly transparent and alive.

Zoja turns back to the first psychoanalytic cases, Anna O. and Sabina Spielrein, not to add further historical detail or ideological weight to these cases, but to tease out the complications in light of the ‘new ethic’ that we need to develop. In reflecting on these early cases, Zoja makes use of a forgotten classic of analytical psychology: Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). This book is a favourite of mine and I have been perturbed to see it sink into obscurity, with little or no references to it in the recent literature. It is surely a book that needs to be rediscovered and Zoja does just that. His book can be read as a contemporary meditation on the classic of 1949, a work which inspired Jung to write an enthusiastic Foreword. ‘There is an urgent need today’, Jung wrote, ‘to formulate the ethical problem anew, for, as the author aptly points out, an entirely new situation has arisen since modern psychology broadened its scope by the study of unconscious processes’ (Jung in Neumann 1949, p. 12). Neumann and Jung were writing with the Second World War in mind, and were conscious of the need for a new orientation. The ethical compass seemed to be swinging around the dial, no longer able to point to true north. The modern experience had dissolved all absolutes and yet they believed that as social beings we still needed to find our way in the midst of radical uncertainty.

Zoja spends most of his time in what he calls the ‘gray zone’. It is unnerving to the reader who wants to find straight answers. An example of Zoja’s daring is evident in his question: ‘Would the sensational healing process of Spielrein have been the same without the sensational breach of boundaries by Jung?’ (p. 74). Zoja respects rules and boundaries but he equally respects the way the trickster figure plays with solid lines and encourages us to enter a world of fluidity. The ‘old ethic’, in which there were goodies and baddies, and which invited us to identify with the good and project the bad, has to be overcome. We are no longer permitted the comfort of the superego which casts judgement on our experience and divides the world into simple categories. To be moral today means being able to endure a good deal of liminality and to live at the borderland between different states and values. The part of us that loves to point the finger and attribute blame has been dissolved in the acid bath of modernity. The fundamentalist backlash is a refusal to engage in the relativity of the world we have inherited. The new political correctness is not an ideological stance Zoja condones, since he sees it as the old rigidity in a new guise.

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Zoja takes us on an extraordinary journey through the history and philosophy of ethics, and we are urged to consider the importance of Kant and Weber in particular. One chapter is entitled, ‘Can Evil Be Avoided if Ugliness is Compulsory?’. Zoja believes that we can recover our moral compass by being attentive to the aesthetics of our experience. In his view beauty and justice need to be brought back into relationship, and his model is ancient Greece. Zoja argues that modernity needs to become more aware of aesthetic violations and desecrations of value as well as of action. Morality should not only be fixed upon what we do to each other, but on what happens in our environment, in our cities and our relations to the physical world. How can we expect moral behaviour in citizens if companies, corporations, city planners and governments act in evil and abusive ways? Neumann emphasized that a new ethic is not a game in which we cynically invent new rules to suit us and discard them when they become constraining. If anything, we need to become more attentive to the moral fibre of our experience, and morality does not dissolve so much as broaden out to include more reality. The new ethic is more difficult than the old because we need to see ethical relations everywhere, not so we become paranoid, but to expand the ethical focus so that it becomes diaphanous. This is a serious engagement with postmodern ethics, with ramifications far beyond the clinic.

Reference

Neumann, E. (1949/1973). Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

WIENER, JAN. The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning (No. 14, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 150. Hbk. $23.95/£ 19.99.

This is an extraordinary book which provides a lucid overview of the phenomenon of transference and countertransference in the context of Jungian psychology. It helps me, as a non-clinician, understand the complexities and frustrations of analysts who have attempted to follow Jung’s inspiration, but who have realized that it is a challenge to apply his ideas in the practical domain of psychotherapy. As Wiener writes, Jung often used his personality in the analytic process, rather than developing communicable methods or techniques as such. She also argues convincingly that Jung’s vulnerability to erotic transference made him wary of too close a personal involvement with his patients. His clinical practice seemed to have been intuitive and idiosyncratic, and this was made clear in his autobiography, where he wrote: ‘In my analysis, I am unsystematic very much by intention. We need a different language for every patient’ (1963, p. 153). This forced those who followed him to develop methods that Jung either did not make explicit or ignored in the therapeutic situation. Wiener is in the British developmental school, influenced by Michael Fordham and Fred Plaut. Her book helps those who are unfamiliar with this school to see why British analysts felt impelled to integrate methods from Freudians, Kleinians and attachment theorists. Jung’s legacy was slight from a clinical point of view, and it had to be supplemented and bolstered by other systems.

However, as Wiener concedes, some of these attempts to integrate methods and concerns from other traditions tended to lose the distinctively Jungian quality of Jungian psychology. The concern for process above content made some British schools less and less Jungian, and more like clones of the mainstream psychoanalytic traditions. This

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meant that the focus on archetypal images and symbol formation gave way to an interest in early childhood experiences and the dynamics between patient and analyst. With this new emphasis, the developmental school of analytical psychology was born, and the subsequent split occurred between it and the so-called classical school as practised in Zurich and elsewhere. My own involvement in clinical practice has involved submitting myself to two analyses, for the purposes of finding out more about depth psychology and its workings. As an academic, it was impossible for me to learn about this art or science without immersing myself personally into the clinical situation. In both of my analyses, the analysts were Zurich trained and tended to ignore the transference and countertransference, and focused on dreams, archetypal imagery and amplification. I was told that the ‘transference’ interest was a kind of obsession of British analysts, who had gone into Freudian and Kleinian fields, thus losing the ‘symbolic’ emphasis of Jungian thought.

However, Wiener has some fascinating perspectives to offer on this ‘classical’ Jungian view. She argues that analyst and patient are in the transference whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not. For Wiener, the choice is not whether the transference is significant or insignificant, but whether the analysis works with the transference, or remains ignorant of it. ‘Called or not called, transference will be there’. This is my formulation, not hers. But this puts the classical antipathy to transference in a different light, making it seem a prejudice rather than a choice. Reading this book has made me reflect critically on my own analyses, and makes me feel as if I missed out on a good deal of psychodynamic activity and information. I challenge classical Jungians who have jaundiced views about transference to read this book and not come away changed in profound and important ways.

Wiener sets herself a difficult task in this landmark work, and that is to integrate the developmental approach with the classical emphasis on myth and symbol formation. She proposes a reworking of the transference model, and in chapter 4 develops the theory of a ‘transference matrix’, which seems equally able to focus on archetypal content and psychodynamic process. This model remains true to the clinical emphasis on childhood experience and developmental stages, and it attends to the amplification of archetypal patterns and symbols. She seems keenly alert to the pitfalls of process without content, and on the other hand is worried by an emphasis on symbols which is not connected dynamically with the growth of personality. Wiener is keenly alert to the possibility that a developmental therapy can lose its sense of soul, and shut down certain transpersonal possibilities in the emphasis on the formation of complexes in the personal life.

What she proposes is a truly integrative model, in which the two sides of Jungian therapy return to each other in an attitude of rapprochement and reconciliation. In her view, both approaches work together when ‘the archetypal energy necessary for development can be harnessed in a relationship’. ‘It is within the framework of an authentic relationship with the analyst . . . that new images are likely to surface when the unconscious eventually facilitates an internal capacity to make meaning’ (p. 103). There is a genuinely progressive sensibility at work in her theorizing, as if trying to protect the Jungian enterprise from further fragmentation and splitting. Wiener says she is writing for ‘practicing analytical psychologists in the twenty-first century’, and she wants to retain the developmental advances made over the last fifty years as well as return to origins and re-engage the soul. Reading this book, I had a real sense of a healing taking place in a field that has suffered strife and division over a long period of time.

Reference

Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Fontana, 1995.

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CAMBRAY, JOSEPH. Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe (No. 15, Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology). College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 144. Hbk. $23.95/£19.99.

This is one of the finest books in the Fay Series and the fact that it is the most recent augurs well for the future. Joseph Cambray has written the clearest and most coherent study to date of the subject of synchronicity. This book deserves to be widely read and disseminated because in the past ‘synchronicity’ has been enshrouded with confusion and prejudice and the general reader has not been able to find a suitable point of entry into the debate. Cambray has provided an entry which opens up the field in an entirely new way. He is ideally suited to this task because he is trained not only in analytical psychology but also in the physical sciences. What is remarkable about this book is that Cambray takes synchronicity out of the confines of Jungian studies and links it to current research taking place in a variety of new and exciting fields in physics and the natural sciences. Synchronicity is too big an idea to be confined to Jungian thought but deserves to be part of the larger debates about the nature of matter, time and physical reality. Here is an important way in which Jungians can overcome their insularity and rejoin the mainstream of contemporary thought.

I am not a scientist, but I welcome new works, such as those of Cambray and Jean Knox, that attempt to resituate Jung in the context of the sciences. I am tired of people dismissing Jung as a mystic, and granting him only limited application in religious studies or cinema studies. Cambray explicates contemporary developments in complexity studies and quantum and relativity theories, and shows how these have a direct bearing on the theory of synchronicity. Of particular interest is his exploration of the links between Jung and Pauli, and also the historical connections between Jung and Einstein. I appreciate Cambray’s presentation of complex adaptive systems and their capacity for self-organization and emergence. The links with the concept of the Self are clearly apparent, and as I read this book I could appreciate its genuine originality: some of these scientific fields are being presented for the first time in terms of Jungian theory. This makes the book not only interesting but of historical significance. From my perspective as an academic, I find Cambray’s book exciting because it helps to reconstruct Jung’s identity in relation to the history of knowledge. Modern knowledge has privileged logic and deductive method above intuition and that is why Jung seems to stand out as a special case. The intuition he possessed is often found in visionary artists and writers rather than in the sciences, and as such the sciences tended to reject Jung’s vision of an interconnected universe. But we are fortunate that the sciences are now in a different phase, thanks to – what? – a change in the zeitgeist? The sciences have themselves taken a giant leap into intuitive understandings of the world and this means that there is more receptivity to Jung’s vision.

Moreover, Cambray helps us see why Jung was somewhat isolated in the past. ‘Jung was radically transgressive; he cared little for the confines or boundaries of different disciplines but sought the most profound patterns in mind, culture, and nature’ (p. 2). Jung was forced to familiarize himself with a dozen or more disciplines in an attempt to gain knowledge of the interconnectedness of psyche and nature. In a time of academic specialization, this generalist approach was frowned upon and not welcomed. Jung risked being ‘undisciplined’ in the technical sense and he risked falling out of view, into the gaps between the disciplines he traversed. In one of his last letters, Jung (1961, p. 629) wrote:

Nobody bothers to devote serious study to my contribution to scientific psychology. The medical man lacks the time and training, and the philosophical or academic psychologist lacks practical knowledge of the material. The theologian . . . is afraid

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of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. He prefers simple childlike faith and backs out of every discussion. Thus I stand isolated between the faculties and can only hope that someone seriously follows up this line of research.

In 2010, however, the situation looks different. Although Jung had been relegated to the arts and humanities, he may be set for a comeback in the sciences. As the sciences grapple with the unitary nature of reality, Jung may no longer be ‘isolated between the faculties’. What we are dealing with here is a time-lag: Jung was exploring interconnectedness before the times had turned toward it. But today, in view of our ecological emergency, and our awareness that holistic medicine might have much to offer and supplement Western medicine, the tide is turning away from specializations that refuse to look at what is happening in other fields. One might even say that specializations are contributing to the continued fragmentation of the world, and if this is true then cross-disciplinary science and intuitive theories of the connections between things may represent the future of knowledge. Cambray has shown the way for Jungians to become part of this new adventure and to move out of insularity into dialogue and exchange.

Reference

Jung, C. G. (1961). Letter to G. Krüger, 17 February 1961. In C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 2, 1951–1961. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.