Falling from favour

TWO new books on Carl Gustav Jung emphasise very different aspects of the Swiss psychologist's eminently full life. In addition to chronicling—some would say over-chronicling—Jung's family life, letters and conversations, Deirdre Bair's biography investigates some of the more serious charges levelled during Jung's lifetime and since his death in 1961, namely that he was a womanising plagiarist and an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathiser. Sonu Shamdasani acknowledges these criticisms, but the main focus of his book is on the writings that most influenced Jung and on the impact he had on the human sciences through the 20th century.

In retrospect, Jung himself thought he had slipped up in his dealings with National Socialism and his writings on a Jewish versus an Aryan psychology during the 1930s. During the second world war, he also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, America's first intelligence agency, having been recruited by Allen Dulles, its Central European representative, who wrote about Jung's “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for”. Jung's analysis, written in 1945, of how best to get the German population to accept defeat was read by many, including General Eisenhower. Ms Bair sets forth evidence on the various charges against Jung, on the whole coming down in his favour. But the overall picture that emerges is of a paradoxical man, capable of great sensitivity, who appears also to have been a self-centred, irascible bully.

Jung saw himself as an empirical scientist whose sole professional interest lay in the workings of the psyche. He believed psychology should be conceived on a grand scale, as evidenced by the combination of disciplines he thought were needed to throw light on the “comparative anatomy of the mind”. According to Mr Shamdasani, an eminent historian of psychology and psychiatry at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, these included medical psychology, philology, anthropology, history, philosophy, theology and biology.

Mr Shamdasani's book is a compilation of writings (with commentary) from many of the disciplines that influenced Jung's thinking, originating in antiquity through to the 20th century. The author's meticulous research illustrates something that has increasingly been suspected by Jung scholars, that the psychologist made extensive use of other people's work to illuminate his conceptions of archetypes, collective unconscious, introversion, extraversion, dream analysis and complexes, often referring to his approach as complex psychology.

Jung's ideas have not been widely assimilated, in part because his approach has fallen into discredit in academic circles but also because the additional research he always insisted needed to be done for complex psychology to move forward has not been taken up by his followers. Likewise, the synthesis of disciplines that Jung believed would culminate in the creation of an over-arching discipline of psychology has unravelled with the fragmentation of psychology into different schools.

As he grew older, Jung began to fear that this might happen, and he grew despondent about how marginalised psychology was becoming in the West. He also became depressed about two other realities: the possibility that the world would destroy itself either through over-population or the hydrogen bomb. “The question is only, what are we going to kill: ourselves or our still infantile psychology and its appalling unconsciousness.” The irony is that while the world may appear to be more psychologically aware than it was a century ago, the study of psychology has yet to find the central place that Jung hoped it would.