Jung: A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'My life is the story of the self-realization of the unconscious.'"
(The first sentence of C.G. Jung's autobiography, quoted by A. Stevens)

About a month ago I allowed myself to make fun of the inanities produced by a certain Dr. Freud, who projected his own sexual complexes and hang-ups onto the entire mankind and, even worse, womankind. So I searched for a text about psychology that I could read without bewilderment at the vagaries of a supposedly scientific mind. Jung (1994) by Anthony Stevens has been a perfect antidote for the Freud-induced malaise. Similarly to Storr's Freud, it is a concise (about 130 pages) account of Carl Gustav Jung's life and his contributions to psychological sciences.

We read about Jung's solitary childhood and youth, his medical studies, and his decision to become a psychiatrist. Several years of close friendship with Freud, 19 years Jung's senior, end when Jung rejects Freud's assumptions of predominantly sexual origins of human motivation and the entirely personal nature of human unconscious mind. The concept of "collective unconscious" is Jung's most important contribution to psychology:

"Jung held it to be the business of the psychologist to investigate the collective unconscious and the functional units of which it is composed - the archetypes [...] Archetypes are 'identical psychic structures common to all' [...] which together constitute 'the archaic heritage of humanity.'"

These archetypes might be thought of as patterns of behavior common for all people. They exhibit a "fundamental duality": they are both psychic structures and neurological structures. The author emphasizes that many other disciplines have produced similar concepts: for example, Levi-Strauss's infrastructures in anthropology or Chomsky's deep structures in linguistics. Jacques Monod, the famous molecular biologist, stated a very similar conclusion:

"Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution."

I find the chapter on archetypes by far the most interesting. It is also very well written - to the extent that such an ignoramus in the field as this reviewer seems to have understood it. I am very curious now how the concept of archetypes relates to the most recent knowledge in the field of genetics.

In the chapter The stages of life we read about the Self (the "psychic nucleus" of a person) and other components that play a role in psychic and social development of all of us: the ego, persona, shadow, anima, and animus. The next chapter, Psychological types presents Jung's psychological typology. He distinguishes four main functions: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, and two attitudes: extraverted and introverted. This produces eight psychological types and the book presents them in detail. To me, it all borders on pop-psychology, particularly the examples of professions typically chosen by people of specific type. The author also seems to reserve full support for the typology.

The next chapter Dreams will certainly interest many readers; it is wasted on me as I have not been able to remember any dream in 20 years or so. Continuing on a personal note, I found the following statement (in one of the previous chapters) optimistic and uplifting:

"For Jung, ageing was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the progressive refinement of what is essential."

Yay! I have just realized how refined I must be! In the chapter on Jung's methods of therapy the author clearly states that "the school of analysis that is carried in Jung's name is his chief legacy to our culture." We read how Jung's analytical method of therapy was based on an interaction of two equals, two real persons, the therapist and the patient. The author praises the "open-minded humanity of [Jung's] approach," and emphasizes that he remained "undogmatic to the end."

Jung is a concise yet good introduction to the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung. I am now interested in reading more about Jung's psychology.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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