This book aims to provide a ‘concise and accessible’ examination of the life of Carl Jung and its relation to his work. The author is a professor of German at the University of Glasgow whose interests include the history of ideas, modern German thought, Goethe, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis. His account of Jung as a young teenager portrays his sense of secrecy and wonder with a world full of hidden objects and his fascination with myth. We witness Jung’s ‘flash of illumination’ when he realised that psychiatry could combine his interest in both ‘nature and spirit’. Bishop shows us how the singular, if somewhat introverted (to use a word popularised by Jung) and lonely teenager grew into Jung the man; drawn to the mystic, the universal, and the ‘permanent feast’ of his and his patients’ inner lives.
Two central chapters trace Jung’s journey from his first post as a psychiatrist in the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich towards his interest in psychoanalysis and the ‘sheer intellectual excitement and exchange of ideas’ of his early relationship with Freud. Jung heard ‘a germ of meaning’ in his patients’ seemingly ‘senseless’ symptoms. He found himself on common ground with Freud’s ideas about uncovering deeper meaning through free association, analysing dreams and in listening to the patient’s symbolic use of language. In quite a technical and complex section Bishop explains how their ideas subsequently diverged: Jung moving towards his conception of the collective unconscious, archetypes and the value of ‘the vital force of religion’; Freud focusing on his model of the id, ego and superego.
There is a careful build up by Bishop of the domestic scene that Jung and his wife created in their later years: the sense of space in the large house that they built on the shore of Lake Zurich, and the gardens in which Jung made time to play with stones and other objects. This left me noticing links between Jung’s interaction with his physical environment and the space he tried to create as a therapist, with its emphasis on expression, creativity, and on the potential for play to be therapeutic. Bishop points out that Jung’s ideas about play foreshadow later work by Winnicott and others.
My experience of reading this book was that it was indeed concise, but not always accessible. The author appears keen for the reader to grasp the myriad influences and reference points for Jung. He emphasises Goethe and Nietzsche in particular – perhaps in keeping with his own interests – but also Kantian philosophy, contemporary writers and thinkers, as well as Jung’s interests in myth, mysticism and alchemy. At certain moments I found the prose tightly packed with references and quotations that made the material difficult to digest. As Anthony Stevens notes in Jung: A Very Short Introduction, it is a daunting task to give a comprehensive account of Jung and his complex work in a slim volume. I did wonder whether Bishop craved a larger space to expound his themes, and perhaps this is reflected in the density of ideas presented. On the other hand, perhaps my difficulty in following certain passages is inevitable in a book that tries to address head-on Jung’s complex life and ideas – as Jung himself wrote, ‘Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health’.
Overall, if you are literary minded, have a good grasp of philosophy and want a scholarly introduction to Jung and his analytic psychology then this book might be for you. For a more accessible read, Anthony Stevens’ work might be an interesting first step.
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