Jung
Deirdre Bair
(Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
2003 Little, Brown & Co.
ISBN: 0316076651

A biography of one of the modern era's most important thinkers.

Carl Gustav Jung's writings are AMONG the most influential in the field of psychoanalysis. The founder of analytical psychology, Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910.

Sr. Reviewer Dr. Alma H. Bond writes:

Jung: A Biography, by the eminent biographer Deirdre Bair, is a meticulously researched, arresting, & well-written book about the great analyst & theorist who is second only to Freud in the annals of psychoanalysis. The biography was authorized by the Jung family, who as his heirs & the recipients of his royalties, have refused access to his archives to those writers they consider unsympathetic to him. Does this make Bair less able to be objective in her assessment of Jung? Perhaps. But then, who among us can be completely impartial?

Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in the vicarage of Kesswil, Switzerland, as the fourth-born but first-surviving child of a poor country parson & his unhappy, troubled wife who believed that she had two personalities. The Jungs were only accidentally Swiss, as Jung's illustrious grandfather, Dr. Med. Carl Gustav I. Jung, had been exiled from Germany for political reasons. Rumors abounded (& were boasted of by the subject) that the first Carl Jung was the illegitimate grandson of the great writer, Goethe. That his grandfather was of German heritage & bragged of such distinguished ancestry had a profound influence on young Carl. Apparently, the boy was raised to follow in his grandfather's footsteps, both as his namesake & as a physician. It is interesting that as a boy Jung was never referred to as “Pastor's Carl”, but always “Dr. Med. Jung's grandson”.

Carl was an oddball from the very beginning. A hefty boy much taller than his classmates, he was always bedraggled looking & usually wet & odorous when the weather was bad, as he trudged along on his daily hour-&-a-half walk to school. On just such a morning walk he had an experience that he said was “the end of his childhood”. Feeling as if he were coming out of a fog, he heard himself saying, “I am myself!” Like his mother, he had a vision that he had two personalities within himself -- an awkward, clumsy boy at the end of the 19th century & that of an old man living in the 18th century who wore high-buckled shoes, a powdered wig, & drove in a fine carriage. Around the same time he had a recurring daydream in which God was sitting on his throne in Heaven & shit an enormous turd on the cathedral below. Jung reflected upon this fantasy for the rest of his life. I wonder why such lengthy deliberation was necessary. It seems clear from the image what Jung thought of the church.

The first time the 24-year-old Doctor Jung saw Emma Rauschenbach, he entered the house of a friend & beheld a 14-year-old, brown-haired girl halfway up the broad staircase. He was smitten instantly, & knew she would become his wife. Captivated by her intelligence &, undoubtedly, her family fortune, Jung wooed & won the young woman. Despite the reluctance of her father that she wed a penniless doctor, they married. After their first child, Agathe Regina, was born, Emma settled into a routine in which her intellectual ambitions were stymied: “he soared, while she.. took care of the mundane details so that he could.” (p. 83) The marriage lasted for the rest of her life, incorporating certain idiosyncrasies unthinkable to most of their world.

Nevertheless, there were three separate occasions when Emma tried to divorce Jung. In each case, he became ill or had a serious accident that necessitated her nursing him back to health.

The most serious attempt occurred around Jung's romance with Toni Wolff, a brilliant young woman of 22 who was his patient. Jung was taken with her intellectual stimulation & camaraderie that he evidently was not able to find in his wife. Jung & Toni fell in love & began an affair so serious that for decades Jung referred to her as “his other wife”. For reasons of her own, Emma put up with the situation & lived in a triangular relationship for the rest of her life with Jung & Wolff. The arrangement was deeply distressing to Emma, Toni, & the Jung children, if not to the master himself.

Originally beloved by Freud & designated as his Christian “crown prince”, his “scientific son and heir”, & the man who would rescue psychoanalysis from being dubbed the “Jewish science”, the two analysts ended their relationship in a disagreement over Freud's assumption that the root cause of neurosis is sexual repression. My impression is that the rupture upset Freud much more than it did Jung.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book deals with the question of Jung's antiSemitism & his sympathy for the Nazi party, the opinion of Freud & many others which followed Jung the rest of his life & still does not go away. Ms. Bair carefully considers the evidence, & comes to the conclusion that Jung cooperated with the Nazis only to ensure the continued existence of psychoanalysis after the demise of the party. Some of us are not so sure. While it is true that he cooperated during World War II with Allen Dulles to shed light on the character of Hitler, & was recruited by the OSS to serve the cause of the Allies, I believe that Jung in his heart of hearts was ambivalent about Jews.

According to Bair, “He remained affiliated with German psychoanalysis from the Nazi solidification of power in the 1930s through the first years of the war, insisting that his primary reason was to aid disenfranchised Jewish practitioners, but debate still rages almost half a century after his death” (p. 431). Even more condemning are derogatory & inappropriate statements he made about Jewish character & culture, such as that “Freud and Adler had created specifically Jewish doctrines...thoroughly unsatisfying to the German mentality” (p. 435). Jung did not help his case when he spoke of the “antichristianism of the jews”....who are not “so damned innocent after all”, (p. 444) & further suggested that the role of intellectual Jews in pre-war Germany would be interesting to investigate. His major detractors insist that Jung was sympathetic to the Nazis because of his ethnic identity as a German, but the issue has not been settled one way or the other. Perhaps it never will be.

Ms. Bair believes that Jung is now passé, & remembered chiefly for his psychological autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, & for terms he coined such as ‘New Age’, ‘the age of Aquarius’, ‘archtypes’, ‘anima’ & ‘animus’. As a Freudian psychoanalyst, perhaps it is unfair of me to say that history is a better judge of Jung's contributions than his contemporaries. I personally have always considered much of his writing gobbledygook which I rarely was able to use in my practice, & I concur with Ms. Bair that his theories on alchemy, UFOs, & extrasensory perception sometimes verge on the psychotic.

Jung: A Biography Deirdre Bair, is a tour de force, & the definitive biography about this famous analyst. It is doubtful whether another biography will equal its thorough & systematic research, or be better written. If there is a criticism of Ms. Bair's research, it concerns “the deficiency of her excellency”. Granted, the book delves deeply into the heart & soul of Jung, his close associates & family, so that we feel we know them as living people. But are 881 pages really required to accomplish that feat? Wouldn't careful research & fine writing provide similar insight? Certainly the lengthy section dealing with Jung's difficulties in getting his books ready for publication could be drastically cut without lessening the value of the whole. In any event, this reader (who, incidentally, finds it difficult to handle so hefty a book while reading), is frequently told more than she really needs to know.

Nevertheless, because of its immaculate scholarship, excellent writing, & absorbing story, Jung: A Biography is highly recommended to people who love biographies, students of psychology & psychoanalysis, & all those who enjoy a good read.

More from Deirdre Bair:
Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Anais Nin: A Biography
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
(05/23/04)

Dr. Alma Bond
2004©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.