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Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography
By Frank Mc Lynn. London: Bantam. 1996.
624 pp. 25.00. ISBN 0 593033 914
Many of Jung's 86 years were lived at the centre of controversy, during a period of dramatic scientific, cultural and political change. Jung was a pioneer of depth psychology and no mere lapsed and quarrelsome disciple of Freud. McLynn's biography, by concentrating on Jung's personal and doctrinal break with Freud as the pivotal event of his life, does not do full justice to Jung's lasting influence on subsequent psychological thinking. Jung was an innovative thinker in his own right. He introduced far-reaching theories of the archetypal basis of the collective unconcious, dream analysis and the psychology of types of personality. He recognised the universal human need to find meaning in life, collectively through myth and symbol, and personally through individuation, and he tried to reconcile science and religion, through psychology.
McLynn states that because the subject of Jung is a "battlefield" he deliberately did not seek "expert advice or academic reading". He depends almost entirely on what has already been published and included in previous biographies. Writing as a professional biographer, rather than from within the field...