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Hill, Scott J (2013). Confrontation with the unconscious: Jungian depth psychology and psychedelic experience. London, UK: Muswell Hill Press. xiii + 252 pp. ISBN 978-1908995070. Paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Stephen A. Martin.
While at training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, I was on the staff at the Klinik am Zürichberg, an in-patient Jungian psychiatric hospital housed in an elegant Beaux Arts villa on the Dolderberg, the patrician quarter of Zurich. At a staff meeting one morning in 1978, Dr. Heinrich Fierz, medical director and student of Jung, was presented with a request from a colleague to have access to some of the remaining LSD in the clinic's pharmacy and to use the comfortable clinic facilities for a controlled psychedelic experience. Rather than take the request seriously, Fierz and his senior staff dismissed the idea by making light of it and declaring that they "didn't need artificial means to explore their unconscious!'' Nothing of any value would come of it, they opined. I was and am still dismayed at their reaction.
It was that dismay that prompted me to agree to review Dr. Scott J. Hill's comprehensive volume, the first significant reconsideration of psychedelics in light of Jungian psychology since the 1950s. In fact, what Dr. Hill has created is a sourcebook for those interested in such a natural interface for the compelling reason that Jung's work is a psychology of inner exploration and, understood properly, psychedelics or entheogens can be an ideal tool in this endeavor. Moreover, its publication coincides with a renewed interest in psychedelics in terms of research and their clinical utility and the revaluation of something culturally long forbidden.
Influenced by a traumatic psychedelic experience as a young adult and by his...