This book
has been envisaged as a cubist portrait, and presents a multifaceted approach
to a multifaceted work. Decisive stimuli for its form and structure have also
been derived from certain works of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and the
writings of Fernando Pessoa. (p.26)

Indeed the author tells us, this book can even be read
in reverse, from an "Olympian perspective". Shamdasani presumes no
teleology or grand overall coherence to Jung’s work. However there is great
clarity of explanation within this book, elegantly illuminating the evolution
of Jung’s thought, and the emergence of his method. This book will not only be
of interest to Jung specialists, but to all with an interest in the history of
ideas. For Shamdasani spends a great deal of time here explicating many key
thinkers of importance to the defining and construction of psychology as an independent
discipline, and, as the title alludes to, its eventually forlorn "dream of
a science".

Consistent throughout Jung’s works is his desire to
secure the scientific position of psychology. Although the common perspective
upon Jung in academic psychology sees only his early experimental studies on
word associations, and his work on psychological types as of a scientific
nature, the need to establish psychology as a science drove Jung’s enquiries
always. Psychology was to become a science for most through experimentation.
This was problematic for psychology, as Jung understood from Krafft-Ebing
"how could psychiatry be a science, given its inescapable subjective
character" (p.45)? Contrary to the position of science today, Jung saw the
role of complex psychology as countering the fragmentation of the sciences. Key
to psychology’s scientific standing was the work on the ‘personal equation’,
that is, differing subjective scientific appraisal. Jung attempted a theory of
the subjective determinants of the personal equation. Psychology could then be
a super-ordinate science, grounding the sciences with an explanation of the
subjective determinants of knowledge. The resulting Psychological Types
refrained from mentioning Jung’s own type, which as Shamdasani states,
"given the thesis of the book, is a significant lacuna" (p.76).
Psychologists indeed proved on the whole reluctant to accept this thesis that
the theories which they had claimed had universal validity were just the
expression of their type, and so Jung’s hope for a psychology of psychologies
met with little overall acceptance. However this was the one area of his work
which received any serious consideration from academic psychology, indeed
Jung’s terms, "introversion", and "extraversion", found
their way into everyday language, and Isabel Myers Briggs and her daughter
Katherine used this work as the basis for the "Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator", the personality test used most often in the United States today.

The problem of science continued to manifest itself in
Jung’s work with the unconscious €“ which established psychology’s claim to
scientific status €“ and the problem of the individual and universal, problems
of man and nature. The theory of archetypes was critical here. The archetypes
were universal structures defining the person. The collective unconscious was
precisely conceived, contrary to popular belief, for its scientific
architecture, providing universal grounds for analysis. Indeed Jung’s friend,
the physicist Pauli, wanted mathematical analyses to be pursued on ‘archetypal’
dreams. That Jung’s work was not carried in this direction caused him to resign
from the Jung Institute. The unconscious as a principle for analysis could then
be interpreted ‘scientifically’ in vastly different ways, from a materialist to
a spiritualist perspective, from being defined according to biological reflexes
to being posited as an eternal soul. Jung ended up seeing the importance of a
method of cultural history in psychology for tracing the primitive mythology that
defined for him the collective unconscious, there being for him an inherited
genetic memory. Jung also saw himself as securing the scientificity of
psychology with his biologizing of Freud’s concept of the libido with a concept
of psychic energy influenced by the thinking of Helmholtz, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Bergson. "He noted that in nature, the instinct for the
preservation of the species [Instinkt der Arterhaltung] and the instinct for
self-preservation [Instinkt der Selbsterhaltung] were indistinct, where one
only saw a life drive [Lebenstrieb] and a will to live [Willen zum
Dasein]" (p.221). Jung saw the need through analysis for us to be more at
home with our animal selves, as primitive cultures are, contrary to
expectations this would result in a peaceful and calm life, man in time with
the rhythms of nature. "Psychotherapy’s task was to provide a means for
modern man to overcome his alienation from nature, through refinding the
guidance and regulation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious"
(p.263). Jung’s identification of the primitive, elemental side of man as lying
in and actually being the unconscious was drawn upon by a Jungian type of
figure, who was occupied by science but also explored the necessarily primitive
nature of the imagination, that is Gaston Bachelard.

This is a book with a depth and richness of
perspective, which is fostered by its historical approach. Expertise, hence is
not needed here for precisely this reason, through a historical method
Shamdasani inherently provides a lucid substrate introduction to the history of
modern philosophy. Jung was a remarkable figure with a profound library of
knowledge. He desperately sought to unify the sciences for their therapeutic
value to man and the world, and so he integrated many disciplinary innovations
into his work, including Lévy-Bruhl and anthroplogy, and implicitly Durkheim
and sociology. He provided corrections to certain fallacies of Freud, but above
all, as with Nietzsche, he wanted no blind ‘followers’, Laurens van der Post
recalls:

"I do not want anybody to be a Jungian," he
told me. "I want people to be themselves. As for "isms," they
are the viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any
medieval plague or pest has ever been. Should I be found one day only to have
created another "ism" then I will have failed in all I tried to
do." (p.348)

© 2004 Andrew
Aitken

Andrew Aitken
is currently completing a PhD on the method of Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology
at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London,
and his research interests include the history of science and contemporary
French philosophy.

Categories: Psychoanalysis