This
book is more about Jungians then about Jung himself. We could say that its main
concern is critical deconstruction of some of the cardinal Jungian myths.
Its main preoccupation is biographical production within the Jungian tradition.
Strictly (methodologically) speaking, it is not a book about Jung himself. It
is not another Jungian (or anti-Jungian) biography. Shamadasani’s book is
narratological (or we could even say critical) study about various
Jungian discourses about Jung. Main object of his interest is narrative
organization (with all its possible falsifications) of Jung’s life. He is, in
his own way, analyzing coherence and credibility of all that texts. In some
very important points of his work it could be easily said that he is trying to
safe Jung from his own biographers.

Carl
Gustav Jung was one of the greatest psychologists of the last century. He was
(and in some points he is still) highly relevant theoretician. He was very
influential practitioner. Among many other things, he is a fonder of one of the
most influential schools of dynamic psychology. His theoretical considerations
about structure and dynamics of personality, and about the process of the
personal individuation, are well known and very often related to Jung’s own
personal experiences. The originality of his thinking, his clear and convincing
style, his fresh and practically valid conceptions, makes him still very
present and undoubtedly live among great number of modern practitioners and
theoreticians of various orientations.

In
many points, Jung’s biography is an important part of Jungian ideology. His own
life is seen as the best possible illustration of his theory. So, we could say,
being Jungian implies living Jungian way of life. And of course, no
wonder; Jung’s own life is (by many Jungian authors) seen as something that
could be understood as the first archetypal pattern of such life.  One can
guess — there is (there must be) a lot of idealization and mystification in
discourse like this. In actual discourse of his followers and his biographers,
Jung’s name is often evoked to denote a whole host of cultural, religious,
philosophical, political, and psychological issues as a kind of shorthand. Discussions
that appear to be ostensibly about him may, on closer examination, carry scant
relation to historical actuality.

As
a result of this, we are faced today with a serious predicament. Currently,
vast sectors of the public are unable to distinguish between functionalized
accounts of Jung from the historical figure, due to the myths, fictions, and
errors that abound in the profusion of literature about him. This situation is
compounded by the dearth of reliable historical and biographical information about
him and the insufficiently realized fact that many manuscripts, seminars, and
thousands of letters still remain unpublished.

Just
for example, there are many problems with famous text of Jung’s Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. As it is well known, this book is officially
attributed to Jung himself and to Aniela Jaffe. Two strata of alternations in
this text need to be distinguished. The first stratum consists in the manner in
which Jaffe utilized materials from her interviews with Jung, and edited the manuscripts
of Jung that she utilized. The second stratum consists in changes made between
the first manuscript she prepared and the published version. Many people were
involved in the second stratum of changes. A number of alternations of the
manuscript were made at the request of a representative of the Jung family at a
late stage of the editorial process. A line by line comparison of the protocols
with subsequent manuscripts and the published German and English versions,
together with the study of editorial correspondences, shows that the bulk of
the deletions and changes lie in the first stratum, i.e., between protocols
Jung’s manuscript, and first German manuscript. While statements in the
protocols that appear in the published version are generally reliably
reproduced, in many cases the context, mood, and associative connections are
lost. Whole sequences are remade with elements drawn from different sources in
a form of a mosaic work. This reordering often recasts the meaning of
statement. In places, sentences spoken by Jung in various contexts and months
apart were joined together to form a sequence of paragraphs.

Shamdasani
is well informed in all of the Jungian matters — he knows theory, he knows
history. His style is well balanced, coherent, and easy to follow. This very
interesting book is logically composed, eloquent, and well documented.  I
believe that it will have positive reception among the analytical
psychologists (Jungians) and also among those that are in some other way
related to Jung’s personality and to his doctrines.

© 2006 Petar Jevremovic

Petar Jevremovic:
Clinical psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, author of two books (Psychoanalysis
and Ontology, Lacan and Psychoanalysis), translator of Aristotle and
Maximus the Confessor, editor of the Serbian editions of selected works of
Heintz Kohut, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, author of various texts that are
concerned with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and theology. He lives in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis