Jung: A Biography

From Publishers Weekly
Jung's shade would be content with Bair's biography, which in bulk and detail suggests that there is little more to say. Lucid and persuasive, the National Book Award-winning biographer of Beckett strikes a balance between damage control and deification, for Jung's ambition, arrogance and lack of generosity tend now to obscure his originality as a thinker and his impact on theories about why we dream and how we think. While Bair provides perhaps more about almost every aspect of his youth, maturity, rivalries, renown and old age than we care to know, it takes an author's note and two long endnotes to realize how much censorship the Jung heirs still insist upon. Bair was, for example, denied access to the diaries of Jung and his mother, which were deemed "too private," and to the thousand letters between Jung and his devoted (yet mistreated) wife. Even so, through interviews, published documentation and the papers released to her, Bair has evoked the man in all his cynical self-interest, opportunism, moral ambiguity, paradoxical insecurity and charismatic hold on decades of disciples. How much a purported Swiss temperament of suspicion, exclusiveness and obsession with ancestral status influenced Jung's development is a fascinating thread winding through Bair's narrative, affecting his personal and professional relations. Freud, father figure and then foe, comes off badly as ambitious, arrogant, single-minded and vengeful. Bair's Jung is no saint, but he is less unpleasant and exploitative here than as portrayed in Frank McLynn's 1997 biography. The large hole in this large book is not biographical. Jung's significance has much to do with his theories of archetypes and the related power of the collective unconscious. One finishes the book without much explanation of either. 32 pages of b&w photos. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Bair, award-winning author of books on Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Anaïs Nin, wrote Jung with the aid of the psychoanalyst's family. She gained access to all of Jung's professional papers, but not the personal ones, including diaries or letters to his wife. With this plethora of information she has produced a judicious, sympathetic, slightly academic, and, above all, comprehensive portrait of Jung's life. This thoroughness comes at a cost. By focusing on the details of Jung's life, Bair fails to explore the interaction between his career trajectory and ideas. Yet as a "definitive" account of his life, Jung "will be praised by scholars, read by the general public and loathed by the partisans--just as a good biography should be" (New York Times Book Review). Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Shortly after the death of Carl Jung in 1961, lightning struck a tree beneath which he had often practiced his analytical psychology. In a biography that maintains the excellence she has achieved in previous works on Beckett, Nin, and de Beauvoir, Bair recounts the life of the famous analyst whose career provoked so much controversy that one of his contemporaries regarded the lightning bolt as its only natural postscript. Predictably, Bair focuses on Jung's stormy parting from his famous mentor, Sigmund Freud, her detailed chronicle exposing the collision of two authoritarian personalities as well as the theoretical divergence of two speculative thinkers. Bair also probes Jung's much-disputed relationship with the Nazis, ultimately clearing Jung of the charge of anti-Semitism but documenting episodes of deplorable recklessness in the years Jung crusaded for a distinctly German psychotherapy. Deftly integrating her theoretical exposition into narrative glosses on Jung's motives, Bair shows how Jung projected his own gender ideals onto female patients; how he allowed his obsession with collective archetypes to smother his interest in individual patients; and how he first attracted, then alienated, disciples with his bizarre fusion of alchemy, religion, and psychology. A capacious portrait of an enigmatic pioneer. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Deirdre Bair has written about some of the most influential figures in 20th century culture--Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and AnaÔs Nin. Now she turns her expert eye to the one person whose teachings and writings are the most influential of all: psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. The founder of analytical psychology, Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910. Jung had a professional relationship with Sigmund Freud until he broke with the elder father of psychoanalysis over his emphasis on infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. As Freud's influence has waned over the years, Jung's ideas--the collective unconscious, the archetypal myths underpinning all societies, synchronicity, "new age" spirituality, and much more--have achieved an overwhelming ascendancy. Bair addresses the myths about Jung--accusations that he was an anti-Semite and a misogynist, and that he falsified data--with evidence from his own writings and from those of his colleagues and former patients. The result is a groundbreaking and accessible work that promises to be the definitive life of Carl Jung.


About the Author
Deirdre Bair has been a literary journalist and university professor of comparative literature and culture. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York. She lives in Connecticut.


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A fastidious, full-scale biography of the Swiss psychologist. Few characters in the history of psychoanalysis have been as gifted, pivotal, or personally fascinating as the polymorphous Jung, who, with Freud, was one of the two great figures of 20th-century psychology. Jung was born in Basel to a long line of patrician German and Swiss physicians and clergymen, but his own parents were poor and odd, and "Pastor's Carl," as he was called as a boy, was unpromising, to say the least. Haunted by visions and drawn to corpses and spiritual contact with the dead, he was silent, awkward, and inscrutable, even to himself. Medical school gave him a method and a focus; while studying schizophrenics in the Zurich asylum, he discovered an associative protocol that made him famous throughout Europe and gained him the attention of Sigmund Freud. Prizewinning Bair (Samuel Beckett, 1978; Ana￯﾿ﾽs Nin, 1995, etc.) painstakingly tracks Jung's restless apprenticeship to the dominating Freud and his painful defection from Freud's belief that an "incest complex" lies at the heart of all neuroses and psychoses. Jung became a colorful and dominating figure in Zurich, attracting patients-primarily wealthy, worshipful, sexually frustrated women-from all over the world to his office in the Victorian home he shared with his long-suffering wife and awe-stricken children. Through his active practice and through self-analysis, dreams, visions, s￯﾿ﾽances, and a study of religion, mythology, and alchemy, in the 1920s and '30s he created such concepts as introversion and extroversion, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity. Yet his family, junior colleagues, collaborators, and mistresses all paid the price of hisgrowing self-obsession. Bair makes this clear without overt judgment, and her closing portrait of the elderly analyst in "a vanishing world," trying to understand himself at last by writing his brilliant memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is riveting, inspiring, and unforgettable. Apart from assuming a too-sophisticated knowledge of psychoanalysis by readers, this triumph of scholarship is also highly accessible.


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