Carl Gustav Jung

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 31 JUL 1997

McLynn (Robert Louis Stevenson) declares at the outset that this is not a definitive biography, which "will not be possible until all the relevant documentation is released into the public domain." He characterizes his subject as arrogant, selfish and domineering, yet possessing a magnetism that drew colleagues, clients and disciples--especially of the opposite sex--and made him the most famous psychologist of his time, after Freud. Recognizing the backbiting propensities of the psychoanalytic profession in Jung's day, the author nonetheless sees his abrasiveness as extreme. Breaking with Freud and his methods of psychotherapy in 1912 after having been viewed as heir apparent to the master, and undergoing years of psychosis afterward, Jung "deliberately avoided anything that smacked of Freudianism." Such avoidance at times reached "bizarre proportions," notes McLynn, as when Jung refused to recognize sexual interpretations that seemed apparent to his colleagues. Despite Jung's unpleasantness and exploitation, he lived long enough (dying at 85 in 1961) for his Jekyll side to balance the Hyde aspect, although McLynn concludes that Jungian methods "often looked like nothing so much as the therapist putting his finger in the scales." Readers will find this a meticulously researched and altogether remarkable if overlong biography.