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distinctively modern, in incorporating the irreducibly subjective element in theorising in any scientific field. The central book here is Jung's Psychological Types , volume six of the Collected Works . Shamdasani's take on Jung and modernity could hardly be more opposed to Noll's. Where Bair rightly establishes Jung's worldwide reputation before any association with Freud, Shamdasani explicates Jung's alliance with other famous psychologists, not least Wilhelm Wundt, William James and Theodore Flournoy. Bair presents Jung as an original, independent psychologist - the conventional view. Shamdasani shows Jung to have been a participant, though still most original, in a larger enterprise - a novel view. Shamdasani links Jung not only to psychologists other than Freud but also to anthropologists and sociologists. The connections reinforce Shamdasani's basic argument that Jung regarded psychology as the linchpin of other disciplines. As compelling as Shamdasani's investigations are, occasionally he goes a mite too far. For example, the armchair anthropologist Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, while eagerly embraced by Jung in support of Jung's characterisation of "primitive mentality," was thereby going far beyond Emile Durkheim, who faults Lvy-Bruhl for overemphasising the distinctiveness of primitive thinking. Lvy-Bruhl, while indisputably indebted to Durkheim for the concept of "collective representations", thus constitutes a shaky link between Jung and Durkheim. Similarly, Shamdasani exaggerates the fear of founding anthropologist E. B. Tylor that rational secular modernity might revert to "primitive superstition" - a tacit parallel by Shamdasani to Jung's prediction of the swamping of modern consciousness by the unconscious. On the contrary, Tylor was seeking to preserve religion in the face of science, and "primitive" religion for him is as rational as science. As Shamdasani acknowledges, the starting point for the history of depth psychology is Henri Ellenberger's magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Like the eponymous detective in the TV series Dragnet , Ellenberger seeks "the facts, just the facts". More precisely, he seeks to separate the facts from loaded interpretations of them. He aims to topple the "Freud legend", or the view, promulgated by Jones, that Freudian psychology sprang out of Freud's head like Athena out of Zeus'. Shamdasani aims to do the same with what he calls the "Jung legend". The two legends are related. Where the Freud legend contends that Freud had no predecessors, the Jung legend claims that Jung had one big predecessor: Freud. Jung is thus to be understood vis-a-vis Freud, even and especially in breaking with him. Admittedly, Jung's practice of starting seemingly every piece of writing by refuting Freud's views on the topic at hand does not abet the case for his autonomy. Shamdasani's book deals, above all, with the scope of psychology, with psychological types and with the relationship between the body and the soul. In, I hope, a future volume, he will consider in detail the application of Jung's theory to myth and to religion, including Eastern religions, Gnosticism and alchemy. As parallels to Jung's effort to unify the sciences under psychology, Shamdasani might consider Talcott Parsons' attempt to unify the social sciences, here including psychology, under the canopy of "social relations". Even bolder is the attempt by E. O. Wilson and other sociobiologists to subsume the social sciences under biology - a reunion of culture with biology that for so long has been tabooed as racist. Though Shamdasani mentions only one of them, he is engaged in the kind of enterprise practiced at its finest by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock and John Dunn in political theory, by George Stocking in anthropology, and by Robert Alun Jones in sociology. He seeks to reconstruct the intellectual history of a discipline by asking what questions the founders themselves were asking, what they were reading, and with whom they were in contact. The position rejected is that there are eternal questions asked, with the differences lying only in the answers. Shamdasani thus stresses that what is called Jungian today is not always quite what the master had in mind. The ultimate source of Shamdasani's brand of intellectual history is that named "question and answer" by the philosopher R. G. Collingwood. Together with Eugene Taylor and several others, Shamdasani has gone far in making the history of Jungian psychology truly professional. His is a superb achievement. Robert A. Segal is professor of theories of religion, Lancaster University, and the editor of The Gnostic Jung and Jung on Mythology .
Jung: A Biography By Deirdre Bair Author - Little, Brown Editor - 881 Price - 25.00 ISBN - 0 316 85434 4
Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science Author - Sonu Shamdasani Publisher - Cambridge University Press Pages - 387 Price - 50.00 and 18.99 ISBN - 0 521 83145 8 and 53909 9
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