How to Read Jung

The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as C. G. Jung's dynamic vision of the self, pitted against an ailing Western civilization.

Jung was the original anti-psychiatrist, who believed that the real patient was not the suffering individual, but a sick and ailing Western civilization. His true aim, in all of his work, was a therapy of the West.

David Tacey introduces the reader to Jung’s unique style and approach, which is at once scientific and prophetic. He explores the radical themes at the core of Jung’s psychology, and interprets the dynamic vision of the whole self that inspires and motivates Jung’s work.

“The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”—Carl Gustav Jung

David Tacey is Associate Professor of English and Reader in Psychoanalytic Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of eight books on psychoanalysis and cultural studies, including Jung and the New Age and The Spirituality Revolution and co-editor (with Ann Casement) of The Idea of the Numinous: Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Essex, Colchester. His many books include Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity and, most recently, The Book of Dead Philosophers.