Jung A Biography

The New York Times

Bair's stated goal is to rise above the fray and answer the questions most often posed about Jung: Was he an anti-Semite? Was he a womanizer? Was his psychological theory a form of religion? She largely succeeds. Painstakingly fair, she digs up and scrutinizes sources with an admirable, if sometimes exhausting, thoroughness. — Robert S. Boynton

The New Yorker

So many women flocked to Zurich to be analyzed by Carl Jung that they were punningly referred to as the Jungfrauen (“virgins,” in German). The legendary analyst can’t be accused of neglecting the opportunities to which, in the days before clear therapeutic boundaries were established, his charisma and their transference gave rise. And there are more serious dents to his reputation, including his decision to accept the presidency of a German analytic society in 1933—he remained until 1940. Bair, the author of exhaustive biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, has turned her research skills to clarifying these, and other, controversies, including Jung’s famous split with Freud, in 1913 (they disagreed on the primacy of the sex drive). The result is largely balanced and thorough, though Bair’s perhaps excessive focus on the minutiae of Jung’s life keeps her from illuminating the ideas and the analytic legacy of the man who invented such concepts as introversion, extroversion, and the collective unconscious, and was able to blame an overactive anima for his womanizing.

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. (Nov. 13) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

By their choice of occupation, psychologists become fair game for biographers, but not many subjects hold the fascination of Carl Jung. Bair (Samuel Beckett: A Biography, winner of the National Book Award) tackles the Swiss founder of analytical psychology who began as a Freud acolyte before breaking away and developing a professional and general audience for his work on psychological types, myth, symbols, and synchronicity, among other things. Her well-crafted narrative integrates life and work, though the latter predominates. Jung's following included celebrities and students, though he often behaved badly. Of course, he was brilliant, but he was also "half-mad," a virtual bigamist, an absentee father, and a hothead. His leadership of a Nazi-sponsored psychology group created a furor; those who fault Jung on this point-and on his womanizing and irregular modes of therapy-will consider Bair an apologist. To her, he was politically na ve, culturally embedded, and prone to poor judgment. Her abundant and vivid detail (supplemented with 200 pages of notes) allows readers to appraise the force and foibles of a peculiar, phenomenal man. This massive and masterful treatment of Jung balances other, more contentious writing about him and will long be the definitive biography. For all libraries.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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; Anaïs 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, séances, 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.