Carl Gustav Jung; A Biography

Rating:
Summary: An indispensable sour companion
Review: Anybody interested in Jung should read this book, but read it with a grain of salt. The author is no great admirer of Jung; was this a result of learning so much about him while writing his biography? I do not know, but I am grateful to McLynn for writing a book that has taught me so much about a man who has taught me so much.

That said, let me state that this book can by no means substitute for reading Jung. The brilliance, fire, and life of his writing is almost entirely absent from this book: a great loss.

Also absent are photographs. I would like to see what Jung and Co. looked like at various stages.

So let's put out a new version with photos!

Rating:
Summary: Fastidiously researched, unsympathetic biography.
Review: As a warts-and-all story, this book provides the most negative view of Jung and his theories you are likely to read from an 'impartial' biographer. Unfortunately, McLynn's own railings against the illogicalities present in Jung's theories manifest themselves as a frank rejection of his work. Also evident by the end of the book are the considerable Freudian sympathies McLynn harbours.Despite the author's partialities, the book is well-researched and provides a factual window into the day-to-day life of a man who was nothing if not influential. Jung-lovers and -haters alike should enjoy it immensely for those reasons alone.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Exhibits little, if any, understanding of the immensity of Jung's work. Try Wehr's biography instead.

Rating:
Summary: Carl Gustav Jung
Review: I was suprised to see all the editorial praise for this book even though I also find it an excellent counterpoint to many other biographies of Jung's life.

Without knowing how credible McLynn's scholarship is, I can suggest that the book's contribution is to give us the whole Jung, shadow and all, or warts and all, so to speak.

For myself, a reader of Jung and of other biographies and memoirs, this book rates as certainly the most severely and relentlessly critical. I came out to see what other readers were saying and found laudatory editorials. Perhaps McLynn's scholarship is unassailable, in which case, Jung having slept with everyone the author thinks he did, it is a wonder the man got any work done. And for those who are astonished at the quantity and quality of Jung's work, that is saying a lot.

My feeling about the book is that it is one thing for a man or a woman to take on his or her own shadow and emerge whole. It is another thing entirely for another to detail the contents of the other's shadow with neutrality and pride. This would be my criticism of this book.

Rating:
Summary: This book spreads disinformation.
Review: In 1936 when the world slept CG Jung wrote of the state of Germany the following:"The emphasis on the Germanic race(vulgarly caller"Ayrian"),the Germanic heritage,blood and soil...Jesus as a blonde and blue-eyed hero...the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic disguise...all this is the indespensible scenery for the drama which is taking place and at bottom they all mean the same thing:a god has taken posession of the Germans...It was soon after Hitler siezed power... that a cartoon apeared in Punch of a raving beserker tearing himself free of his bonds.A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather." The same year when the Germans were saying that no one could live with the Jews and that they had to be isolated he published an article which stated:"In consequence of their more than twice as aincent culture they are vastly more conscious of human weakness and inferiorities and are therefor much less vulnerable in this respect than we are ourselves.They also owe to the experience of aincent culture the ability to live consciously in benevolent,friendly and tolerant neighbourhood with their own defects,while we are still too young to have no illusions about ourselves." In January 1939 with Hitler close to the summit of his powers,Jung in an interview said:"Hitler made on me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth,an automaton with a mask,like a robot,or a mask of a robot." Now if on the other hand you want to read a fictional work about a fool who had a low opinion of Jews,admired Hitled and really was a person who only gave nonsense to the world then please read this book.

Rating:
Summary: the last page causes a sigh of relief
Review: McLynn doesn't like Jung ideas. Not a problem, really, but then why write a book about him? So the book crawls slowly, unhappily amassing all negative gossip about Jung, leaving the reader ( as probably also it did to the writer), miserable, exhausted, untill, at last the book ends, and a sigh of relief is impossible to avoid. Was this really necessary? Was this a paid, imposed job? This is really a pathography, a subgenre of our sick postmodern times, and I hope that these kind of people never go so far as the write a new life of Christ.

Rating:
Summary: A sophisticated hatchet-job
Review: Ok, so the Jungians have done themselves no favors by publishing biographies of Jung that are one-sidedly laudatory. However, the solution is not, in my opinion, to compose counter-biographies that are one-sidedly negative.

After being disappointed with Noll's sensationalist books on Jung, I was hoping that McLynn's biography would be more even-handed. It had, after all, drawn very favorable reviews.

On one hand, thanks to McLynn's efforts, I learned a lot more about Jung than I knew before. However,McLynn's overwhelmingly negative, even petty, evaluation of Jung quickly became both tedious and frustrating as I forced myself to finish it.

If one wishes to know, in exhaustive detail, everything Jung ever did that could expose him to criticism, this book is useful. However, if one wishes to have a complete view of Jung, both positive and negative, this book is extremely misleading.

One source of frustration was the obvious fact that McLynn did not understand Jung's writings, and did not wish to take the time to understand them. It is not enough to dismiss his works as "impenetrable" (a word which, along with "farrago," "besotted," and "emollient," McLynn uses with excruciating frequency.) Lesser minds than McLynn's, such as my own, have managed to "penetrate" Jung's works and found them illuminating.

Another source of frustration was McLynn's penchant for taking gratuitous swipes at almost anyone or anything he finds deficient, as an adjunct to skewering Jung. Why, for example, was it necessary for McLynn to suggest that Jung resembled Physicist Richard Feynmann in having a "taste for the low life." What has Feynmann to do with the issue? What is Feynmann's unstated connection with the "low life"? Why, for another example, does McLynn feel so confident that much of Zen Buddhism is "pure nonsense"?

McLynn's dismissive attitude towards Jung's admirers, particularly his women students, is particularly unconvincing and mean-spirited. McLynn seems to sort them into two categories: mistresses, and would-be mistresses who were notable primarily for their lack of physical attractiveness. As just one example, for McLynn to ridicule Marie-Louise Von Franz as the author of mere incomprehensible gibberish goes beyond the realm of fair comment.

In short, if the reader is seeking a sarcasm-laden, repetitive expose of a famous man, look no further than this volume. However, if you wish truly to know Jung, this book will be a disappointment. An unbiased biography of Carl Jung has yet to be written.

Rating:
Summary: Masquerade
Review: So far, I find this book captivating like a traffic accident. Page 222 of 529, for example, consists, in it's entirety, of three paragraphs about Freud. And it's so chock-full of whiney, vague "interpretation," that McLynn has become in my mind the handlebar-moustache-twisting, bound-lady-on-the railroad villain of all biographies. What other reviews of this book have said comes to mind: McLynn's book is valuable precisely because it is OBVIOUSLY the most unfair and degrading description one could credibly sling together based on any interpretation of the facts (in fact, I would say, well beyond "credibly," except, naturally, I am not aquainted in a thoroughgoing way with every detail of Jungs's life... which it's worth noting, the author assumes I am. McLynn omits a vast array of details as if he were *deliberately* trying to make himself sound even more of the dire propogandist than he actually is.) One wonders if this book was written in an attempt to discredit the whole field of critical biography of Jung. That's my theory. Jung must be above reproach, if his foremost critics are the likes of McLynn.