DON'T shoot the messenger is an aphorism used to shield a blameless man bearing bad tidings. Such a man is Frank McLynn. It is just as well that such a noted biographer has been the first to tackle a popular biography of Jung. Had the work been undertaken by a feminist therapist, it would have been a very "unpopular" biography indeed, even if it had presented only half of the immense amount of material unearthed, compiled and interpreted by McLynn. The disciples of Carl Gustav Jung are not going to enjoy this depiction of Jung - as the unpleasant antithesis of his own message.
In a splendid chapter entitled "The Doctrine", McLynn masterfully reviews Jung's work. He sought no "professional" advice and claims any errors are his alone, but his synthesis is comprehensive and accessible. He makes clear that Jung saw neuroses rooted in the present rather than the past. The analysis and is to face "reality", the therapist to balance the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is collective and responds in fixed behaviour patterns called archetypes. These archetypes manifest themselves in images and symbols, found in dreams, fantasies and myths, the best known being the contrasexual images of animus and anima. The final stage of human development is to confront the archetype of archetypes, the universal Self (not the personal "self") whose closest possible identification is with God.
If this is the message, what of the man? How far did Jung himself travel on this journey? Jung was, to say the least, a difficult personality. McLynn's research finds him described repeatedly as egotistical, a bully, given to foul language and volcanic rages and demonstrating ill concealed hostility to patients who did not interest him. Dr Michael Fordham "found him thoughtless, insensitive, inconsiderate and tactless, with a tendency to ride roughshod over people". His sense of humour was said to be his saving grace, but Walter Kaufman, who made a detailed study of Jung's humour, found it was mainly sarcasm and hyperbole of the reductio ad absurdum kind. McLynn concludes that he made many enemies, especially among men, the most famous of whom was Freud.
The relationship between Jung and Freud, engrossingly detailed by McLynn, is often self described by the two men as a father/son relationship, with Jung as Crown Prince and heir to Freud as the Father of Psychoanalysis. Aware of the effects of anti Semitism, Freud the politician told his Jewish colleagues that they needed Jung to proselytise on their behalf: "The gentiles won't hear the Jews. The Swiss will save us." This was an unfounded hope, for two reasons. First, in the 1930s Jung allowed Nazi propaganda to be published in a journal of which he was editor. Then, after only six years, the professional relationship was sundered. Therein lay the paradox: Jung appears to have been walking proof of the Freudian thesis that the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is sexuality.
If men did not like Jung, women did. Lots of them. McLynn suggests that Jung's delineation of the traits of the typical sufferer from philandering syndrome was a shrewd self portrait. He invented what I could call the Wife's Double Bind: a "mother's boy", if he avoided homosexuality, would marry a girl inferior to his mother or a female tyrant who would tear him away from his mother. He consistently argued for free love and bluntly told Freud that the prescription for a happy marriage was a licence to be unfaithful. Emma, Jung's wife, was to bear all this without jealousy, as a jealous woman did not really love her husband. He went so far as to deal with his wife's distress by analysing her with the aim of converting her to a polygamou husband. A somewhat self serving course of therapy?
While constantly repeating that animus and anima were fundamental components of human nature, Jung never adverted to the basic inequality and asymmetry that exists between men and women, thus making his theorising a historical and gender blind.
Unlike his subject, McLynn writes with restraint and balance, and at 600 pages, this fascinating book is not a page too long. We are left with the knowledge that postJungians have much retrieving to do, for, to quote McLynn, "His apparent willingness to define woman's identity in terms of her value to men; his statement that there was merit in the old patristic conundrum about whether women had souls; his likening the feminine principle to yin or emptiness; and, most of all, his fulminations against animus hounds'", is damning. Whether you shoot the messenger or not, some messages can sure give you an itchy trigger finger.