Sir, - As people who have spent many years studying and using the work of Freud, Lacan and Jung, we write to express our dismay at Ian Robertson's recent "review" of Ronald Hayman's biography of Jung.
Alarm bells started ringing when we realised that Joyce had acquired a second daughter called Lucrezia and that Jung had dealt in collective "consciousness"; they grew louder when we noted that nearly half of the review consisted of anecdotes demonstrating what an awful person Jung was and that Robertson needed to draw so heavily on this material to discredit Jung's work. To say that "in middle-European psychotherapy the theory was often as interwoven with its founder's personality as was Nazism with Hitler's" is sleight of hand masquerading as argument. It tells us nothing about the theory, function or meaning of Nazism, nor of Jungian therapy.
Another astonishing feature of the review is that less than one-twelfth of it tells us anything about Hayman's method, its main lines of argument or how precisely Jung's work relates to his personality.
Robertson berates Jung for offering meaning to his patients: where we come from, humans are meaning-giving creatures, alas! Prof Robertson offers us no insight into the complexities of Jungian meaning, Shadow and all; nor does he indicate the subtle ways in which archetypal figure and stories are used in Jungian and neo-Jungian therapy. And when he suggests that "the heady blend of mysticism and psychotherapy" may explain Jung's influence he uses the term "mysticism" very egregiously indeed, conflating it with religion in a most cavalier way.
Prof Robertson's Comtean optimism and scientism might be tenable in the 19th century, touching in the 20th, but it is downright worrying in the 21st when it is manifested by a Professor of Psychology. Psyche is, after all, soul, life in all its darkness, depth and profundity.
It is perhaps, then, the Jungian attempt to revive among psychologists, scientists and intellectuals a feeling for myth and symbol that threatens Prof Robertson. It certainly seems to be the motor of his review.
Prof Robertson shouldn't have been asked to, nor should he have agreed to, review a book on Jung. - Yours, etc.,
Redmond O'Hanlon, D. Phil. (Oxon), Michael Murphy, M. Phil. (Psychoanalytic Studies, TCD), Monkstown, Co Dublin.