Newspaper Article

The Jung offenders: Psychoanalyst's descendants sully his reputation by trying to control it

Fulford, Robert

2005

Overview

The atmosphere of nervous embarrassment that's surrounded the reputation of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) in recent years was only deepened last week by the frantic efforts of his family to protect him from a distinguished American biographer, Deirdre Bair. The author of earlier books on Samuel Beckett, Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, she spent 10 years working on Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst who began his career as a colleague of Sigmund Freud's but then went his own way after their angry breakup in 1913. The result, Jung: A Biography (Little, Brown), appeared two years ago in English to mostly admiring reviews. In 1914, about the time Emma Jung was carrying their fifth child, Carl started a liaison with [Toni Wolff], who was 13 years younger. As a husband, Jung was a scoundrel. Two weeks after Emma gave birth, Jung and his new girlfriend went on a two-week holiday together, leaving his wife and her mother to look after the baby while his own mother cared for the older children. Later, Jung explained: \"Back then I was in the midst of the anima problem,\" the word \"anima\" being his term for the inner personality and also the feminine element in a male personality. He added, \"What could you expect from me? The anima bit me on the forehead and would not let go.\" Canada was among the places that felt Jung's effect. Robertson Davies began reading him in the 1950s and eventually became so caught up in Jungian theory that he built his 1972 novel, The Manticore, around an unlikely but highly detailed Jungian analysis. Because astrology interested Jung, Davies (who usually scorned the fads of the ignorant) consulted an astrologer in New York. Northrop Frye used Jungian terminology as a way of structuring his own ideas. Frye reworked concepts like synchronicity and collective subconscious into terms he found useful. He warmed to Jung's belief that humans desperately need myths and can't function without them.

• Publisher: Postmedia Network Inc
• Subject: Bair, Deirdre / Biographies / Jewish people / Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961) / Jung, Emma / Parapsychology / Reputations / Wolff, Toni