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Distinguishing the Forest from the Trees: Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography

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Distinguishing the Forest from the Trees
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography
Review by: George B. Hogenson
The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 2005), pp. 29-41
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
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THE SAN FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL, 2005, Vol. 24, no. 1, 29–41.

DISTINGUISHING THE FOREST FROM THE TREES

Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography, Boston, Little Brown, 2003.

Reviewed by George B. Hogenson

Within fifty years of his death, descriptions of the life of Isaac

Newton had largely eliminated any reference to his intense inter-
est in alchemy. His theological writings, while preserved, were rel-
egated to the margins of his work, which had been transformed into
an ideal type: the essential form of the modern scientist. Another
250 years would pass before a more fully rounded understanding of
Newton’s life and intellectual pursuits could be assembled and posi-
tively received in polite intellectual circles. The scandal of Newton’s
alchemy had finally passed into the domain of the history of sci-
ence. Science, of course, had also passed into new realms that were
so distant from Newton’s classical physics as to be virtually unrec-
ognizable to the tradition he had inaugurated. But the alchemy had
been a harbinger of greater things, as Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs1 argued
in her study of Newton’s eccentric passion, for his objective was to
find the means to understand the very small—a problem that would
eventually be addressed by quantum mechanics—in a manner simi-
lar to his understanding of the very large, the movement of celes-
tial bodies. As with his study of the cosmos, in his alchemical stud-
ies Newton sought an observational basis for the development of
theory. His early biographers, however, already inhabited a world
where alchemy was being discredited, not the least by the impact of
Newton’s science. The result was that accounts of his life had to sus-
tain the emerging paradigm. Biography became an instrument in
the formation of “normal science.”
The subsequent history of scientific biography, after the bowd-
lerization of Newton’s life, has never been required to serve a simi-
lar purpose—that is, until the advent of psychoanalysis. While a bi-
ography of Einstein or Bohr might contain a variety of interesting
anecdotes, even genuinely revealing human conflicts and challeng-
es, influences or missed opportunities, biography within an estab-
lished normal science does not serve the function that was served
by the excision of Newton’s alchemy; biography does not establish
30 George B. Hogenson

the framework of acceptable research. No one would suggest that

service in a Swiss patent office is a necessary element in the forma-
tion of a modern theoretical physicist, even though a recent study of
Einstein makes a case for the impact an abundance of patent appli-
cations concerned with the reconciliation of time on clocks might
have had in shaping Einstein’s interest in the relativity of time.2 But
then there is psychoanalysis. What are we to do with a “science”
that takes biography as its object of study, and then turns in on it-
self, making claims based on the autobiographies of the founders of
the science? Jung famously remarked that all psychological theories
have the form of a personal confession on the part of the theoreti-
cian. To the extent that Jung’s contention is true, it would seem that
we cannot understand a psychological theory, or at least an analyti-
cal theory, in the absence of the biography of the originator. Seen
from this standpoint, the task of the biographer of one of the found-
ers of what we can generally refer to as the depth psychologies be-
comes significantly more difficult and portentous than biography in
any other domain. To what extent, we might ask, does getting the
biography wrong also get the theory wrong?
This question plagues the study of Freud’s theories, as more
and more information about his life comes into conflict with ele-
ments of his theories, based as they ostensibly are on his self-anal-
ysis. In my own early work on the relationship between Jung and
Freud, I made the argument that for Freud, biographical foreclo-
sure was an essential move in his theoretical development.3 Such
gestures as the wholesale destruction of personal correspondence
may thus be seen as moves Freud made within the theory building
process itself. There is, in other words, a degree of reflexivity in psy-
choanalysis that makes the founder’s life grist for the analytic mill
constructed by the founder him or her self. (The claim is not gender
bound; one need only consider the biography of Klein and its rela-
tionship to her theories of mother-infant interaction). In the case of
Freud, it is increasingly clear that much of his theoretical project is
an effort to manage his own narcissistic needs, rather than come to
terms with the lives of those who consulted him. This may be most
pronounced in his relationship to religion, but it plays itself out at
many levels in his theory. What is interesting about this phenom-
enon, however, is the degree to which the idiosyncratic neuroses
or obsessions of a genuine genius can become normative for entire
schools of thought. When popular commentary holds that we can-
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 31

not escape Freud’s theories in the modern world, we are really, in

large measure, being told that we cannot escape Freud’s biography.
We cannot escape Newton’s theories because they define laws of
nature. Something altogether different is going on in the develop-
ment of theory in depth psychology, as Jung clearly understood.
Within the historiography of psychoanalysis, Jung’s biography
has occupied an unusual position. While Freud’s life has only re-
cently come under critical scrutiny, Jung’s “biography” was in many
respects deployed at a fairly early point in his career as the basis for
a critique of his theories. This was, of course, the method of attack
employed by Freud’s reliable followers both before and after the
rupture in relations between the two men. According to them, the
fact that Jung came from lines of protestant pastors, on both sides,
clearly determined his continued devotion to religion, even after
Freud had “debunked” the entire phenomenon as a collective neu-
rosis. Likewise, Jung’s misguided and stubborn engagement with
the Nazi efforts to “conform” psychoanalysis to National Socialist
ideology has been taken as grounds for the wholesale rejection of
his ideas, while Martin Heidegger’s actual party membership, con-
certed efforts to remove Jews from academic positions while he was
rector at the University of Freiburg, and at best obtuse relationship
to the Nazis after the war, has done nothing to stem the flow of
books and courses on his philosophy.
Jung, of course, never made much of his own biography, and
therein rests an irony. In his 1929 seminars on analytical psychol-
ogy he gives a fairly detailed account of his development after the
break with Freud, focusing in particular on his imaginal work with
interior figures such as the famous Philemon.4 But there is little evi-
dence of contrivance in these accounts, and, importantly, Jung is at
some pains to dissuade the members of the seminar from following
his example on the way to psychological insight. This last is again
a point at which “biographical” accounts of Jung’s work have gone
wildly astray, as when Richard Noll5 implies that Jung was endorsing
the importance of the ancient Roman religion of Mithraism when
in fact he explicitly remarks that he is not doing so, only recount-
ing his own personal area of investigation. While Noll’s writings on
Jung have received well deserved criticism from scholars actually
familiar with Jung’s life and work,6 he has nevertheless gained con-
siderable currency among those who would rather dispense with
Jung, regardless of their project.7 This in stark contrast to the recep-
32 George B. Hogenson

tion often accorded even fairly modest critiques of Freud based on

a deepening knowledge of his life and the manner in which his the-
ories were built up.
Deirdre Bair’s biography of Jung is the latest entry in this on-
going bio-hermeneutical contest, and she has provided us with an
enviable, if still incomplete, picture of Jung. That her work will, by
itself, significantly alter the reception of Jung in the larger critical
world is already doubtful, given her—all too predictable—reception
in the leading cultural outlets in the United States. The inexplicable
vendetta that the New York Times continues to work against any-
thing Jungian found its voice in a shabby review of Bair’s book.8 The
resolutely anti-Freudian—given its prominent support of Frederick
Crews, how else could one characterize it?—New York Review of
Books has, as of this writing, completely ignored Bair. Apparently,
further criticism is forthcoming from within the world of serious
Jungian historiography in the form of a book or other commentary
by Sonu Shamdasani9, who has contributed a great deal to our un-
derstanding of Jung and is probably the most focused critic of writ-
ers such as Noll. Shamdasani has recently published his own book
length study of Jung’s intellectual heritage,10 and we can only wait
for his comments on Bair’s book to determine whether his critique,
if that is what it is, is cogent.
The near simultaneous appearance of Bair’s Jung and
Shamdasani’s Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology does de-
serve some brief comment, insofar as they illustrate an aspect of
Jungian studies that is crucial to understanding the field. (I have re-
viewed Shamdasani’s book elsewhere.11) A word of contrast is there-
fore in order. What we have in this remarkable publishing event is a
convergence; one might say a conjunction, of near opposite points
of departure for understanding Jung. I would say that the truly com-
mitted scholar will have to have both volumes in hand and be pre-
pared to use them in very different ways. To briefly comment on
Shamdasani’s book, one will, in the end, use it more as a reference
work than as a sustained read. Shamdasani has gone to extraordi-
nary lengths to imbed Jung’s project in the literature of the develop-
ing science of psychology at the turn of the twentieth century. His
command of the literature of that period is formidable. The poten-
tial failing of the book, in terms of biographical understanding, is
that it too easily reminds one of what happened to Newton; in the
quest to establish a sense of normal science, the man is lost. What
one certainly does get of the man, in Shamdasani’s book—and this
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 33

is not insignificant—is a very real sense of the prodigious intellec-

tual power Jung brought to his work. For myself, and for colleagues
with whom I have discussed this aspect of Jung’s life, the extent and
depth of Jung’s familiarity with the literature of psychology, psychi-
atry, mythology, religion, and a variety of other disciplines is quite
simply awe-inspiring. Shamdasani has given us a detailed render-
ing of one important element of Jung’s prodigious scholarship. But
Jung did not read everything, and one of the virtues of Bair’s book is
her ability to point out the lacunae in Jung’s intellectual life, and to
explain how much they influenced the reception of his ideas and, to
some degree, detracted from his life and project.
Deirdre Bair gives us Jung in extraordinary detail. This is not sur-
prising given her previous biographical studies of Samuel Beckett,
Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir.12 Bair knows how to write a bi-
ography as an account of a life. The question that remains is wheth-
er we are closer to understanding the man, even within the context
of vastly greater detail in the rendering of the portrait? Who is the
C. G. Jung in Bair’s book?

Detail, The Weimar Congress, 1911. Freud is standing on a box, while Jung is
crouching forward, holding onto the back of Emma’s chair. Seated: Lou Andreas-
Salomé, Beatrice Hinkle, Emma Jung. Second row: Sandor Ferenczi, Sigmund
Freud, C. G. Jung. Third Row: Alphonse Maeder, Leonhard Seif, K. Landauer, A.
Stegman, Karl Abraham.
34 George B. Hogenson

At the beginning of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR)13,

Jung remarks that his external life was relatively uneventful and that
what really matters was his internal life. Leaving aside for a mo-
ment the now well-attested disdain Jung felt for the MDR project,
this comment has always seemed somewhat paradoxical, given the
extent of Jung’s active and varied life. The image presented in MDR
has nevertheless been one of the more influential representations
of Jung, and it is often referred to by those interested in Jung as the
inspiration for their fascination. As a point of contrast to this im-
age, Bair first of all gives us a fully embodied Jung. Jungians tend,
I believe, to forget this aspect of Jung’s being. Then he becomes an
abstraction. In a famous photograph taken with Freud and an ar-
ray of other early psychoanalysts at the Weimar Congress in 1912,
one can see Jung, next to Freud, trying mightily to sink lower than
Freud, who was already standing on a box in order to rise above his
followers.
Throughout her book, Bair gives us examples of what it must
have been like to be physically in the company of Jung. On the trip
to Africa, to take one example, Ruth Bailey recounted Jung con-
fronting a native group who had apparently been robbing and mur-
dering European “explorers.” “He just loomed colossal,” was Bailey’s
final comment.14
Needless to say, the most notorious aspect of Jung’s embodi-
ment comes to light in his relationships with women other than his
wife, Emma. Ever since Aldo Carotenuto published the letters of
Sabina Spielrein in his book, A Secret Symmetry,15 there has been
a running controversy regarding the precise nature of Jung’s rela-
tionship to his patient. The first assessments were that Jung and
Spielrein must have had a sexual relationship, but this assessment
has become increasingly problematic. Bair’s discussion of the re-
lationship, while replete with details that I have not seen before,
nevertheless remains fundamentally agnostic about the sexual di-
mensions of the relationship, while nevertheless giving the strong
sense that the skeptics are probably correct. Jung’s relationship to
Spielrein was certainly not a model of clinical discretion, but the
likelihood that they were actual lovers appears to be diminishing.
Whether this was the case with other women is more problematic.
During the early days of Jung’s professional life he rapidly became
an object of fascination among the wealthy—and bored—women of
Zürich. The attention lavished on Jung by these women was a con-
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 35

stant irritant and frequent embarrassment to Emma. But it is again

unclear that any infidelity resulted from his being surrounded by
admiring women. We simply do not really know and probably nev-
er will.
The relationship with Toni Wolff is a different matter but also
one fraught with contradictions. In this instance the movement to
a sexual relationship appears incontrovertible. But Bair leads us
through the evolution of the relationship in a manner that brings
it into focus as a relationship driven by factors that had little to do
with sex, and that would, in the end, contribute to its demise in ways
one would not have predicted. The core of the relationship is more
definitively than ever centered in Jung’s apparent need for a partic-
ular form of feminine intellectual companionship. At least initially,
this was also the point of greatest distress for Emma, herself a well-
educated and curious woman who deeply desired to be close to her
husband in his intellectual endeavors. To be displaced in this do-
main was perhaps more of a disappointment than the eventual de-
velopment of a sexual relationship with Toni. In this degree, the re-
lationship with Toni reproduced the core elements of the relation-
ship with Sabina Spielrein.
The succession of close intellectual relationships with women
does not end with Toni. When Jung turned his attention to alche-
my, and began to study it intensely, Toni refused to go along. As Bair
accounts for this reluctance on her part, what falls out is a woman
who was both deeply concerned about Jung’s reputation in the in-
tellectual community they inhabited and also—importantly—suf-
ficiently committed to traditional Christian beliefs to find the het-
erodox alchemists suspect and off-putting. Promptly, Jung found a
new assistant who would follow him into the thicket of alchemy in
the redoubtable Marie-Louise von Franz. Here there was no ques-
tion of a sexual relationship—indeed Jung seems almost to have de-
signed impediments by recommending that von Franz and Barbara
Hannah take up residence together.
It is here that we begin to run into the paradoxical nature of
Jung’s life. As Bair makes clear, Jung was a vigorous and relentless-
ly physical man, indifferent to the elements when camping with his
children or in Africa, joyfully roaring around Zurich in his red road-
ster, intensely frustrated in his last years by his declining physical
abilities. And yet he seems to have only really engaged the world
when he was able to bring events within a psychological framework.
36 George B. Hogenson

Bair again makes this clear in her detailed discussion of Jung’s ac-
tions during the 1930s and 40s in regard to the rise of National
Socialism in Germany.
The events of this period are, needless to say, the most disturb-
ing in Jung’s long and eventful life. The connection to Nazi efforts to
“conform” psychology and psychoanalysis to the guiding principles
of Hitler’s worldview—reading Mein Kampf became mandatory for
psychologists and therapists—and the degree to which Jung partic-
ipated in this effort has been the centerpiece of criticism directed
at Jung ever since. Jung maintained to the end that his involvement
with the Nazis was motivated by a desire to preserve the profes-
sional integrity of psychotherapy and to protect the Jewish psychol-
ogists who were being excluded from the German societies by in-
stituting an international membership in the International General
Medical Society for Psychotherapy. Coupled to this, however, was
a long, and complex, record of remarks and writings about the psy-
chological differences characteristic of various ethnic groups, in-
cluding the Jews. Some of these predated the rise of the Nazis by de-
cades, but they nevertheless provided fodder for Nazi propaganda,
and ammunition for Jung’s detractors. Overshadowing all of this,
however, is the sense, intensified by Bair’s account, that Jung was
extraordinarily blind to the realities of power politics in the pre-
war years. Through a detailed reconstruction of a multi-party cor-
respondence, Bair provides for the first time a well worked out ac-
count of the degree to which Jung was manipulated by Matthias
Göring and his associates in Germany. Their objective was less to
have Jung actively support them, than it was to simply have him
present when it was convenient, thereby lending implicit support to
their program of Nazification. It is not a trivialization of this situa-
tion to invoke the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me
twice, shame on me.” Jung appears anything but the wise old man in
this situation. The old fool comes closer, as he used all his author-
ity, risking the breach of his closest friendships, to resist entreat-
ies to thoroughly dissociate himself from the German psychologi-
cal scene.
But then we have the war years, and the emergence of Jung’s
relationship with Allen Dulles and his spy networks in Switzerland.
To my knowledge, Bair’s is the first thorough account of this epi-
sode in Jung’s life, and it will require careful study in any future as-
sessment of Jung’s relationship to the Hitler years and accusations
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 37

of anti-Semitism. In terms of understanding Jung, the crux of this

episode is that once he was removed from active engagement with
political maneuvering and put in the position of analyst and com-
mentator on events, his insights and effectiveness seem to have es-
sentially reversed their polarity. While he had been headstrong and
blind to what was happening around him while actually trying to
play politics with the devil, he was now cautious, thoughtful, and
insightful. Beginning with connections to an effort in Germany
to have Hitler declared unable to function, which Jung—proba-
bly wisely—resisted getting involved in, he moved on to assisting
with the development of lines of communication to England, and
then, most importantly, to advising Dulles on the behavior of the
German leadership, and even the best ways to influence internal
Swiss politics. Agent 488 would eventually gain the admiration of
the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, and would offer a
strong endorsement of Eisenhower’s constructive efforts to appeal
to the most positive aspects of German culture as an antidote to the
“moral hole” the Nazis had opened in the German psyche. It is clear
from the papers Bair cites that Jung was, at this point, intent on the
elimination of the Nazi regime and willing to go to considerable
lengths for a man in his late sixties to achieve that end.
So here again we have a paradoxical Jung; seemingly a man en-
gaged with the world but fundamentally unable to comprehend it
unless he brought it within the ambit of psychological understand-
ing. This now appears to have been a defining characteristic of Jung’s
experience. He was never able to find a way to respond effectively to
the assaults Freud’s entourage mounted against him after the break
in 1913. Nor was he nearly as effective as was Freud at assembling
a school of thought that would come to dominate the field of psy-
chology and psychotherapy for two generations. And while he has
been pilloried ever since for his involvement with the Nazis, we are
only now beginning to understand the degree to which Freud and
Jones trolled the same waters—Jones meeting with Göring, just as
Jung had, with an eye to maintaining the position of psychoanalysis
in Germany and in the process removing a few apostate Freudians
at the master’s behest.16
With the wealth of material provided by Bair, it becomes some-
what easier to put an interpretation on Jung’s remark in MDR. It is
not so much that Jung did not have an active life, he manifestly did,
and it is not really so much that all that mattered to him was the in-
38 George B. Hogenson

ternal life of dreams and fantasies, although that is probably how

he came to understand it. The issue, it seems to me, is that by the
end of his life Jung had come to realize that the world did not make
sense to him in its mundane or material form. This is not to impute
a simple-minded mysticism to Jung, as is so often done by his crit-
ics. In point of fact, it is interesting to contemplate a man who is
so completely embodied and who yet finds the world of action so
utterly opaque. One has to wonder whether it is not precisely this
disjunction that both attracts followers to Jung and can also repel
those who would attack him. He is simply too paradoxical, and it
is a virtue of Bair’s book that she brings so much evidence to light
that we can begin to see the conflicts at the heart of Jung’s life. Bair’s
Jung is not really wounded in the sense much popular psycholo-
gy views the wound. Neither is he a particularly complicated man.
When one considers the lives of some of his contemporaries, for ex-
ample the theologian Paul Tillich who was close to Jung, Jung’s life
has a certain simplicity to it, and the complexity of his personality is
not extraordinary. The demimonde of the high intellectuals of cen-
tral Europe in the early years of the twentieth century was far more
exaggerated in its promiscuous sexuality and the explosive nature
of the imaginal than Jung’s personal life had any claim to. Where it
fatally intersected with Jung’s life was when the psychic life of the
times gave way to real social and political activity. In that context,
Jung lost his balance. It was as if he did not understand that the
world of political action did not allow for the kind of psychological
insight he relied on in other situations.
The detailed description of these events of Jung’s midlife adds a
level of understanding to the famous events of his childhood, which
form so much of the “myth of Jung.” It also sheds light, I believe, on
one of the other famous musings of his early career, his question-
ing of the nature of his own myth, shortly after the completion of
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Symbols of Transformation)17
in 1913. Leading up to the break with Freud, this book was prob-
ably the most pronounced instance of Jung’s reformulation of the
concept of the libido. The governing theme of the book was that
the symbol in some manner transformed libidinal energy from one
state to another. In a sense, the symbol works like a turbine, con-
verting the kinetic energy of falling water into electricity. It seems
to me that a man with Jung’s relationship to the symbolic would ex-
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 39

pect, at some unconscious level, that his actions in the world would
transform the reality around him. Bair’s account of Jung’s visionary
experiences, again rendered in great detail in many instances, gives
us a unique window into the ways in which he relied on the work-
ings of his interior world to orient himself to the exigencies of the
world outside.
Despite the extraordinary detail of Bair’s work, however, we
remain, as I noted at the outset, with an incomplete sense of the
man. One comes away from this book with the impression that Bair
herself is in some profound way frustrated with Jung, unable, ulti-
mately, to crack the code in which his life comes encrypted. In many
ways, Freud clearly set about to make his life a cipher, daring his bi-
ographers to find the reality behind the mask. Jung never gives this
impression, although in some respects his heirs have followed the
tradition of Freud’s successors in trying to keep important informa-
tion sequestered. Rather, in Jung’s case the acts of encryption and
de-coding are elements of the life as it was lived. It is regrettable
that Bair, for all her industry, does not seem to have fully grasped
this element of Jung’s being in the world, and therefore enlists her
considerable energy and skill as an investigative biographer in try-
ing to crack the code by overwhelming it. Paradoxically, it seems to
me that this effort at ever greater detail results in a distancing from
the man himself. At the same time, reflection on this sense of dis-
tance may in the end yield the greater insight into the actual qual-
ity of Jung’s life.
In his studies of historical transitions, Michel Foucault18 con-
stantly drew our attention to what he called ruptures in history—
moments in the development of systems of power and conceptual
organization when it became impossible to fully understand what
had gone before. The transition in our understanding of the world
that Newton initiated was such a rupture, and we can look back
on the development of biographical renderings of his life as mea-
sures of this rupture. In some sense, then, it was only after Newton’s
science had ceased to genuinely shape the development of thought
that it was possible to return to the point of origin and understand
just how much of Newton’s life remained pre-modern, even medi-
eval in some important ways. In the case of Freud, a concerted ef-
fort was made by the founder himself to create the sense of a rup-
ture, and thereby lay the foundations for the creation of a normal
40 George B. Hogenson

science paradigm. I seriously doubt that there has ever been a more
calculated effort on the part of a great thinker to consciously put in
place the elements of such a paradigm shift.
With Jung, however, paradox rather than paradigm shift pre-
vails. In the work of Shamdasani we have an account of Jung as a
participant in an already developing normal science, the emerging
work of psychology as an experimental, and generally empirical sci-
ence, finding its place in the larger scientific framework. In Bair, we
have the visionary and deeply embodied figure discussed here. Can
they be reconciled? This, it appears to me, carries us into the world
of Jung and the future of analytical psychology. If the depth psychol-
ogies are attempts at a science of the biographical, then that science
is radically incomplete in the face of so paradoxical a “founder” as
Jung increasingly appears to be. Deirdre Bair has made an impor-
tant contribution to our emerging portrait of Jung, but it is less clear
that she has helped us to fully comprehend him. Nevertheless, in
her rich and detailed account of his life, she helps us better under-
stand the task that we face in the quest to understand the man and
to move his project forward.

ENDNOTES
1
B. J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy: Or, The Hunting of
the Greene Lyon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
2
P. L. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time, New
York, W. W. Norton, 2003.
3
G. B. Hogenson, Jung’s Struggle with Freud, South Bend, IN, Notre Dame
University Press, 1983.
4
C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925 (Ed.
W. McGuire), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989.
5
R. Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1994.
6
S. Shamdasani, Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical
Psychology, London, Routledge, 1998.
7
For an example, see W. R. Newman and L. M. Principle, Alchemy Tried
in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle and the Fate of Helmontian Chymestry, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
8
D. Smith, “Jung’s Life, Built of Psychoanalysis, Fantasy and Cruelty,” The
New York Times, January 21, 2004. However, another article on Jung appearing
around the same time showed greater balance: R. S. Boynton, “In the Jung
Archives,” The New York Times Book Review, January 11, 2004.
9
S. Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of
a Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
10
Editor’s Note: As we go to press, Sonu Shamdasani’s Jung Stripped Bare,
By His Biographers, Even has beeen released by Karnac Press (London).
11
G. B. Hogenson, “Critical Notice: Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making
of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science,” Journal of Analytical Psychology,
2004, 49:4, 569–571.
12
Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, New York, Touchstone,
1990; Samuel Beckett (rev. ed.), New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990; Anais Nin: A
Biography, New York, Putnam, 1995.
13
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Ed. A. Jaffe, Trans. R. A. C.
Winston), New York, Random House, 1963.
 Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography 41

14
Bair, Jung, 351.
15
A. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and
Freud, New York, Pantheon Books, 1982.
16
P. Roazen “The Exclusion of Eric Fromm from the IPA,” Contemporary
Psychoanalysis, 2003, 37, 5–42.
17
CW 5.
18
M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences,
New York, Pantheon Books, 1970.

ABSTRACT
George B. Hogenson, “Distinguishing the Forest from the Trees,” THE SAN FRAN-
CISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL, 2005, 24:1, 29–41. Review of
Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography, Boston, Little Brown, 2003. Deirdre Bair has writ-
ten an exceptionally detailed life of Jung. In that degree, it will likely be the stan-
dard reference for the foreseeable future, regardless of the quibbles that may be ad-
dressed to it. Nevertheless, the author’s attention to detail in this biography, valu-
able though it is, is judged to miss the mark in terms of capturing the depths of
the subject—C. G. Jung—or the motivations for his life and work. The project as a
whole is considered in the context of the role of biography in the establishment of
a science, with some reference to other works on the life of Jung.

KEY WORDS
C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, biography, history of psychoanalysis, history of
Analytical Psychology, Deirdre Bair.

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