Jung: A Biography Summary and Reviews

Jung: A Biography
by Deirdre Bair

Jung: A Biography
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Book Summary Information

Author: Deirdre Bair
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-11
ISBN: 0316076651
Number of pages: 860
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Book Reviews of Jung: A Biography

Book Review: A bit unsatisfying
Summary: 4 Stars

Bair's biography of Jung is a well-written but ultimately rather disappointing book, not up to the high standard Bair set for herself in her earlier biographies of Beckett and de Beauvoir. Her treatment here is so replete with detail about Jung's life that it sometimes seems slightly obsessive; the opening chapter on Jung's grandparents and parents, for example, offers way more information than the typical reader is likely to want or need. But there's little effort in all the minutiae to offer analysis or even description of Jung's thought. At best, Bair throws in a short paragraph every other chapter or so that summarily announces a central Jungian concept. But even then, the paragraph is frequently a quotation, laden with jargon that hasn't been explained. This seems strange, given that Jung himself insisted that inner life was constitutive of his outer one. The upshot is that the reader who knows little about Jung's psychology will walk away from the book with his/her ignorance pretty much intact. This is frustrating.

One thing that the book does accomplish is to give the reader a good idea of the terrible jockeying for intellectual authority that consumed the Viennese Freudian school as well as the Zurich Jungian school. The life of the mind, at least in the context of early twentieth-century psychoanalysis, comes across as cutthroat and down-and-dirty, with both Freud and Jung seeming pretty shameful. Here's where good discussions of the intellectual issues at stake would've been helpful. In their absence, the major players in this story come across as pretty cynical.

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