Abstract
Since C.G. Jung’s death, various attempts have been made to write a biography of him, but only a few of them can be defined as ‘critical’. First, in most cases the authors were prejudiced, either positively or negatively, by what Sonu Shamdasani (2005: 3–4) calls the ‘Jungian legend’; second – and related to this – Jung’s educational background was completely overlooked, and his philosophical or literary sources disregarded, while biographers focused instead on his relationships with Freud or Spielrein. This began to change during the 1990s with the emergence of the first historically reconstructive works on Jung’s life. Carl Jung, the relatively short book by Paul Bishop, can be considered part of this new approach. It has been published in the series ‘Critical Lives’, and ‘critical’ is certainly the right adjective to define Bishop’s approach and attitude towards biographical material. In addition, his sources are assessed critically, in the sense that he uses all material available, without excluding authors a priori, without exalting or condemning, quoting, for instance, from Jaffé and Noll, Shamdasani and Storr, but questioning every time the reliability of unproved information. Bishop employs a critical style: sharp, but always clear and precise; any reader – from a scholar to someone approaching Jung for the first time – can easily follow his argumentations.
Bishop emphasizes the importance of a certain philosophical literary tradition, which began with Weimar Classicism, in order to understand better and to contextualize Jung’s thinking. Bishop (2008) has already dealt with the influence of German culture in Jung’s education, stressing especially the role of Goethe and Schiller as a source of inspiration for Jung’s main theories. He has also seriously engaged with Jung’s philosophical interest (Bishop, 1995, 1999), showing how important his reception of Nietzsche, Kant and Schopenhauer was, in order to figure out the commitment of depth psychology to philosophy. In the volume under review, these two aspects of the German tradition come together and merge into a single line, which is regarded as a consistent fascination throughout Jung’s life, representing the chimera of a lost past, as well as a certain wish to be part of it. Indeed, the leitmotif of Bishop’s whole text can be summarized as a two-level tension in Jung’s life: between literature (as well as myth and religion) and science on the one hand, and between his time and the time of Weimar Classicism – extended to the time of Nietzsche – on the other. Both these tensions are kept together by what Bishop calls, in the middle of his book, ‘question of meaning’ or ‘search for meaning’ (pp. 75–8).
In his short, conclusive chapter, Bishop wonders about Jung’s legacy, stressing the importance of debating his thinking within a philosophical framework. On one level, the validity of Jung’s concepts in relation to the most relevant thorny issues of modern and – above all – postmodern philo-sophy is investigated, especially concerning ‘ambiguity, ambivalence, playfulness and paradox’ (p. 215). On another level, however, Jung’s philosophical weight is always regarded in connection with his influential philosophical readings such as Heraclitus, Kant and Gnosticism on the one hand, and with a feeling of closeness to Goethe on the other. In fact, Bishop also extends Jung’s sense of continuity with German tradition to a philosophical dimension, comparing him to Goethe as ‘Lebensphilosoph[en] (philosopher[s] of life)’ (p. 206). Such a view differentiates the text from any previous studies on Jung’s philosophical contribution, which tended to exclude literature from their investigations. It is questionable, however, whether or not the time from Weimar Classicism until Nietzsche’s philosophy can be actually considered as a continuous line, an issue with which Bishop has previously engaged (Bishop and Stephenson, 2004). What is even more important, Jung doubtless perceived Nietzsche as part of a tradition which includes, besides Goethe, such characters as Dante Alighieri, Richard Wagner, Carl Spitteler and William Blake, regarded as capable of ‘visionary’ artistic creation, as well as Hölderlin and Vischer. By highlighting such vicinity in terms of ‘mythopoesis’, not only can Bishop extend Weimar Classicism to the time of Nietzsche and link Jung’s posthumous testimony Memories, Dreams, Reflections with – among others – Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (pp. 9–10), but he can even freely interpret all these works in the light of the same ‘search for meaning’. This makes the book a good source of reference for a non-specialist reader, as well as an innovative reading for both historians and clinicians, showing how hard it can often be to trace clear boundaries between humanities and science.