Books like Jung: A Biography

Normally, I don’t write book reviews until after I’ve finished the book, but when a book is over 500 pages long and dense with information, I do status updates as mini-reviews. The things that impress me at the beginning of a book may not be the same at the end, but I don’t want to forget anything. This is a biography of Jung, and I was drawn to it because it addresses Jung’s Nazi past, claiming that he was not a really a Nazi sympathizer, but an American spy. But I’m not up to that part yet. I’m just up to his early life and career.The first thing that impressed me, aside from the coldness and isolation of Jung’s childhood, is that he had a cousin who claimed to be a medium, and he and other members of his family had seances with her at the helm regularly. The author of the book claims that Helly (the cousin) had a crush on Carl, which I find easy to believe. I was a teenage girl once; that’s what we’re like. But the thought that struck me was one I’d heard in another book I’d heard about recently: namely, that in an era when women weren’t taken seriously when they spoke for themselves, being “possessed” or “speaking in tongues” was an effective way to get heard. (That book is called Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America.) To be clear, I don’t mean that Helly was being deliberately manipulative. She may well have fallen for her own act. Presumably, her older cousin Carl did, too.Next, I learned about Eugen Bleuler, who ran the most well-reputed psychiatric hospital in Switzerland, the Burgholzi and gave Jung his first medical job. His reputation was far eclipsed by Freud’s and Jung’s, but the book makes him out like a hero. Like R.D. Laing a century later, he lived alongside his patients, he involved them directly in their own care, and also in the running of the facility. It sounded so much like what I’ve read about Kingsley Hall, I wondered if Bleuler was an influence, at least in his democratic or egalitarian approach to treatment, but Bleuler is the one who coined the phrase “schizophrenia,” which Laing said was a myth. I’m going to have to ask Laing’s biographer. I’ve emailed him once before. In any case, to Bleuler’s credit, the reason he didn’t write as voluminously as Freud and Jung is that he was too busy caring for his patients.The final figure that interested me was Sabina Spielrein. Now, I’d heard of her before – Keira Knightley stars in a biopic about her – but this book gave me more detail. She was Jewish, which of course interested me, and she sounded like Mary Barnes in many ways. In parallel to Helly finding her voice indirectly as a medium, the highly intelligent Sabina got as far as medical school, which made her a pioneer, but she broke down in the process. Well, breaking barriers is taxing. It was her against the world. That’s a hard place to be in. No wonder she fell back into the passive position of patient, but she was willful enough to be a really difficult one at times. I want to read more of her story. There are multiple accounts of it, though. As of now, I have no way of knowing whose opinion to trust.Well, that’s all for now. I guess I’ll post again in a few days. Be well!