Apart from assuming a too-sophisticated knowledge of psychoanalysis by readers, this triumph of scholarship is also highly...
A fastidious, full-scale biography of the Swiss psychologist.
Few characters in the history of psychoanalysis have been as gifted, pivotal, or personally fascinating as the polymorphous Jung, who, with Freud, was one of the two great figures of 20th-century psychology. Jung was born in Basel to a long line of patrician German and Swiss physicians and clergymen, but his own parents were poor and odd, and “Pastor’s Carl,” as he was called as a boy, was unpromising, to say the least. Haunted by visions and drawn to corpses and spiritual contact with the dead, he was silent, awkward, and inscrutable, even to himself. Medical school gave him a method and a focus; while studying schizophrenics in the Zurich asylum, he discovered an associative protocol that made him famous throughout Europe and gained him the attention of Sigmund Freud. Prizewinning Bair (Samuel Beckett, 1978; Anaïs Nin, 1995, etc.) painstakingly tracks Jung’s restless apprenticeship to the dominating Freud and his painful defection from Freud’s belief that an “incest complex” lies at the heart of all neuroses and psychoses. Jung became a colorful and dominating figure in Zurich, attracting patients—primarily wealthy, worshipful, sexually frustrated women—from all over the world to his office in the Victorian home he shared with his long-suffering wife and awe-stricken children. Through his active practice and through self-analysis, dreams, visions, séances, and a study of religion, mythology, and alchemy, in the 1920s and ’30s he created such concepts as introversion and extroversion, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity. Yet his family, junior colleagues, collaborators, and mistresses all paid the price of his growing self-obsession. Bair makes this clear without overt judgment, and her closing portrait of the elderly analyst in “a vanishing world,” trying to understand himself at last by writing his brilliant memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is riveting, inspiring, and unforgettable.
Apart from assuming a too-sophisticated knowledge of psychoanalysis by readers, this triumph of scholarship is also highly accessible.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-07665-1
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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