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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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