A brilliant collection, evocative of all that is wonderful and strange about Jung’s Red Book and about the human psyche...
This series of transcribed conversations between two eminent scholars provides nuanced and provocative context for Carl Jung’s Red Book and its influence on contemporary thinking.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history, Jung wrote and illustrated his Red Book between 1914 and 1930, but it wasn’t until 2009 that his heirs allowed the text to be published for a wide readership. A product of Jung’s cognitive methodology “active imagination,” in which one’s psyche is expressed freely as a method of understanding, Red Book is a robust source text for this enthralling collection of dialogues. Hillman (Alchemical Psychology, 2011 etc.), who died in 2011 and spent his life immersed in Jung’s school, and Shamdasani (C.G. Jung: Biography in Books, 2012, etc.), a prominent Jungian historian, discuss a wide range of subjects, including the porous boundaries among psychology, history and literature; imagery and narrative as links to the past and to the unconscious; and how dreams and fantasies may play significant roles in waking life. In addition, a major focus is “the dead” as both a literal and metaphysical concept, as well as the imperative to provide a voice and place for the dead to enable our own living. These conversations, which took place in 2010 and 2011, were originally recorded live, allowing the authors to explore Jung’s text with extemporaneous verve. The resulting conversations, drawn from Jung’s entire body of work, are lively, contemplative and insightful. This intimate and accessible series of dialogues is an exemplary complement to Red Book and also stands alone as a wonderful—if allusive—introduction to the significance of Jung’s work.
A brilliant collection, evocative of all that is wonderful and strange about Jung’s Red Book and about the human psyche itself.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08894-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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