JUNG AND THE STORY OF OUR TIME

A sincere if awkward service to the memory of Jung, this intensely personal tribute interweaves first-hand recollections of the man and labyrinthine accounts of his principal ideas. Van der Post's own African background, his interest in dreams, and his beliefs about history all played a role in his eventual acceptance of Jung, whom he came to know well. With many flashbacks and redoublings he outlines how Jung came to his own ideas on the reality of dreams, his study of personality types, his classification of archetypes, his redefinition of causality and insistence on the timeless universality of the collective unconscious, his strange exercises in stone building and carving at Bollingen. Van der Post's reverence for his subject is at times affecting, but this will be of more interest to believing Jungians than to those who want a disinterested account of the break with Freud or an evaluation of the Jungian method's scientific claims (Van der Post simply declares, as a self-evident truth, that of course the objective validity of the archetypes has been thoroughly verified). The empirically minded may have a hard time finding a port of entry into this determinedly subjective recital.