JUNG AND THE STORY OF OUR TIME by LAURENS VAN DER POST 276 pages. Pantheon. $10.
If Sigmund Freud was the Moses of Old Testament psychiatry, Carl Jung was its presumptive Joshua. Freud led modern man to the promising territory of the unconscious mind, but, destined to play the Wandering Jew, he was denied his share of milk and honey. Instead, there was the bitter pessimism of his Civilization and Its Discontents. Jung, the son of a Swiss Protestant clergyman, was born with a spiritual sweet tooth. He had a craving to heal the soul's wounds, to make a oneness of good and evil, darkness and light, masculinity and femininity.
Jung rushed in where Freud feared to tread: into an exotic Zion built on scientific method but furnished by the ages. There was a place in Jung's world for the philosophy of ancient Asia and classical Greece, for the Gnosticism of early Christianity, for medieval alchemy, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, for Romanticism and the occult.
As a clinician, Jung pioneered in word-association techniques and dream analysis. The characters in his own dreams included Salome, Siegfried, Elijah, and once, Freud as an Austrian customs agent. Jung the theoretician made his name synonymous with such terms as archetype, introvert and extravert. Jung the religious healer believed the goal of psychiatry was to release and develop the divine within each individual. He broke with Freud by placing unsatisfied spiritual hungers rather than repressed sexuality at the center of personality disorders. Freudians could always counter that those pangs are just another symptom of stifled libido.
The best known of Jung's psychoanalytic heresies is his formulation of a collective unconscious−a timeless, unbounded level of awareness that exists outside history and culture. It is a kind of mother lode of mankind's mythologies and symbols, not rationally conceived but intuited through dreams and visions. A vast scholarship supported these theories. Whether or not one accepts them in the mystical sense, there is no denying the energy and intellect behind their authorship. Jung had the capacity to treat the universe as if it were an enormous crossword puzzle. Everything was interrelated; starting at any point, he could fill in all the blanks.