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Since his death in 1961 at the age of 86, some of the most challenging parts of what is called Jungian seem to have slipped from public attention. This is hardly surprising; Jung is a larger-than-life figure in an age that prefers its gurus bite-sized and unit-priced. The novelist and explorer Laurens van der Post, who was a friend of Jung's, would probably agree. In fact, his book seems an impassioned missionary effort to portray Jung as an angelic messenger from the gods, communicating in a series of dreams, omens and thunderclaps. On the very afternoon that Jung died in Zurich, writes van der Post, "lightning struck his favorite tree in the garden." Van der Post was on a ship bound from Africa at the time. Unaware that his old friend had died, he had a vision of Jung atop the Matterhorn. He was waving and calling out, "I'll be seeing you." Some years later, van der Post was filming a documentary at the Jung house in Zurich. "When the moment came for me to speak directly to the camera about Jung's death," he recalls, "and I came to the description of how lightning demolished Jung's favorite tree, the lightning struck in the garden again." Van der Post's achievements as a lucid and reliable journalist make it difficult to dismiss these strange experiences out of hand. One may simply accept or reject his version of the events.
Too Narrow. The rest of the book, however, cannot be handled so easily. As biography, Jung is far too narrow and restricted. The psychoanalytic revolution frequently exists as a backdrop for the author's efforts to treat Jung's life as heroic, supernatural drama. The account of Jung's professional association with the Nazis during the mid-1930s is narrated with deliberate vagueness. Instead of an analysis of the analyst, the disciple uncritically labels Jung "one of the greatest universal personalities since the Renaissance." That neon statement distracts from Jung's true contribution: the provision of a balance for the reductive scientism that has made 20th century man feel smaller than he is or wants to be.