Misunderstanding Jung: the Afterlife of Legends
Misunderstanding Jung: the Afterlife of Legends, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2000, 45, 459-472
Misunderstanding Jung: the Afterlife of Legends by Sonu Shamdasani
C.G. Jung has almost become completely fictional.
When Frank McLynn’s biography appeared in 1996, I had thought that the bottom had finally been reached.
So I titled my review of it, ‘Why are Jung biographies so bad?’ (Shamdasani 1996b).
In the April 2000 issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology (also featured on its website) F. X. Charet declares:
McLynn’s literary style and mastery of the sources makes this biography stand out as the most readable and thorough that has been published to date. His judgements are often astute and perceptive . . .(p. 203)
No examples or evidence of this are given.
What is worse is that such statements evidently evaded questioning and red ink by the editors of this journal and the experts on Jung history that one assumes reviewed it before publication.
Clearly, the bottom had not been reached. Jung history, as I have argued, has become increasingly dominated by ‘History Lite’, or evidence free history (Shamdasani 1999b & forthcoming).
Charet’s idiosyncratic account of Jung scholarship is littered with erroneous statements and repetition of worn out legends.
In the following, I will restrict myself to false, mistaken and egregious comments about my work.
Commenting on several works by Eugene Taylor and myself that critiqued the Freudocentric reading of Jung and demonstrated the significance for Jung of the work of William James, Frederic Myers, Theodore Flournoy, Charet concludes:
Valuable as this line of enquiry might be, and while there are indications of the direct
and significant influence of Janet and Flournoy on Jung, it has not yet been adequately demonstrated that a direct line exists from Myers to Jung, nor has the exact nature and extent of James’s influence upon Jung been the subject of detailed study. (p. 207)
This calls for comment.
In his 1980 article, ‘William James and C. G. Jung’, Eugene Taylor drew together a number of Jung’s acknowledgements of James and argued that James was significant for Jung in five main areas:
According to Jung’s own account, James’s writing helped to shape his earliest formulation of psychological types; James was the guiding spirit in the direction Jung took in diverging from Freud over the essential nature of psychic energy; he influenced
Jung’s definition of science, and his views on the collective unconscious.
Early on James impressed Jung with the importance of viewing personality as a holistic
totality that quite transcends the bounds imposed on it by the rational mind. (Taylor 1980, p. r 57)
He goes on to provide evidence for each of these claims.
Building upon this, I presented more statements of Jung’s acknowledgement of James in ‘Memories, dreams, omissions’ in l995, and gave further indications of the significance
that the work of James and Flournoy on the psychology of religion had for Jung (Shamdasani l999a).
It is one thing to question any of these specific points – and such discussion would be welcome.
But to state that ‘the exact nature and extent of James’s influence upon Jung has not been the subject of detailed study’ is surely disingenuous.
After demonstrating the significance that James had for Jung, Taylor went on to reconstruct James’s 1896 lectures on exceptional mental states from James’s lecture notes, marginal annotations, and newspaper reviews (Taylor 1983).
This was one of the most remarkable scholarly achievements in intellectual history in recent times.
This work forms an indispensable source book for the state of psychology and psychotherapy at the end of the nineteenth century, and a window into several contexts and debates that critically informed Jung (it was not reviewed in this journal).
It was then a commonplace of Jam es scholarship that after the Principles of Psychology in 1890, James abandoned psychology for philosophy.
Taylor demonstrated that this was false, and reconstructed the continuities in James’s work.
He showed how James had developed a dynamic psychology of the subliminal in the 1890s, and, that far from abandoning psychology, James’s late work in part constituted a critique of the positivistic epistemology of the new psychology, that was to enable the transformation of psychology (see Taylor l996a).
These developments allowed James’s psychology to be viewed in an altogether new light.
This in turn enabled the connections between his work and that of Myers and Flournoy to be grasped in a new way.
Taylor also presented further details concerning Jung’s associations with Adolf Meyer, James Jackson Putnam and William James that gave more evidence of Jung’s independence from psychoanalysis (Taylor 1986).
Jung made several acknowledgements of the personal and intellectual significance
for him of Theodore Flournoy.
It was on reading his From India to the Planet Mars in 1988 that the genesis of Jung’s work began to become comprehensible to me.
I stated that Flournoy’s influence on Jung was arguably greater than that of Freud (Shamdasani 1990, p. 39).
In 1988, I began to study Myers’s work and encountered Taylor’s work.
A dialogue between us commenced.
The convergence of our research and the assembling together of our various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle resulted in 1990 in an understanding of the strong linkages between James, Myers, Flournoy and Jung.
Following Myers, Flournoy had called their work subliminal psychology.
Subliminal psychology was not monolithic, and there were differences between James, Myers and Flournoy.
However, there was broad agreement on many fundamental issues, as well as close friendship.
Thus in critical respects, their work was inseparable.
I presented an account of these connections in 1991 at a lecture to the Analytical Psychology Club of Western New York in Buffalo (thanks to Paul Kugler) and Taylor presented an account of these connections
in his paper ‘Jung in his intellectual setting: the Swedenborgian connection’ (Taylor 1991).
We claimed that the Freudocentnc reading of Jung has led to the complete mislocation of Jung’s work in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Initial statements of this argument had thus been made public at that time.
During the same period, the Freudocentric reading of the origins of psychoanalysis had simply been exploded by decades of Freud scholarship.
In place of the immaculate conception myth – through which psychoanalysis was seen
to have arisen from the twin sources of Freud’s self-analysis and clinical work – the origins of psychoanalysis have been contextualized in terms of developments in nineteenth century biology, neurology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and psychotherapy.
This had critical consequences for the Freudocentric reading of the origins of Jung’s work.
For the ‘Freud’ from whom Jung supposedly drew his ideas turns out to have been a myth created by the psychoanalytic movement.
Critical developments in Freud scholarship – which did much to confirm and expand many of Jung’s critiques of Freud – had as little impact in Jungian circles as they had had in Freudian circles.
A non-Freudocentric account of the origins of psychoanalysis enables a new account of the rise of modern psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and Jung’s role in these (on this issue see my ‘Psychoanalysis Inc’).
At that stage, Frederic Myers’s work had mainly been approached from the angle of Victorian spiritualism, with which psychical research was widely conflated. Much of this left a lot to be desired.
A study of Myers’s work from the angle of the history of psychology (Shamdasani 1993).
I indicated that this should be considered in part as a genealogy of Jung’s method of active imagination and concept of the autonomous psyche (ibid., p. 1 26).
I had assumed that the connections with Jung’s work would be apparent to any informed and open-minded reader.
Copies of Myers’s Human Personality and its survival of Bodily Death (1903) were
available then, and there had been a reissue by Arno Press of his papers on the subliminal consciousness.
The same was not the case with Flournoy, so I prepared an enlarged reissue of the first English edition of From India to the Planet Mars (also not reviewed in this journal).
As Jung’s tribute to Flournoy – which appeared in the German edition of Memories, Dreams, Reflections – was not available in English, I included this as well.
As the otherwise excellent French reissue of 1983 of From India to the Planet Mars suffered from a certain teleology – Flournoy as the man who supposedly failed to be Freud – I endeavoured to present Flournoy in his own right.
Flournoy’s work was fundamentally based on the work of Myers.
Without Myers’s concept of the subliminal consciousness – which was informed by
James’s notions of consciousness – and Myers’s psychologization of mediumistic
experience, From India to the Planet Mars simply could not have been written.
In his review of Myers’s Human Personality, Flournoy claimed that if future discoveries confirmed Myers’s thesis of the intervention of the discarnate, then his name would join those of Copernicus and Darwin: ‘he will complete the triad of geniuses who have most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought, in the order, Cosmological, Biological, Psychological’ (Flournoy l911).
A reading of the correspondence of James and Flournoy makes clear their proximity and alliance.
As James put it to Flournoy in his penultimate letter to him, ‘we seem two men particularly well fa its pour nous comprendre’ (Le Clair 1966, p. 239).
Thus, it would have been impossible for Jung to have been significantly influenced by Flournoy, as Charet admits, without also taking on board fundamental aspects of the work of Myers and James.
Such a view is simply incoherent.
If the Freudocentric reading of Jung was a legend, the question arises as to how it came about.
In 1996 I presented an account of its genesis (Shamdasani l996a). In the same year, Taylor presented a synoptic account of our researches and the state of Jung scholarship (Taylor l996b).
As with the subliminal psychologists, there are differences of perspective between us, but also a broad band of consensus.
Thus by 1996, I had reconstructed the genesis of subliminal psychology in the l880s; Taylor had reconstructed its development in the 1890s; I had reconstructed its climax and decline in the 1900s; Taylor had presented a synoptic argument demonstrating Jung’s connection with this psychological tradition; and both of us had accompanied our reconstructions with scholarly editions which made available critical primary texts.
Considering this to have been sufficient to support the arguments we had put forward, I continued with my project of providing an account of the genesis of Jung’s work.
This necessitated a new account of the rise of modern psychology, psychotherapy and, in part, of the human sciences.
This is presented in the recently completed first volume of my Prisms of Psychology: Jung in History.
From my current perspective and after further textual and archival research, the arguments that Taylor and I developed a decade ago seem quite conservative.
I would now argue that the significance of James, Flournoy and Myers for Jung goes far
beyond what we had previously claimed.
This is laid out, inter alia, in the first and second volumes of my work.
As regards the reception of these views in Jungian circles, they were initially largely ignored as a negative hallucination.
More recently, they have sometimes been spoken about as if they had always already been known.
The same fate befell the research on the composition of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
independently conducted by Alan Elms and myself.
Here, Charet makes a number of misstatements that require correction.
Once again, old legends persist; threads of new information are simply embroidered into old patchworks.
In the 1950s, there were several attempts at biographies of Jung.2
In 1952, Lucy Heyer, the wife of Gustav Heyer, proposed a biography of Jung.
Jung agreed to the project, and Paul Mellon agreed to fund it.
She commenced on it in the following year, and for a period of time, had weekly interviews with Jung.
Dissatisfied with the results, Jung discontinued the project in 1955.
Meanwhile, the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff had unsuccessfully tried to get Jung to write an autobiography for years.
In the summer of l956, he suggested a new project to Jung at the Eranos conference, along the lines of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe.
An early provisional title was Carl Gustav Jung’s Improvised Memories.
It was to be presented in the first person.
Jolande Jacobi proposed Aniela Jaffe for the task, because, as Jung’s secretary, it would be easier for her to ask questions concerning his life in free hours.
Jung made available a number of autobiographical materials for Jaffe to use as she saw fit in her ‘future biographical work’ (Jung to John Barrett 3 October 19 57, Bollingen archive, Library of Congress).
Like Lucy Heyer, Jaffe undertook a series of regular interviews with Jung, which she noted in shorthand.
These notes were later typed out.
Copies of these notes are currently in the Library of Congress in Washington and at the
ETH in Zurich (hereafter referred to as the ‘transcripts’). In these interviews, Jung spoke about a wide range of subjects. Jaffe, with the close involvement of Kurt Wolff, selected material from these interviews and arranged it thematically.
This was then organized into a series of approximately chronological chapters.
During this process, Jung wrote a manuscript at the beginning of 1958 entitled ‘From the earliest experiences of my life’.
The opening lines of this manuscript make clear that it was addressed, first and foremost, to his children.
With Jung’s permission, Jaffe incorporated this manuscript into Memories.
She also incorporated excerpted versions of some other unpublished manuscripts of Jung, such as autobiographical material from his 1925 seminar, and accounts of some of his travels.
Finally, Jung contributed a chapter entitled ‘late thoughts’.3
According to Hull, Jaffe rewrote parts of this.
During the composition of the work, there were many disagreements between the parties involved concerning what the book should contain, its structure, the relative weighting of Jung and Jaffe’s contributions, the title, and the question of authorship.4
In the editorial correspondences, the work was sometimes referred to as the autobiography, the ‘autobiography’, the so-called autobiography, the biography, the ‘biography’ and the so-called biography, even in the same letter.
The publishers involved were not oblivious to the fact that an autobiography of Jung – or something that could be made to look as much like one as possible – held far greater sales potential than a biography by the then as yet unknown Aniela Jaffe.
There were also legal wrangles between the publishers involved as to who held the rights of the book.
At one point, a plan was considered to publish the unedited transcripts.
Regrettably, this was abandoned, as the work was intended for the general reader. Jung’s attitude towards the project fluctuated.
After reading the early manuscript, he criticized Aniela Jaffe’s handling of the text, complaining of ‘auntifications’ (Shamdasani 1995, p. 130).
Hull subsequently wondered whether the tension between Kurt Wolff’s desire to publish Jung’s autobiography and Aniela Jaffe’s attempt to take over Lucy Heyer’s project to write a biography was responsible for some of the difficulties which ensued.
Charet informs us that ‘Jaffe tells us, Jung went through the entire manuscript’ (p. 209).
He also states that ‘Jung wrote a number of chapters himself, dictated others and went over the rest’ (p. 2 10).
Contrary to Charet’s claims, none of the chapters were ‘dictated’, a charge that used to incense Jaffe, as I indicated in my study (p. 123).
It is true that Jaffe wrote that Jung ‘read through the manuscript of the book and approved it’ (Jung 1962, p. 9).
However, Jung never saw nor approved the final manuscript.
The manuscripts he did see went through considerable editing after his death.
Both Elms and I had given indication of this in our studies.
A further example of this is the following statement from the minutes of a discussion between Aniela Jaffe, Mr Rascher and Mrs. Poggensee:
Collins have made a few very good suggestions for abridgements which she has followed.
Above all, the ‘extraverted’ and somewhat superficial accounts of London and Paris should be omitted, Africa somewhat cut, whilst all ‘introverted’ sections should be extended and somewhat built up in places.
The section of the meeting with James and Flournoy (sic) should further be cut according to Pantheon as well as those with Oeri and Zimmer, whereas we will retain these. (22 January 1962, Rascher archives, Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, tr. mine)
It is critical to note that these deliberations concerning how introverted or extroverted
the book should be, how many of Jung’s travels should be included, and whether the likes of Flournoy, James, Oeri and Zimmer were in or out, took place after Jung’s death.
I submit that these are by no means minor changes (the chapters on Paris and London were amongst those which Jung had actually read through).
There are also instances where Jung’s specific recommendations were not carried out.
One example is the following footnote of Jaffe in the Countway manuscript, in reference to the chapter ‘The confrontation with the unconscious’:
The strong excitement Jung underwent still reverberates when he tells of these matters. He proposed as the epigraph for this chapter the quotation from the Odyssey, ‘Happily escaped from death’. (p. 213)5
Underneath this, there is a note signed ‘WS’ (Wolfgang Sauerlander, an editor at Pantheon, and the co-editor of the Freud/Jung correspondence): ‘Why not use as motto (there are other mottos, f. i. p. 23 1)’.6
This was crossed out.
One also sees from this that a number of Jaffe’s notes were also cut.
Several chapters in the book are based on Jung’s own writings.
Here again, the manuscripts Jung wrote do not exactly correspond to what was printed in the final work.
One sees this clearly in the treatment of Jung’s ‘From the earliest experiences of my life’.
Some passages were deleted, and other passages were added by Jaffe from her interviews, and further changes were made by others involved in the project.
Concerning alterations that were made to the text and passages that were deleted, Charet claims:
In terms of allocating blame, it now appears that it was Jung’s own immediate family and through the pressure that they exerted on Jaffe that the majority of the changes were made. (p. 210)
In my view, this is fallacious.
Two strata of alterations need to be distinguished.
The first stratum consists in the manner in which Jaffe utilized materials from her interviews with Jung, and edited the manuscripts of Jung which she utilized.
The second stratum consists in changes made between the first manuscript she
prepared and the published version.
As I indicated in my study, many people were involved in the second stratum of changes.
A number of alterations of the manuscript were made at the request of a representative of the Jung family at a late stage of the editorial process.
It has by no means been established that the bulk of the alterations in the second stratum were made at the request of the family.
A line by line comparison of the transcripts with subsequent manuscripts and the published English and German versions, together with the study of editorial correspondences, shows that the bulk of the deletions and changes lie in the first stratum, i.e., between the transcripts, Jung’s manuscripts and the first German manuscript.
Whilst statements in the transcripts which appear in the published version are generally reliably reproduced, in many cases the context, mood and associative connections are lost.
Whole sequences are remade with elements drawn from different sources in a form of mosaic work.
This reordering often recasts the meaning of statements.
I personally find the transcripts far more interesting, profound, informative, moving and humorous than any of the later manuscripts or the published versions.
One discrepancy occurs in a passage which Jaffe cited in her introduction to Memories, in which Jung spoke of the fateful nature of his books, and the physical symptoms he had when he did not write down his early memories.
According to Jaffe, Jung said, ‘Thus this “autobiography” is now taking a different direction from what I had imagined at the beginning’ (Jung 1962, p. 8).
The corresponding passage on page 303 of the transcripts reads: ‘It has already taken a completely different direction, from what I had imagined at the beginning’ .7
The word ‘autobiography’ does not occur.
In addition, the order of the sentences in the passage as a whole have been rearranged, and the specific symptoms – loss of appetite, feeling of being poisoned – omitted.
Selectivity is an inherent part of any editorial process, and it is not illegitimate for a biographer to shape their materials according to their own perspectives to form their portrayal of their subject.
Thus it is not a question of ‘allocating blame’, as Charet would have it.
Critical problems enter, however, when a particular biographer’s portrayal is identified with a subject’s own self-understanding.
In my view, this is precisely what occurred in the case of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and has been the cause of endless misunderstandings and the proliferation of legends.
From my researches, I would claim that Jung’s self-understanding and styles of self-portrayal8 – in as much as I have been able to reconstruct them through documents and interviews – were quite different from Aniela Jaffe’s understanding and portrayal of him.
As Jung saw it, his multiple facets required a variety of different approaches.
This is borne out by the following letter.
At Ruth Bailey’s suggestion, E. A. Bennet was contemplating writing a biography of Jung from a medical perspective.
Initially, this was viewed as complementary to Jaffe’s project.
Jung also gave interviews to Bennet and was directly involved with his project. In 1956, Jung wrote to him:
As you know, I am a somewhat complicated phenomenon, which hardly can be covered by one biographer only . . . Therefore I should like to make you a similar proposition, namely that you proceed along your line as a medical man like Philp has done on his part as a theologian. Being a doctor you would inquire into the anamnesis of your patient and you would ask the questions and I would answer as a patient would answer.
Thus you would move along the lines of your habitual thinking and would be enabled to produce a picture of my personality understandable at least to more or less medical people. Philp certainly would produce a picture of my religious aspect, equally satisfactory. Since it is undeniable that one of several aspects is medical, another theological, a biography written by specialists in their field has the best chance of being accurate, although not comprehensive in as much as the specifical psychological synthesis would demand somebody equally at home in primitive psychology, mythology, history, parapsychology and science – and even in the field of artistic experience.9
Thus as Jung saw it, any biography of him would inevitably be shaped by the presuppositions and personal equation of the biographer.
The multifaceted nature of his life and work meant that there simply couldn’t be a definitive biography of him.
In this regard, the supposed status of Memories as Jung’s autobiography gave it pre-eminence over any other work.
Charet contends that ‘in the light of Jung’s own direct involvement in the creation of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it is difficult to sustain Shamdasani’s final judgement’ (p. 210).
The judgement in question is presumably my contention that Memories was not Jung’s autobiography.
Charet adds that ‘Alan Elms’ own reading of Jung’s behaviour … is more psychologically persuasive’ (ibid.).
In support of this claim I had reproduced some documents, which, because of their significance, I do so again, together with the linking remarks.
The specific issue I raised – whether Memories should be regarded as Jung’s autobiography – was not discussed by Elms, nor did he cite the following documents:
‘On 5th April 1960, Jung wrote to Walter Niehus-Jung, his son-in-law and literary executor’:
I want to thank you for your efforts on behalf of my so-called ‘Autobiography’ and to confirm once more that I do not regard this book as my undertaking but expressly as a book which Frau A. Jaffe has written . .. The book should be published under her name and not under mine, since it does not represent an autobiography composed by myself. (Jung to Walther Niehus-Jung, 5 April 1960, C. G. Jung: Letters, vol. 2, p. 5 50, trans. modified)
‘On 25th May, 1960, Herbert Read wrote to John Barrett concerning the book’:
It now appears it will have some such title as: Aniela Jaffe ‘Reminiscences, Dreams, Thoughts’ with contributions from C. G. Jung. (Herbert Read to John Barrett, 25 May 1960, Bollingen archive, Library of Congress)
‘Following these negotiations, a resolution of the Editorial Committee of the
Collected Works of Jung was drawn up, allowing the book to be published outside of the exclusive contracts with the Bollingen Foundation and Routledge and Kegan Paul.
It contains the following statement’:
- G. Jung has always maintained that he did not consider this book as his own
enterprise but expressly as a book written by Mrs. Jaffe. The chapters written by C. G. Jung were to be considered as his contributions to the work of Mrs. Jaffe. The
book was to be published in the name of Mrs. Jaffe and not in the name of C. G.
Jung, because it did not represent an autobiography composed by C. G. Jung.
(Letter of C. G. Jung to Walter Niehus dated 5 April 1960)
On a conference held on the 26th August between Prof. C. G. Jung, Mr. John
Barrett, Miss Yaun Gillmor, Sir Herbert Read, Mr. and Mrs. W. Niehus-Jung and
Mrs. Aniela Jaffe, C. G. Jung confirmed again that he did strictly consider this book
as an undertaking of Mrs. A. Jaffe to which he had only given his contributions …
The Editorial Committee decides hereby formally that it will not approve any
decision of the Executive Subcommittee which would add the book of Mrs. A. Jaffe
to the Collected Works (‘Resolution of the Editorial Committee for ‘The Collected
Works’ of Prof. C. G. Jung’, Bollingen archive, Library of Congress, signed by Jung
on 29th November, 1960, and by John Barrett on 13th December, 1960).
(Shamdasani I995, pp. I}2-3).
Whilst Memories was variously referred to by the parties involved during its
composition, including by Jung, I contend that the context of these statements
gives them special weight and significance.
Hence I do not think that Jung was lying when he wrote his letter to Walther Niehus on 5 April 1960, when he made his statements at the editorial meeting on 26 August 1960, and then again when he reviewed these statements and signed the above declaration on 29 November 1960.
There is also no evidence that he was of unsound mind when he did this.
More could be said about the discussions of this issue which went on, and this will be taken up elsewhere. But when documentation is flagrantly ignored without being properly cited, one wonders if there is much point.
I will simply cite a few examples.
In the minutes of a meeting between Dr Karrer (Jung’s lawyer}, Mr Niehus, Mr Rascher s Sr, Mr Albert Rascher and Mrs. Poggensee on l May 1959, it is noted that Mr Niehus had spoken with Jaffe and Jung, and reported that ‘the matter had not been planned as an autobiography but as a description and interweaving of personal conversations’.
The minutes noted that ‘one still does not even know, whether the book will sail under the flag of “Jung” or “Jaffe'”.
It was also noted that ‘Herr Niehus added that Herr Prof. Jung himself did not want the word “autobiography” to be used’ (Rascher archives, Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, tr. mine).
All that I have personally endeavoured to do has been to respect Jung’s wishes in this regard.
A contract between Pantheon and Rascher Verlag, dated 22 February 1961, contained the following clause:
In his letter to us of 18th January, Prof. Jung himself spoke of ‘my so-called ‘biography”: with this it is then clearly expressed, that what Prof. Jung has dictated to Frau Jaffe it is not a real biography and still less an autobiography. (Rascher archives, tr. mine)10
In 1963, E. A. Bennet wrote a review of Memories. In his opening paragraph he stated:
‘It is an unusual book and apparently it has been a great problem to reviewers, many of whom accepted it as an autobiography. Certainly it is not that’ (Bennet 1963).
Bennet was almost alone amongst commentators to see this.
I would also like to quote from a letter that I received from the late Franz Jung, after reading my study:
It gives me at least some proofs, what I before only guessed, that not everything has
run straight and we do not even know m what extent C. G. J. was aware of and
agreed to the formulation or the omissions Frau Jaffe, Hull or even third parties were
actually doing. It is very good that you recalled to our memories the letter April 5th
1960 and the letter of Herbert Read to J. Barrett, 25th May 1960, with proposing a
title which makes clear who the author was. Today most people do not know these
statements and take wrong conclusions. 11
It seems that they still do. Some legends die hard.
I can only conclude by reiterating a (utopian?) plea that I wrote at the end of Cult Fictions:
The present book has at the same time been a treatise on method, a plea for minimal
standards of scholarship, not only in Jung history, but also in its reception. For
without responsible and informed reception, the efforts of scholars are nullified.
(Shamdasani 1998a, pp. 83-4) ~Sonu Shamdasani, Misunderstanding Jung: the Afterlife of Legends, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2000, 45, 459-472
