Review
"How are we to protect our children from ourselves?" asked Carl Gustav Jung. In one of its senses, this question is all around us, as in the agitated discussion of child abuse. But this stimulating collection of Jungian essays tackles the question from a less familiar, and often surprising, angle. In the first of the twelve essays Robert Bly reports what he has heard from so many men: "There is not enough father." We (many of us, at least) yearn for a closeness that was missing. But we yearn in vain, for Dad is "not the type." Yet we can find from the archetypal father witbin. To do so, however - here's the rub - we must enlarge the inner "apartment we keep for our father," especially "by renewed attention to our personal father, particularly to his dark side." Here we have the distinctively Jungian themes: the (hidden) longing for the archetype, looking for it within (and in our favorite myths and fairy tales), and embracing the dark so that we may receive the light. These themes are spelled out in fascinating ways: from a magisterial height (by Jung, Erich Neumann, James Hillman, Augusto Vitale, and Patricia Berry), and in the concrete detail of case-studies (by Marion Woodman, Jackie Schectman, and Mary Watkins) and literature (Ursula Le Guin). Jung worried about the excessively extroverted character of the typical American. The Jungian and largely American authors in this volume outline one way in which we can "protect our children from ourselves" by finding some peace with the parents we carry within us. -- From Independent Publisher
