Jung and the Story of Our Time [Paperback]

Laurens Van Der Post (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1976

That Laurens van der Post should have chosen to write about Jung will come as no surprise to the millions of people who saw the three television programmes that he devoted to the story of Jung's life and work. Indeed, part of the compulsion for putting the experience of his extraordinarily fruitful friendship with Jung into book form was precisely that the limitations of a single film sequence left him with the insistent feeling of a challenge only partially met. To present Jung as he knew him, not Jung the psychologist but rather Jung the man, the discoverer and explorer of a new dimension in the human spirit, was the task which Laurens van der Post set himself and which has taken his special gifts to accomplish.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books; 1st edition (October 12, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394721756
• ISBN-13: 978-0394721750
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Intimate Look at Jung and his Work, March 22, 2002

By 

Nadine A. Swahnberg "Unicat" (Lakewood, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jung and the Story of Our Time (Paperback)

After World War II, still in uniform and having been in a Japanese POW camp, Van der Post arrived in Zurich where his wife was studying with Carl Jung's mistress, Toni Wolff. Van der Post met Jung and an unlikely friendship ensued, based at first on a common love of Africa (van der Post's native continent.) The book explores Jung the man with rich doses of Van der Post's own narrative and subjectivity. It is unusually vivid, non-analytic, yet deep. The era of the end of the War and emerging Cold War helps set Jung in a meaningful context. Van der Post resonates powerfully with Jung's emphasis on dreams, which seems surprising in a man of action, but the depth he achieves in exploring some of Jung's well-known dreams is rewarding. He also catches some of the man's faults and foibles, so the tone, while idealizing on the whole, has a convincing precision of detail. The two men, author and subject, share a deep passion for the religious (as well as similar Reformed roots) and so the reader is drawn into a passionate dialogue about good and evil, God, the collective unconscious, war, racism, and other fascinating themes of Jung's work. Van der Post illuminates Jung's work without getting into the scholarly or pedantic mode, and brings the world of Jung's time to bear on our understanding of the man and his work. In addition to Jung, other members of the Zurich coterie are portrayed with spirited appreciation. Highly recommended.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars van der post and jung open perception on man's spiritsoul, September 16, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Maheshwar india) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jung and the Story of Our Time (Paperback)

van der post's fond and poetic account of Carl Jung offers insights into that psychologists often confusing world view. With clarity and conviction, van der Post brings the reader an understanding of Jung's conception of the unconscious currents which link MAN together, and cause MEN to act as they do. Time and again, the author discusses psychological events which bring us the "ah ha" reaction, enabling the reader to put words to emotional and psychological events in their own lives which had remained undeveloped and poorly understood because of our own lack of frames of reference. Van der Post himself adds abundant philosophical and psychological insights, reaching into his own history to interpret myth and soul with eloquent prose. This book is not so much a biography of Carl Gustav Jung as a richly poetic account by van der Post of both Jung's and his own striving to understand what is MAN.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the best Jung biographies...., January 7, 2007

By 

Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLO... (Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jung and the Story of Our Time (Paperback)

....from a gifted writer who knew Jung personally. The beauty of this book's language is surpassed only by its relevance for an in-depth look at Jung's life and ideas as narrated by his friend and associate. This book lacks the factual content of some of the big Jung biographies, but it illuminates and explains many of Jung's deepest ideas while providing anecdotes not available in other biographies. Well worth reading if you can get past the author's almost unwavering tone of idealization ("Jung was the first ever to --"; "no one else in all of human history had done such-and-such before Jung" etc.). He manages to remain insightful in spite of it.