Customer Reviews

Jung and the Story of Our Time

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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.

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.

....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.