Customer Reviews

Jung Stripped Bare: By His Biographers, Even

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This small but deadly book might have been titled "Jung strips bare his biographers" for in it, historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani takes Jung's own words, meticulously researched and documented, and uses them to expose the factual inaccuracy of nearly every biography of Jung ever written. It's a challenging book because as each fabrication is unearthed we get closer to the facts about Jung but further from his truth. It's a shame Shamdasani doesn't go on to explore why Jung the man generates so many unsupportable stories, but speculation isn't Shamdasani's style. He prefers to use scholarship as a deadly weapon, which he does with devastating precision, leaving behind a staggering body count of reputations. If you have read a biography of Jung, read Shamdasani and find out how little you really know, as I have.

I strongly recommend Shamdasani's other works, Cult Fictions, and Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology; also Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious.

Here, Shamdasani has written a concise, modest and deadly-sharp rejoinder to the gossip-infested field of Jung-biographies. Rather than idealizing Jung - as too many of his defenders have done - he challenges us to question the motivations and methods of those who perpetuate caricatures and tabloid speculation as facts.

Key points include the dismantling of the hyperbole and shoddy scholarship perpetrated by recent biographers, as well as the distressing tendency throughout psychoanalytic history to speculate on a controversial individual's diagnosis, and to use it as a form of character assassination.

Jung continues to bring out the paranoid imagination in those who label him simply crazy, or a charlatan. Until his place in history is approached with better scholarship and respect, his actual failings and gifts will simply be missed and replaced by a love of scandal and defamation that even the professionals can't seem to resist.

Shamdasani's book is as much on the art of biography writing as it is on writing biographies about Jung. Having said that, I believe that it is an important book to read when/if bios on Jung are read, such as the recent biography by Deidre Bair, or when others are undertaken in the future. Very cogently written and argued, it would be a mistake to miss Shamdasani's work.