What Is Wrong With Jung [Hardcover]

Don McGowan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1994

In this detailed and systematic critique of the theories of psychologist Carl G Jung (1875-1961), Don McGowan exposes the many flaws in Jungian analysis and methodology. Beginning with Jung's interpretation of religion and his attempts to draw parallels between mythology and his patients' dreams, McGowan finds a consistent lack of rigor, a highly selective use of evidence, and a tendency toward broad generalisation, which ignores important cultural distinctions. Jung's popular theory of the collective unconscious is especially criticised as an example of over-interpretation and a failure to examine the diversity of cultural evidence. His proposed archetypes, derived from a narrow and rather biased study of Indo-European cultures, may reflect nothing more than patterns of cultural conditioning, argues McGowan, and not some universal substructure of the human mind, as Jung suggests.In Jung's ideas about the "blond beast" and other "innate" characteristics of various races, McGowan detects disturbing echoes of Alfred Rosenberg, the German Nazi Party's chief ideologist; and his attitude toward women, by today's standards, is decidedly sexist - all of which makes his continuing popularity in the politically correct 1990's difficult to understand. Despite these fundamental problems in Jungian analysis, McGowan points out that some of Jung's ideas have enduring scientific value. Jung's contrasting categories of extraversion and introversion, and his thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting personality types are based on empirical observations. This book offers the only critique of Jung's work that does not attempt to promote another school of psychological analysis in place of the Jungian approach. McGowan's objective, thorough, and very readable presentation will be of interest to critics and advocates of Jung alike.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 219 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; First Edition edition (February 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879758597
• ISBN-13: 978-0879758592
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,827,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars please read Jung first....ok, Don and Mario?, July 4, 2001

By 

george borten (Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Is Wrong With Jung (Hardcover)

well..attacking Jung seems to be money rewarding, but what about reading and understanding him first? Don and Mario ( could it be the Mario Bros?) just seems to have skipped through, so why bother reading this book at all. As for the reviews they are simply apalling, one calling him Yung, the other Jong. Whats wrong with Don and Mario would be the big question. First: learn to write . Second: Learn to research Third: oh..well..leave it at that..

31 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars the icecream has melted, May 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: What Is Wrong With Jung (Hardcover)

since my original review has been removed after being posted for a few days, I return to the same arguments, but in a more cavalier manner, hoping it will not now be considered offensive anymore.I was stunned that most reviews here were in the three-four lines spectrum, and altough praising Don and Mario, revealed little or any personal commentary on Jungs work, which indicated an audience that dislikes Jung even without having read
anything by him. I insinuated that it did no bode well neither for the author nor for his audience, which could then be construed to be badly positioned on the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum. Sorry, but there is no nicer way to put it.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What is wrong with Yong?, October 31, 2010

By 

Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Is Wrong With Jung (Hardcover)

I must say that the reviews of this book are extremely entertaining. Moronic one-liners, misspellings of Jung's name, a "customer picture" showing an entirely different book (it's about logic - a pique against the author?).

And who on earth is Mark Feldmann, who has written four reviews of Don McGowan's book???

The book itself, "What is wrong with Jung" (I hope I got the spelling right), isn't very entertaining, however. It's badly written, edited or both. Frankly, it's near-incomprehensible. And no, Don McGowan doesn't have a dry sense of Scottish humour, except in the introduction (he's no Phillip Kitcher). The author essentially just babbles on, going blah-blah-blah. On p. 163, he expresses an implicit support for paedophilia. Is this typical of Prometheus Books? Also, the book seems to have been published before Noll's seminal "The Young Kult", so it never mentions the Volksdeutsche connection.

C.G. Jung was, with outmost probability, wrong. I mean, the guy was a psychoanalyst from Switzerland. Says it all. They got female suffrage in 1971 and still have cantons. However, I think I stick to the funny reviews of this book, rather than the book itself.

One star.