Customer Reviews

What Is Wrong With Jung

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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..

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.

I have read most of Jung's works, as well as those of his followers. I find a great amount of truth in his works, but I also think his work suffers a similar fate as that of people like Einstein and Darwin; no theory stands unchallenged forever. As a trailblazer Jung opened doors of inquiry. As an imperfect human being he made some mistakes. Those mistakes are being critiqued and analyzed by people with 100 years of learning on Jung. So parts of his work might be revised, others discarded, and totally new parts added. People who pick on Jung for being ethnocentric or chauvanistic fail to account for the time and culture he lived in (again 100 years of learning). I think this book has great value, because it questions Jung's theories, and that's scientific. But let's not go overboard and "tar and feather" the man. He truly was a pioneer in his field.

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.

I am still reading the book. However, it was the very title that drew my interest and why I sought out this book to read. I hope the author shares my need to seek answers to what for me is a painful question, "What Is Wrong With Jung". Watching my once honorable (former) husband's moral compass morph to zero while on his really long path to individuation and punctuated with Jungian jargon has been devastating. His Jungian therapist's PhD thesis was on the evolution of the male consciousness by way of a fairy tale. During the first 10 years and counting (15) of my husband's very expensive therapy, the Jungian therapist (as plaintiff) divorced twice, and advised my husband do the same. I have read dozens and dozens of books and articles on Jung and Jungian theory and therapy, attempting to understand the attributions to dreams, fantasies, archetypes, entitlement, first adulthood, second adulthood, introvert, extrovert, mythology, alchemy, the collective unconscious, astrology, art, and visions and more. I am hoping this book might, as much as it is possible, pull it all together for me. As of this writing, when I hear the words Jung or Jungian, I think svengali. I think cult.
(Four stars as I have not yet finished the book).

McGowan misses the point of Jung's work. Too bad, as he's a rather entertaining author and might otherwise have added something of value to the literature on Jung's life and outlook. Ah, well, Jung's writing is not for everyone. Those looking for simple answers would do best to look for someone other than Jung to read. McGowan's book has little value for the serious inquirer. The pertinent question is this: "What is wrong with McGowan?"

Don McGowan is becoming the eminence grise of Intellectual Muscle movement while remaining its enfant terrible -still capable of confounding his audience with new twists and turns in his work.

McGowan's work has always been analytical, but in recent years his work morphed from the analysis of Jung toward the psychological, specifically Freudian, kind. For some time now, he has recycled the texts of Jung into muscular pieces that resemble sculpted post modern works that often boggle the mind and eye.

The strength of McGowan's work resides in his ability to compress radical and imense ideas into puny pieces of magma, one that the viewer wants to hold, yet cannot due to weight and temperature considerations.

Against all odds, McGowan's journey concludes with seemingly random thoughts twisted and turned back to which it began, with only an elbow to the guy who wrote the bad review in '01.

McGowan is an inventor, academic, public servant, mentor, cultural hero, eminence gris and grand visionary whose critically acclaimed account of Jung has improved with the test of time making it the de rigueur bible on the subject.

Like a fine wine McGowan's arguments improve with age. In the 20th century McGowan's truly significant attainments became lost in the mass of the inconsequential and reached the few that were capable of comprehending his genius.

McGowan's arguments have hitherto reasserted their relevance in the Internet Age. We are used to people who excel in one era. McGowan excels in all of them.

It's localism plus globalism. It's smart typewriters and information workers and electronic banking. It's the push for decentralization. At one end it's the space shuttle - at the other the search for individual identity. It's flex-time and robots and the rising militancy of mankind. It's the combined impact of all these forces converging on and shattering our traditional industrial way of life. Above all, it's the acceleration of change, itself, which marks our moment in history.

So buy the book!

McGowan's work is deeper that to be expected from this author. Thinking I was going to be venturing into a sea of psycho-babble and double-talk, I actually found this critique of Jung (or "Yung" as his close friends referred to him after those late nights at the bar) to be well thought out and fair. And as a previous commentator insightfully noted, McGowan's sense of humour takes this form of writing to a new and loftier level. My only criticism is that the author failed to write a sequel to answer many of the questions he raised. Cheers to McGowan and jeers to those who stand in the way of the freedom to say whatcha please!

I found that this book is an exceptional reference on Jong. It is much more insightful than Steven Nerdelyi's book on a similar subject.