Analytical Psychology: Esoteric Doctrine or Exoteric Science? A Review of Diane Finiello Zervas’s Enchanting the Unconscious: Jung’s Reception in Great Britain , The Red Book and h

Abstract

The paper begins by providing a review of Diane Finiello Zervas’s book, Enchanting the Unconscious: Jung’s Reception in Great Britain , The Red Book and his First English Seminars, 1919 and 1920 . The book is seen as important because it focuses upon a crucial transition period in Jung’s development during which he wrestled with the task of finding a place in his psychology for what he had learned from his Red Book experiences. However, the paper goes on to critique a strong distinction in Zervas’s book between Jung’s “esoteric” and “exoteric” teachings. This distinction is contextualized in terms of a tendency in Jungian recent thinking to prioritize the contents and images of Jung’s 1913–1916 text over the texts eventually published as the Collected Works . The writer argues instead that in Jung’s mature psychology we find a creative encounter between two psychic poles: the numinous/experiential dimension and the reflective/conceptual dimension, and moreover that the seminars explored in the book show Jung engaging just such a process. At its richest and most diverse, therefore, analytical psychology is not a weak shadow of Jung’s originary Red Book experiences but a living organism in its own right that continues to individuate.