Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Jung: A Biography by Deirdre Bair ISBN: 0-316-07665-1 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A disappointing biography
Comment: Although exhaustingly and thoroughly researched, this biography ultimately disappoints the reader. The book provides way more detail than anyone needs to know about the circle of therapists and patients around Jung. Yet, it doesn't provide even the most elementary description of his basic philosophy. Someone who is not familiar with Jung's ideas will learn nothing from the book, although those who are already knowledgeable about and enamored with his philosophy should enjoy it.
Rating: 4
Summary: A bit unsatisfying
Comment: Bair's biography of Jung is a well-written but ultimately rather disappointing book, not up to the high standard Bair set for herself in her earlier biographies of Beckett and de Beauvoir. Her treatment here is so replete with detail about Jung's life that it sometimes seems slightly obsessive; the opening chapter on Jung's grandparents and parents, for example, offers way more information than the typical reader is likely to want or need. But there's little effort in all the minutiae to offer analysis or even description of Jung's thought. At best, Bair throws in a short paragraph every other chapter or so that summarily announces a central Jungian concept. But even then, the paragraph is frequently a quotation, laden with jargon that hasn't been explained. This seems strange, given that Jung himself insisted that inner life was constitutive of his outer one. The upshot is that the reader who knows little about Jung's psychology will walk away from the book with his/her ignorance pretty much intact. This is frustrating.
One thing that the book does accomplish is to give the reader a good idea of the terrible jockeying for intellectual authority that consumed the Viennese Freudian school as well as the Zurich Jungian school. The life of the mind, at least in the context of early twentieth-century psychoanalysis, comes across as cutthroat and down-and-dirty, with both Freud and Jung seeming pretty shameful. Here's where good discussions of the intellectual issues at stake would've been helpful. In their absence, the major players in this story come across as pretty cynical.
Rating: 5
Summary: buy it
Comment: a marvelous thoughtful biography. bair has a way of turning years of grueling research into something very readable. I read a little every night before I go to bed, thinking of jung, his relationships, his ideas, and then reflect on my own memories dreams and reflections.
 |
Title: Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology : The Dream of a Science by Sonu Shamdasani ISBN: 0521539099 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 11 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: Beyond Belief : The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels ISBN: 0375501568 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: Goya by Robert Hughes ISBN: 0394580281 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
 |
Title: Jung's Psychology As a Spiritual Practice and Way of Life: A Dialogue by William D. Geoghegan, Kevin L. Stoehr, Dilin L. Liu ISBN: 0761824189 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: Transformation of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis by Joseph L. Henderson, Dyane N. Sherwood, Joe Cambray ISBN: 1583919503 Publisher: Brunner-Routledge Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
