A Genius and His Contradictions

Abstract

Jay Sherry’s Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative deals with the paradox that, as a psychologist, Jung was a revolutionary; however, in politics and art, he was a conservative. The book places Jung’s intellectual and political writing in their Germanic intellectual context and provides the first complete presentation of what Jung wrote about Jewish psychology and Nazism. Sherry suggests that personal factors led Jung to be blind to the danger of the Nazis. It also reveals many influences on Jung little known to the English-speaking world. Sherry is critical of R. F. C. Hull’s translation of Jung and shows that many passages were sanitized. The reviewer wonders if it is not time to call for a new translation of The Collected Works. The book makes an important contribution to Jung scholarship.

Key Words:

• anti-Semitism
• biography
• complex
• Freud
• German
• intellectual history
• Jewish
• Jung
• Jungian
• Nazi
• translation