About Jung scholarship

A comment found under the listing for the book Carl Jung (Critical Lives) by Paul Bishop @Amazon:


A stimulating amplification of the "textual Jung," not another "Red Book" auntification
ByHapax Existentiel on December 14, 2014
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase

As a reader of scholarly books and articles on the history of psychoanalysis and C.G. Jung, I would have to say that Paul Bishop's book is the most fascinating volume to appear since Richard Noll's "The Jung Cult" back in 1994. For me, Jung simply does not make sense outside of his German historical and cultural context. The rather fulsome, uncritical Jungian literature sidesteps German cultural influences and tend to portray Jung as a mystical prophet who somehow lived and worked outside of history. In recent years Sonu Shamdasani's early efforts at scholarship have been replaced by weakly footnoted coffee table books and New Age spiritualist dialogues with James Hillman passing as "profound" intellectual discourse. Additionally, Shamdasani's relationship with the Jung family and estate as their "approved" court historian since 2000 renders his Jung scholarship unverifiable and open to a round of charges of being yet another "auntification" and protective whitewashing of Jung's image (he's now an aesthetic literary figure like William Blake, apparently). Jung is big business, after all. No one will be allowed to check the original archival sources against Shamdasani's claims unless approved by the Jung heirs. Good luck with that. This throws much of The Red Book research into question.

So thank god for the many high-level books on Jung by Paul Bishop. This one, however, is his best.

Paul Bishop is now the undisputed "preeminent" Jung scholar.

Bishop securely places Jung in the archaic stream that also carries Goethe and Schiller. He engages the textual Jung, not the biographical or even (much) the historical Jung. But Bishop make the case that it is the ideas of the man that are important, and he does so in a judicious manner, citing the major authors of the secondary literature (Ellenberger, Homans, Kerr, Noll, Shamdasani). Bishop also uses primary sources by German and French authors who may not be familiar to readers of works on Jung because they do not write specificially about Jung but about themes found throughout his work. These are excellent.

This is it -- the best critical biography of Jung in existence. Highly recommended