It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And because ranting is one of my favorite activities, I’ll start with a brief review of Robin Robertson’s Beginner’s Guide to Jungian Psychology.
It shouldn’t take long for any intelligent reader to discover in the course of his Jungian researches that many of Robertson’s interpretations of Jung’s psychology are more than a bit misleading in places. Instead of presenting a factual synopsis of Jung’s actual work, Robertson has given a rather narrow, opinionated and self-congratulatory explanation of a few skeletal elements of the topic. He has even taken the horrific liberty of discarding some of Jung’s original terms as unsatisfactory and replacing them with his own, (for instance, the exchange of “archetypes” for “cognitive invariants”).
Robertson’s dogmatized, systemized slant on “Jungian” dream interpretation is also laughably misguided (see, for example, page 20 or 189). As Jung himself says in “Man and His Symbols”: “…it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream. Each individual varies so much in that his unconscious complements or compensates his conscious mind that it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and their symbols can be classified at all.”
For any reader who is genuinely interested in Jungian psychology, I would strongly recommend steering clear of this book. Try instead Jung’s own “Man and His Symbols,” a collection of essays written by Jung and other collaborators whom Jung selected himself, with the express intent of making his work understood by the non-technical public. It is misinterpretations like Robertson’s that have, lamentably, led the psychological sciences of today to dismiss Jung’s work as dogma and mysticism.
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