Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (review)

Sonu Shamdasani is a research associate at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. His award-winning books Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science and Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology have established him as a renowned Jungian scholar. Jung Stripped Bare is a succinct, well-researched, and well-documented book that traces previous biographers' fabrications of a profoundly misleading image of the man. Shamdasani begins with a discussion of Jung's own qualms about autobiographies and biographies. In 1953, when Jung was questioned on whether he intended to write an autobiography, he responded: "I have always mistrusted an autobiography because one can never tell the truth. In so far as one is truthful, or believes one is truthful, it is an illusion, or of bad taste" (p. 11). Apparently he was even less excited about the prospects of a formal biography, claiming that he was a "simple bourgeois" (p. 12).

Jung's reservations led to him acquiesce to a project modeled on Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, with Jung's personal secretary, Aniela Jaffé, conducting the interviews. This project resulted in the widely read "autobiography" Memories, Dreams and Reflections; however, Shamdasani's scholarly reconstruction proves that despite the first-person narrative, Memories is actually a "remarkable biography . . . mistakenly read as an autobiography" (p. 38). Concurrent with Memories Jung also authorized his friend the English psychiatrist E. A. Bennet to write a biography. Shamdasani suggests that "it is possible that . . . because Jung thought that there was no single individual with sufficient grasp of his psychology to write his biography, that he deliberately narrated some of the same material to Bennet as to Jaffé, so neither would be the only account" (p. 42). Shamdasani laments that Bennet's book, long out of print, has been almost forgotten while Jaffé's has continued as a best-seller.

In his survey of biographies that were initiated after Jung's death in 1961, Shamdasani finds little merit. Only Barbra Hannah's Jung: His Life and Work. A Biographical Memoir receives praise. Hannah was a disciple of Jung from 1929 onward, and Shamdasani describes her work as "still the only indispensable biography of Jung" (p. 71). According to Shamdasani, the biographies by Paul Stern, Vincent Brome, Frank McLynn, Gerhard Wehr, Ronald Hayman, and Deirdre Bair have only "heightened the significance" (p. 71) of Hannah's work, which he prefers because it is "a biographical memoir" that contains "invaluable first hand information," and because she acknowledges that a detailed biography is impossible until all available material is released by the Jung family (pp. 70–71).

Shamdasani saves most of his wrath (and I do not think that is too strong a word) for a scathing attack on Deirdre Bair's recent Jung: A Biography. Given that he spends nearly 30 of the book's 118 pages on Bair's biography, it appears that his animus reflects some sort of scholarly infighting (p. 105). Whatever the cause, his attack covers everything from inaccuracies in dates and events, to the use of anonymous sources, allegations about Jung's sexual life, and an inability to fully understand Jung's intellectual development nor "his life as well" (pp. 102–3). It is difficult to pick a side in this debate: On the one hand, Deirdre Bair is a prize-winning biographer in her own right. On the other hand, it appears from his footnotes that Shamdasani has personal access to the Jung family archive, and in addition he has published three books on Jung that were well received. This certainly gives the edge to Shamdasani. However, sometimes authors can get too close to their subject, and in doing so they appear "stripped" and "bare" when all they really are is human—all-too-human. Maybe Shamdasani should ask other questions, such as Why have so many fictions and fabrications about Jung's life occurred...