Starred review from October 30, 2000
In today's marketplace, books on or about spiritual therapies of all kinds are getting to be as common and, to many, as irresistible as potato chips. This succinct, gorgeously illustrated portrait of Carl Jung stands out, however, as a reminder of the profundity and singularity of Jung's achievement. Irish-born, Australian transplant Dunne (People Under the Skin, etc.) captures Jung's immense personal power and intuition, attributing it (as Jung did) to his "archaic nature," his rootedness to the earth and to the primal layers of the unconscious. Deftly interweaving letters and commentary with an extraordinary array of 150 ancient and contemporary images, including three of Jung's paintings from his private journal, the unpublished "Red Book," Dunne helps readers grasp Jung's insight that the divine contains both light and dark, and thatDas a 79-year-old Jung wroteD"A `complete' life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded." In her introduction, psychologist Jean Houston affirms that this great modern explorer of inner life uncovered "the mythic foundations" of our individual lives and showed how the archetypal code of myth is meant to help humans "advance along an evolutionary path that carries us nearer to the spiritual source." This clear, luminous volume shows that Jung himself evolved. By the end of his life, he was not just a psychologist nor even a visionary artist but an alchemist who understood that what is highest and what is deepest in us are inextricably tethered. 50 color and 100 b&w illustrations. Author tour.