Having read Carl Jung now for the past twenty years, and having given his psychology much thought over this amount of time, it should come as no surprise I still turn to introductory material to help broaden and refresh my understanding of this analytical genius.
I read June Singer first back in the eighties. It was a little book called 'Seeing Through the Visible World' and was a nice rumination on Jung and his relationship to the gnostics.
In this great book, though, Singer proves to be expansive, well read and well experienced in Jungian philosophy and psychology.
Singer proves, chapter by chapter, her deep grasp of the material and provides wonderful clinical examples of this particular brand of psychology at work.
If nothing else, in seeking Wholeness, the crux of Jung's psychology, there is a dynamism and tension of opposites because Jung does not arrive at Platonic Forms that are static and good, but rather Archetypes, which are dynamic and therefore hold out the promise in polarity of both good and evil. His is an honest and sobering psychology and philosophy, a bareknuckled approach to the realities of life that sometimes borders on a Religion, what with Jung having become the prophet and harbinger of the modern subjective view to reality.
Singer begins in this work with complexes, continues on through archetypes, the persona, the shadow, individuation and culminates in the reality of death and dying. But she does so with an extreme intelligence on the subjects that makes the material available and most, relevant, for a new generation of discoverers.
While I have read other Jungian analysts such as Jaffe and Edinger, Singer takes the cake with this one, in my humble opinion!
A landmark!
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