C. G. Jung and the psychology of symbolic forms

JHBS—WILEY RIGHT BATCH

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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 38(3), 317–318 Summer 2002Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.1131� 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

B O O K R E V I E W S

EDITOR’S REVIEW: FOOTNOTES PRO AND CON

Chuck Zerby. The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes.Montpelier VT: Invisible CitiesPress, 2002. 150 pp. $24.00. ISBN 1-931229-05-8.

Since becoming the the editor of this journal I have taken an increasing interest in thegeneral subject of footnotes. I confess to a certain bias against them, especially when theythreaten to distract attention from the main narratives in the articles that cross my desk. Quiteoften I ask authors to shorten, delete, or incorporate their footnotes into the main text. Ac-cordingly, I was intrigued to read Chuck Zerby’s opening description of the footnote as “oneof the earliest and most ingenious inventions of mankind, . . . anindispensible tool of thescholar and a source of endlessly varied delight for the layperson” (p. 1). Clearly his appre-ciation differed somewhat from my own, and as I began the book I wondered if it wouldchange my mind.

Zerby declares at the outset, “The need for an adequate book on footnotes is obvious”(p. 1). This, it turns out, is an indirect dig at Anthony Grafton’s recent and well-reviewedbook, The Footnote: A Curious History(1997). The “inadequacy” of Grafton’s book, inZerby’s eyes, arises partly from its restricted treatment of the footnote as a scholarly toolrather than a more general literary device. But further, Grafton is unenthusiastic about thefootnote’s aesthetic qualities. He likens “the low rumble of the footnote” to “the high whineof the dentist’s drill. . . . [T]he tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is notrandom but directed” (1997, p. 5). For Grafton, a typical, heavily footnoted historical work“travel[s] on an impregnably armored bottom, rather like a tank” (p. 56), and he characterizesPierre Bayle’s famousHistorical and Critical Dictionaryas a “slender, lightweight text hov-ering over a staggeringly learned and profound commentary, rather like a mayfly hoveringover a swamp” (1997, p. 214).

Zerby begs to differ. For him, “Bayle is the Mozart of the footnote,” who “first recog-nized the full potential of the form and explored it as deftly and exhaustively as Mozartexplored the sonata, the string quartet, and most important, the opera” (page 77). Zerby extolsEdward Gibbon as another type of master historical footnoter, whose work simulates a par-liamentary debate with the main text representing a prime minister’s oration and the footnotesat the bottom of the page the accompanying comments and jeers of the opposition leaders:“Gibbon knew that it was the comments and not just the dry facts that enlivened parliamentarydebate and persuaded the doubtful” (p. 81). For Zerby the footnote “is not just an artifact ofscholarship” but also a provider of “amusement, charm, a chance to rest” (p. 5). Further andperhaps most importantly, footnotes can “preserve the collateral thought.” Zerby elaborates:“The mind may give shape to experience but it is not a mold, it is not neat, it never settlesdown; it disorganizes as it organizes; and, having blazed one trail, it instantly takes off inanother direction. . . . Footnotes can represent that trait of mind” (pp. 140–141).

The Devil’s Detailsis entertaining as well as informative as it traces the history of thefootnote from its origins in the Reformation’s “fierce market of ideas” in which the discussionof religion was contentious and dangerous, and in which “the spirit ofBeavis and Butthead

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textwas afoot” (p. 20), through its modern incarnations in cyberspace. Zerby focuses attention

not only on pioneers of the scholarly footnote such as Bayle, Gibbon, and Leopold von Ranke,but also on poets and novelists who put the device to effective artistic use. The poet AphraBehn (1640–1689), for example, artfully changed the meaning of one of her verses by afootnote indicating that the word “Tabernacler” denoted not a person at prayer, but the slangterm for one immersed in a sweating tub to cure the pox.

So did the book change my attitude toward footnotes? The answer is both yes and no.I certainly have a new appreciation for the creativity of some virtuoso footnoters. But I stillsympathize with a more Graftonian conception of most mundane, scholarly footnotes as atbest a necessary evil. When Zerby describes the ratio of 16 lines of notes to 24 of basic textas “satisfying” (p. 47), I think he carries things a bit too far. Unsurprisingly, his own bookis heavily footnoted, and there were times when I felt distracted and that even he might havemore effectively integrated some of his “collateral thoughts” into themain narrative. I supposeit this largely a matter of taste, but despite my enjoyment of this book I will continue to urgeJHBSauthors to use footnotes with a measure of restraint.

REFERENCE

Grafton, A, (1997). The footnote: A curious history. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Reviewed by RAYMOND E. FANCHER, professor of psychology at York University, andeditor of this journal.


Randall Collins. Macrohistory: Essays in the Sociology of the Long Run.Stanford CA:Stanford University Press, 1999. 397 pp. $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8047-3523-9.

There are two major interconnected themes that emanate from Randall Collins’ com-pelling Macrohistory Essays in the Sociology of the Long Run.The first, and for Collins,major theme that is drawn out and developed throughout the interconnected essays in hisbook concerns state-centered views of societal figuration and transformation. From this per-spective, this book represents a sustained reflection and argument concerning the state as thecentral organizing unit for the analysis of societies and social change. For Collins, in hisdiscussions of the state-centered social theories, social change occurs in the context of thebreakdown of states through strains in their fiscal, administrative, and military resources,conflicts within the elite, and popular revolts sometimes manifested along class lines, at othertimes, along ethnic ones.

Moreover, Collins argues that dynamics of social change should not be viewed from thevantage point of their internal logics alone. In addition, external or geopolitical contexts inwhich states are configured also accompany state-centered power relations. In other words,for him, states are not constituted as entities, but rather as internally and externally relationalfigurations.

For Collins, the state and its processes can only be viewed from the perspective of thelong-term historical dynamics that are internal to these processes and their geopolitical rela-

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texttions. This long-term historical perspective constitutes the book’s second theme. Macrohis-

tory—or macrosociology—is, for Collins, a combination of conflicts and intersectionsbetween state-centered processes and geopolitical figurations, taken from the long-term per-spective. The result of this perspective is an empirically oriented sociology of the long run,which can develop methodologies of predictability based on these long-term historical trends.In this context, Collins’ work draws on, argues with, and develops the long-term historicaland civilizational perspectives laid down by the Annales School, especially Fernand Braudel,the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, and the works of Charles Tilly, WilliamMcNeill, Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, and Michael Mann. As Collins notes, MaxWeber’swork also casts its own long shadow over this approach. By implication, so too does the workof Norbert Elias.

Given that a short review of this type cannot do justice to the complexity and richnessof this compelling book, it must suffice to say that its most innovative and exciting aspect isCollins’ discussion of the still under-theorized dimension of democratic modernity. This isespecially the case when his discussion is combined with his reflections on ethnic change.The result is a theoretical reflection, by Collins, on the tension between nation building anddemocratization from the vantage point of multi-ethnic states, viewed from a long-term,geopolitical perspective.

From this perspective, what might be termed the holocaustal imagination looks lessspecific to Germany, and more generalizable to modernity as a whole. As Collins’ argumentsmake clear, the holocaustal imagination, or what he terms “Balkanization,” is generalizablefrom the vantage point of the geopolitics of ethnic identities. In his view, geopolitically strongstates decrease ethnic tensions by mobilizing an ethno-national core, while geopoliticallyweak ones increase them by being subject to ethnic forces that raise claims for nationallegitimacy. In this context, agonistic relations abound in which ethnic boundaries becomeless blurred, more fixed and one’s friend becomes one’s enemy overnight.

For Collins, the counterparadigm to this ethnic agonism or “Balkanization” is a demo-cratic geopolity. When viewed from the long run, this democratic geopolity should be seenas a cosmopolitan collegial federalism, the origins of which should, for Collins, be traced,not to the American or French revolutions, but to the medieval cities and their corporations.

As Collins, notes, his book is a synthesis of two major themes of geopolitics and ma-crohistory, or social processes viewed from the long run. It is suggested here, though, thatthe theme of modernity is an additional one that opens onto economic, democratic, andintellectual formations that are contextualized within, although not necessarily subordinatedto, the long-term dynamics of the geopolitics of states.

Reviewed by JOHN RUNDELL, director of The Ashworth Centre for Social Theory, TheUniversity of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.


Thomas Muller. Von Charlottenburg zum Central Park West. Henry Lowenfeld und diePsychoanalyse in Berlin, Prag und New York.Frankfurt am Main: Edition De´ja-vu(Sigmund-Freud-Buchhandlung), 2000. 344 pp. 48,00 DM. ISBN 3980531759 (paper).

There are many writings on the “pilgrim fathers” of psychoanalysis, and one wonders

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textif there is anything new to be said on, say, this Viennese Professor Freud? However, beyond

the mythological founders, what was early psychoanalysis and who did it? Who, for example,was Henry Lowenfeld (or Heinrich Lo¨wenfeld as he called himself until he became an Amer-ican)? Born in Berlin in 1900, he never was in the limelight of historical interest. NowThomasMuller, a physician and historian from Berlin, has written a fine work, based on abundantsources, about this typical Jewish-German psychoanalyst of the twentieth century. Far fromwriting a hagiography, Mu¨ller succeeds in writing the social history of an individual and histime along three red threads: What was it like to be a Jew in Imperial and Weimar Germany?What was it like to be a young psychoanalyst in the most famous German psychoanalyticinstitute of the time (and an “adult” psychoanalyst in the important New York PsychoanalyticInstitute)? And how—if at all!—can one talk of “assimilation” of Jews in nineteenth- andtwentieth-century Germany?

Lowenfeld was the son of Raphael Lo¨wenfeld, the Jewish-GermanBildungsbu¨rger,translator of Tolstoy, founder of the Berlin Schiller-Theater as well as one of the originatorsof the “Centralverein deutscher Staatsbu¨rger judischen Glaubens” in 1893 (as a reactionagainst the increasing anti-Semitism in the GermanKaiserreich). Heinrich studied medicinefrom 1920 to 1926, then worked as an assistant physician at the famous Heidelberg psychi-atric clinic. While working in a hospital in Berlin-Lankwitz he made his training analysis atthe well-known Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and was also a member of the Socialist Med-ical Society. Muller not only describes this skeleton of facts, but also embeds Lo¨wenfeld’sbiography in the background of the increasing anti-Semitism of Weimar Germany andthe evolution of the psychoanalytical movement, especially in Berlin. In 1933, Lo¨wenfeldhad to emigrate to Czechoslovakia with his wife Yela (a physician and psychoanalyst aswell) and his son Andreas. Like many other young German emigre´s, the Lowenfelds chosePrague because they could work there without being compelled to change their language.Muller describes many new things about psychoanalysis in the Czech republic in interwartimes, and about the psychoanalytic circle of the German emigre´s with Otto Fenichel at thecenter.

In 1938, after theAnschlussof Austria, the Lowenfelds had to emigrate to the UnitedStates, where they had to begin a new life in a foreign cultural milieu and an unknownlanguage. Nevertheless, Lo¨wenfeld stayed in the U.S. until his death in 1985 (although hisfriend Alexander Mitscherlich wanted him to take over the directorship of the Frankfurt“Sigmund-Freud-Institute”). Although he saw himself as a settled psychoanalyst, he remainedrooted in German culture and thought of “exile” as “always tragic.” In these chapters, Mu¨lleralso focuses on the “americanisation of pychoanalysis,” i.e., the abandonment of its left-wingpolitical implications.

Muller also critically discusses the question of “assimilation” of Jews in nineteenth-century Germany. Although he acknowledges that there was an identification with Germanclassical culture on behalf of the Jews as a “door-opener,” Mu¨ller skeptically states that therewas no such thing as a “german-jewish dialogue.” Therefore “assimilation” is a misleadingconcept and the term “acculturation” would cover reality better.

In sum, this book is an important contribution to the history of psychoanalysis (beyondgreat names), of Jewry in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, and of emigration aswell.

Reviewed by KAI SAMMET, M.D., Institute for the History of Medicine, University of Ham-burg, Universita¨tsklinikum Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, D-20246 Hamburg, Germany.

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Ignace Meyerson.Existe-t-il une nature humaine? La psychologie historique, objective,comparative.Collection Les empeˆcheurs depenser enrond. Paris: Institut d’e´dition San-ofi-Synthelabo, 2000. 440 pp. 130 ff. ISBN 2-84324-124-3.

The book is a lecture course which a patriarch of French psychology, Ignace Meyerson,gave at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes during the 1975–1976 academic year. Theyoung Polish e´migre appeared in Paris in 1906, studied there, became part of the socialistmovement, fought with the Resistance in the Second World War, and passed away in 1983,at the age of 95. A little story from the preface to the book: after the Second World War,Meyerson returned to Paris and settled in the area Boulogne-Billancourt, near themetro stationMarcel Sembat, named after a socialist leader who lived nearby and died in 1922. To hisneighbors, Meyerson was able to say: “For you, Marcel Sembat is a metro station. For me,he was a man whom I knew.” He also knew Pierre Janet, Georges Dumas, Henri Wallon,and many others of the first cohort of French academic psychology.

A man whom his friends called “Cosimo” for his enormously wide interests and expertisewhich stretched from experiments with primates to Renaissance history, Meyersonwas nearlyforgotten, not only in the English-speaking world, but in France itself. The journal that heedited for many decades (Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique) and in which hebrought together leading French intellectuals ceased publication with Meyerson’s death. Al-though he published books and articles, nowhere was Meyerson’s interdisciplinary programof psychology so well worked out as in his journal. At different periods, the sociologistMarcelMauss, the historian Charles Seignobos, and the psychologist Jean Piaget published in itspages. Meyerson, who originally studied physiology with Louis Lapicque at the Sorbonne,came to oppose a narrow experimental program of physiological psychology, which domi-nated the field in France where Henri Pie´ron and his disciples gradually acquired leadingpositions.

The course is representative of the program for a new “historical, objective, and com-parative” psychology towards which Meyerson was striving. His ambition was to restructurethe area completely and, instead of addressing classical mental processes (perception, mem-ory, intellect, etc.), to introduce new categories. Meyerson proposed to study “les oeuvres,”human artifices and the ways they are made, preserved, and used in their different incarna-tions; and “le travail,” including mental work, the construction of objects, signs, classifica-tions, languages, as well as the development of science, philosophy, and the arts. He broughta historical dimension to a psychology that was to become a study of human beings in differentepochs, and he offered as an illustration his own historical analysis of memory. In his analysisof human movement (he took gesture as a model), Meyerson demonstrated how a physicalmotion is filled with a psychological content which itself changes depending on the culturaland historical context.

A French historian of psychology, Franc¸oise Parot, has dug Meyerson’s manuscript outfrom the archives and decided to publish it almost intact, giving it only a new title and asubstantial introduction. One may ask whether Meyerson himself would have authorized thepublication of an unedited manuscript, given that many of its ideas were already present inhis published works. Putting this doubt aside, more editorial work on the text would bewelcome: cuts in places where Meyerson repeats himself, and more extended comments. Thebook, however, serves as an important reminder of a psychology which is different and which,like dreams, may not come true.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textReviewed by IRINA SIROTKINA, researcher at the Institute for the History of Science and

Technology, 1/5 Staropansky per., Moscow 103012 Russia; tel./fax:� 7095 246 6624;e-mail: [email protected].


Petteri Pietikainen.C. G. Jung and the Psychology of Symbolic Forms.Helsinki: AcademiaScientarum Fennice, 1999. 379 pp. ISBN 951-41-0857-4.

Kantians, Freudians, and Hegelians will welcome this work as an examination of Jung’slife and ideas from the Aristotelian viewpoint of disciplined reason. Part One examines Jung’sbiography and works with special emphasis on the author’s interpretation of what Jungmeansby “symbol” and “myth.” Part Two proposes that Jung’s approach was rooted in strong socio-cultural matrix that positioned him as a psychological critic of modernism; while Part Threeexamines the implications of “Jungism”—the use Jung’s ideas have had for creating a systemof beliefs to live by, a use toward which the author takes a slightly jaundiced view.

The author himself is a historian who reads Jung through the lens of Ernst Cassirer,Charles Taylor, and Alyster MacIntyre. Thus, his analysis of symbols is embedded in con-ventional ideas about linguistics, his interpretation of myths bound within linear conceptionsof time, and his understanding of the transcendent is one of purely rational analysis. So howcan a man who has not experienced transcendence write a book about a man who has? Theanswer is that this is a perfectly readable work that makes Jung accessible to a larger audienceof educated intellectuals beyond those already committed to a lifetime of spiritual practicewho use Jung to navigate not only interior domains of their own consciousness, but non-Western epistemologies as well. If one is not yet involved with personal or planetary trans-formation and comes to Jung initially for intellectual reasons, then this book is a good placeto start.

Yet, although it is a good introduction to Jung for normative psychologists, it remainsa book by a historian, rather than by a historian of psychology. There is plenty of personaland cultural history in it, but the author simply has no sense for the contemporary place ofJung within the modern history of academic psychology, clinical psychology, depth psy-chology, or folk psychology, except to say that Jung appearsmore connected to the humanitiesthan the sciences in his methods.

In addition, the author makes no use of the most contemporary historical scholarship onJung within Jungian psychology; rather he relies on outdated interpretations still floatingaround the world of Western historians who are largely familiar with Jung in name only, ifat all. The status of Jung’sMemories, Dreams, and Reflectionsalready has been establishedby Elms and Shamdasani, for instance, but Pietikainen appears not to know this literature(Shamdasani, 1995). Thus, he gives credit to the wrong authors for this original work. Second,Pietikainen’s text remains strongly Freudo-centric in an era when it already has been ac-knowledged by knowledgeable historians and clinicians that Jung has both a history and alineage of his own separate from psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, the author does not appear toknow anything about the history of depth psychology beyond Freud and Ellenberger. Third,

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe author does not access in any systematic way the American psychological literature on

Jung and thus he fails to acknowledge the over-arching significance of the Americanizationof Jung, especially for contemporary European interpreters of Jung’s ideas, including hisown. Fourth, one of his biggest problems is that he relies too heavily on the seriously flawedresearch of Richard Noll, whose misappropriation of documents, mistaken attributions, andmethod of guilt-by-innuendo have been exposed sufficiently to discount any other work basedon Noll’s ideas (Shamdasani, 1998).

The most important problem of Mr. Pietikainen’s text, however, is that it omits anyreference to the New Jung Scholarship (Taylor, 1996; Martinez & Taylor, 1998). This is theattempt to apply techniques of historical scholarship to various problems of interpretationregarding Jung’s life and work by investigators working in various collections, including theunpublished Jung archives still held by the Jung Estate in Switzerland. TheNew JungScholarshave so far centered their work around several crucial themes—an examination of Jung’santi-semitism; his questionable association with the Nazis; a re-examination of the period ofhis personal crisis between 1912 and 1918; the archetypal significance of America in Jung’sown individuation process; an in-depth study of Jung’s actual cases; a critical reappraisal ofJung’s intellectual lineage beyond the knee-jerk assessments linking him to Nietszche, Kant,and Freud; and the all important Americanization of Jung’s ideas (Taylor, 2000, 2001).

The major thesis of the New Jung Scholarship is the idea that Jung was the twentieth-century exponent of the symbolic hypothesis but in the tradition of the late-nineteenth- centurypsychologies of transcendence. This means that he is not properly to be associated as anexclusive clone of Freud’s, but rather has a quite different lineage. The method of symbolismin the life of the hysteric Jung indeed borrowed from Freud, but he applied it across a widerdomain, reaching into the hallucinations of the psychotic, the symbolism of alchemy, andnuminous representations of consciousness from the mythology of non-western as well asnon-technological systems of thought. But Jung’s intellectual lineage was closer to the spec-trum of depth psychologies based on the iconography of the transcendent that flourishedacross Europe and America before 1900, such as those of F.W. H. Myers, Theodore Flournoy,and William James—well acknowledged by Jung himself in those sections ofMemories,Dreams, and Reflectionsexcised by the editors out of the final published edition. Such themes,however, lay beyond the reach of Mr. Pietikainen’s analysis. Thus, the work opens the doorto Jung, but takes us only so far.

REFERENCES

Martinez, T. J., & Taylor, E. I. (1998). “Yes, in you the tempest rages”: The archetypal significance of America inJung’s own process of individuation. Spring: Journal of Archetype and Culture, Fall/Winter, 64, 32–56.

Shamdasani, S. (1995). Memories, dreams, and omissions. Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, 57, 113–141.

Shamdasani, S. (1998). Cult fictions: C. G. Jung and the founding of analytical psychology. London: Routledge.Taylor, E. I. (1996). The new Jung scholarship. Psychoanalytic Review, 83(4), 547–568.Taylor, E. I. (2000). The Americanization of Jung and Freud. In E. I. Taylor, Shadow culture: Psychology and

spirituality in America (pp. 209–234). Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press.Taylor, E. I. (2001). Introduction to C. G. Jung’s Psychology of the unconscious. Princeton NJ: Princeton University

Press. (Original edition, 1916)

Reviewed by EUGENETAYLOR, Harvard University and Saybrook Institute.

Petteri Pietikainen comments:

It is unfortunate that the reviewer did not focus on my book’s main thesis and on theassessment of the way I have succeeded in substantiating my thesis. Thus the reader of his

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textreview can have no clue to the main point of my book, which is to examine how Jung

attempted to develop an interdisciplinary approach to “symbolic forms” (myth, history, sci-ence, and morality). The reviewer mentions Ernst Cassirer’s name, but does not assess thevalidity of the arguments I have gathered to support my thesis that Cassirer’s philosophyoffers a fruitful methodological approach to Jung’s psychology. This I find a bit odd, for Idevote the main chapters of my book to this particular question.

My book has a very strong philosophical basis, but it seems that the reviewer approachesJungian psychology from a totally different methodological perspective. I was surprised tobe criticized, for example, for ignoring the so-called Americanization of Jung’s work, al-though my book is not related to this development at all. Apparently the reviewer examinesAmericanization in his own work, but he does not explicate why I should have done likewise(and refer to his work).

Further, the reviewer’s criticism of the fact that I do not refer to the so-called “NewJung Scholarship” (I had not even heard the term before) seems problematic. I do hope thatI have misinterpreted his implication that any historical work on Jung that fails to refer tothis particular scholarship (or, makes the “mistake” of referring to Richard Noll) is flawed bydefinition. Finally, the reviewer implies that by giving a “purely rational analysis” my bookis somehow deficient, again by definition. Yet the reviewer does not make clear howmy booksuffers from its rational method, except for his assertion that it is somehow limited becauseI have not experienced “transcendence.” Although it is true that many books that deal withJungian psychology are devoid of rational analysis, I take the reviewer’s judgment of myrationality as a compliment rather than as an indication of any deficit in my book.

C. G. Jung and the psychology of symbolic forms

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