Knowledge in a Nutshell: Carl Jung: The complete guide to the great psychoanalyst, including the unconscious, archetypes and the self

Review for an e-book format.

I've read one other book on Jungian psychology and found Jung's work subtle, intriguing, and logical. This one by Gary Bobroff does Jung a disservice. Some portions are clearly delivered. These tend to be the matter-of-fact statements of definitions and concepts, with quotations from Jung and certain other psychological professionals. These are why the book gets 2 stars: it wasn't useless. Clearly from the reviews, other people are kinder about this than I am. But I've written and published academic work myself, so my tolerance for bad academic writing is low.

The good parts are tainted by editorializing, moralizing, silliness, and the occasional stupid mistake.
He repeatedly injects his own (boring, typical, mainstream West Coast left-wing) biases into the work and twists Jung's ideas around to kinda-sorta-not-really justify it. It's darkly amusing to read a supposedly scholarly work that talks about the dangers of getting too wrapped up in your persona by a guy so obviously wrapped up in his persona (seriously, visit his website) he damages his own book just to posture it. Did you know Jungian analysis intersects with climate change, crop circles, and Trump?

I mean, it doesn't (obviously), but this guy says it does. "Is this shadow being reflected back to us today in tragic form by the effects of climate change and by discordant political figures?" Repeatedly. "In coming to see what we’ve done to the planet with climate change, we are being forced to face our civilizational shadow..." Don't know why he keeps talking about global warming; the polar ice caps melted 21 years ago...

BTW, "Shadow" is a Jungian psychological term for repressed values or urges, which can (and often does) include objectively good things that are simply inconvenient or socially disfavored during your upbringing and that mature people can struggle to reconcile. This guy goes back and forth from short-handing it as 'bad stuff' he doesn't like (as above) and implying that it's all the fun things your square parents wouldn't let you do and that you should, like, totally indulge in so you can live a full life, man (Chapter 2). Related, he gives Moses destroying the Tablets of the Law as an example of destroying the uncool restrictions society puts on you; which is, just, fantastically wrong. That is literally the opposite of what Moses was doing descending from Sinai. Carl Jung was an unconventional, but completely genuine spiritual Christian and that perspective is clear throughout his work. For someone supposedly dedicated to Jung's work to so seriously misunderstand basic elements of the founding mythology of Christianity hurts his credibility in general, but specifically in the context of Jungian psychology (which uses myth as an explanatory tool; can't amplify dream interpretations with myths if you don't bother reading them, can you?).

He brags (!) about having written a book about how crop circles tie into Jungian concepts of the Self... because they're circles, and circles are like mandalas and commonly used in such representations. No, man. They're circles because it was easy for the hoaxsters who made them to move in circles around central points; they demonstrated on video, I think decades ago, now. The most charitable angle I can think of here is hammering a square peg of plugging his own book into the round hole of legitimate psychology. In any case, it's stupid.

His logic fails routinely. Consider: "What we admire or dislike in other men or women often
reflects our own hidden face." Got that? *Both* approval and disapproval 'often' (but not always) reflect our Shadow. This is a tautology. This statement has no meaning; there is no way it can be false. Example: **Sometimes I get up before 7:00 and other times I don't, often after having gone to sleep the previous night.** Other than the raw facts that I sleep and wake up, this is a worthless statement.

There were silly typos. These could be a consequence of translation to e-book format, but these weren't random characters from an encoding error; these were just regular typos of the kind Word might overlook. Aside, I saw no editor's credit.

However, I only called it quits and decided to write this review on page 114 when I read this: "To some extent, our personality type is the water we breathe, it’s the essential nature of our way of being." You get that? THE WATER WE BREATHE.

NO ONE BREATHES WATER. EVEN FISH DON'T BREATHE WATER BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE LUNGS.

Sorry folks, I'm out. I finished 114 of 202 pages in this format. You can get essentially the same information from "Jung: A Very Short Introduction," by Anthony Stevens. It's currently priced on Amazon at $11.95 for the paperback (cheaper than this book). Bonus: It was published in 2001, so editorializing about Trump and "climate change" is missing.

This book lacks depth into Jung's work and theories - but it is a fantastic introduction if that's what you're looking for. Easy to read and understand - for me it clarified some of Jung's basic concepts.