The Freudian Jung: Book II of In The Mirror: A Psychological Reversal Of Freud And Jung

In The Freudian Jung, Book II of In The Mirror: A Psychological Reversal Of Freud And Jung, John Swygert turns the mirror around.The first volume, The Jungian Freud, examined Sigmund Freud through Carl Jung’s symbolic psychology. This second volume places Jung himself on Freud’s couch.What hidden wish lives beneath the symbol? What personal wound may have been lifted into universal language? What father-complex remained inside Jung’s rebellion against Freud? What ambition, rivalry, sublimation, compensation, desire, fear, defense, and unresolved dependence may have moved beneath Jung’s vast symbolic architecture?This book does not dismiss Jung. It takes him seriously enough to analyze him.Jung remains one of the great figures in the history of psychology. He restored myth, religion, dream, shadow, persona, archetype, Self, individuation, and symbolic meaning to the study of the psyche. But no founder stands outside the psyche. A man who speaks of archetypes still has a childhood, a father, a mother, a body, an ego, a wound, a shadow, and a set of defenses.Freud’s knife cuts where Jung’s cathedral rises.The Freudian Jung asks whether Jung’s symbolic expansion was always revelation, or whether it was also sometimes evasion. It asks whether archetype may sometimes disguise wish, whether religious image may carry father-longing, whether individuation may also be rebellion, and whether the son who left the father ever fully escaped the father’s house.Respect without suspicion becomes worship. Suspicion without respect becomes reduction. This book attempts both: to honor Jung’s greatness while testing his system with Freud’s analytic suspicion.The result is not a victory of Freud over Jung.It is a deeper psychological dialogue between wound and meaning, knife and cathedral, descent and ascent, father and son. Read more