A Life of Jung by Ronald Hayman
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...Ronald Hayman’s biography of Jung starts out reasonably well but starts quickly degenerating into a Jung bashing fest around page 200. For instance Hayman states that "Jung thought it healthier to blame death on witchcraft, sorcery or magic than on old age, disease or accident." (p.224) Anyone who’s read even a little Jung would see the silliness in this claim right away. The documentation Hayman provides for this claim is a quote, not of Jung’s, but from someone Jung once studied!
In another section Hayman calls Jung a cult leader and compares him to Jim Jones!(p.239) Jim Jones was the master mind behind the mass murder of 900 people via cyanide poisoning and gunshot wounds. I’m hard pressed to understand how C.G. Jung can be compared with him. But Hayman (who is noted to be a Freudian) apparently wants people to dislike Jung so much that he’s willing to intimate a connection between the two. If Hayman is just sparring for a Freud vs. Jung fight then a pro-Freudian argument using sound logic and fact might serve his cause better than the ludicrous and mean spirited connotation that Jung and Jones have something in common.
Hayman tries to paint a dismal picture of Jung as a lazy mimicker by quoting what he falsely claims is Jung’s wife’s description of her husband’s type (based on Jung’s Personality Type system). Hayman refers to a lecture Emma Jung gave on the Introverted Sensate type saying her statements were "based on her relationship with Jung." But Jung isn’t an Introverted Sensate type at all. In fact, his type, an Introverted Intuitive according to his wife and all those who knew him, is considered to be almost opposite to the type his wife described in the lecture Hayman quotes. Worse than this, Hayman’s sole "proof" that Emma, Jung’s wife, is describing her husband is that she uses the personal pronoun "he" in her lecture, not "she." (p.293) Wow! With this kind of logic the world could be reinvented any which way in any moment.
While I find a good argument worth reading even if I strongly disagree, this kind of utter silliness starts to cast a dim light on every word the author says. I’d have to concede that much of the book is very well written and at cursory glance, appears to be well documented, but boondoggles like this started leaving me wishing I was doing chores or taking a nap.
One is left with the impression that Hayman has made no attempt whatsoever to understand even the most basic tenets of Jung’s work and instead is hell bent on making distorted, unsupported claims that attempt to misrepresent Jung’s life. To my mind, that’s the last thing a biographer should do.