nighttime check-in

I’m going to miss Manchester a great deal, and will try to enjoy it as much as possible on the final night.

Before doing so, I’ll just say that since Suarez is always such a demanding read, I needed to reset my tastebuds after each chapter with more of Bair’s Jung biography. I’m not sure what Jung experts think about the book, but as a biography lover I find it to be an exceptionally helpful one.

The only complaint I have so far is a minor one… The pacing of the adolescence part is too quick. We get a lot of early treatment of little Carl, the weird and clumsy boy with unhappy parents whom no one wants to play with, and then we get a lot of big Carl the philosophically sophisticated undergraduate, good-looking and charismatic, respected by his peers for his encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects. These things do happen, as we all know, but the jump is too abrupt, and the existing pages on the Gymnasium years doesn’t fill in the gaps quite enough. If this were a work of fiction it would be a glaring failure, but in the context of a biography we can just shrug and say “well, somehow he must have matured.”

There’s another part that I didn’t like at first, but which I’ve already grown to like very much… Initially, Bair’s portrayal of Freud seemed a bit off: she treats him as more of an isolated, eccentric sort of figure than seemed right to me. But then I realized that this is sort of how Freud must have looked from Jung’s point in the universe.

If you read the Freud-Jung correspondence alone, you get the sense of Jung as an eager beaver disciple of Freud who only gradually breaks free. When viewed through Bair’s biography it’s different… Jung was already fully formed, a successful professional of international renown, married to the second richest heiress in Switzerland, and perhaps someone who caves in to Freud in the correspondence for tactical ease more than anything else. (There is no question that Freud tries to establish the dominant position early in the correspondence; I remember this quite well even 15 years after reading it all. But I remember Jung as sucking up a bit more in the correspondence than Bair indicates. She does seems to see it, but without taking it seriously.)

Bair makes another interesting point, a true one in my opinion, that even though the Freud-Jung correspondence lasted for only 8 years, in soem ways it overshadows the rest of their lives in both cases. It’s certainly a very good read, even though a fairly depressing one by the end.