gesang reviewed The Creation of Consciousness by Edward F. Edinger (Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts)
Most Compact Exposition of Jungian Thoughts
4 stars
While my little essay A Brief Remark on the Actual Thoughts of C. G. Jung: Human Participation in the Creation tries to make sense of Jungian thoughts, this book, without actually arguing for it philosophically (hence, it may come as lack of rigor and conceptual clarity), gives a most - if not the most - compact exposition of the core of Jungian thoughts from a more purely Jungian point of view. Correctly, and plainly, Edinger shows that, the actual thoughts of Jung isn't really about archetype classifications and vague thoughts about the transformations of archetype, but the generation and transformation of consciousness.
The book is written for a wide audience, so there are some "popular", New-Age-ish passages. Some people may not really like the quasi-utilitarian naive-eudaimonistic point of departure that Edinger takes. Furthermore it doesn't venture further to the metaphysical, and doesn't argue that creation of consciousness is actually the …
While my little essay A Brief Remark on the Actual Thoughts of C. G. Jung: Human Participation in the Creation tries to make sense of Jungian thoughts, this book, without actually arguing for it philosophically (hence, it may come as lack of rigor and conceptual clarity), gives a most - if not the most - compact exposition of the core of Jungian thoughts from a more purely Jungian point of view. Correctly, and plainly, Edinger shows that, the actual thoughts of Jung isn't really about archetype classifications and vague thoughts about the transformations of archetype, but the generation and transformation of consciousness.
The book is written for a wide audience, so there are some "popular", New-Age-ish passages. Some people may not really like the quasi-utilitarian naive-eudaimonistic point of departure that Edinger takes. Furthermore it doesn't venture further to the metaphysical, and doesn't argue that creation of consciousness is actually the creation of the ontological real so that the full-blown (modern) Schellingian nature of Jungian thoughts is made clear. Nevertheless it is still a good read.
Jungian thoughts should still be understood by actually peeking into Jung's writings: the last chapters of his autobiography, Aion, and the opening and several closing chapters Answer to Job. It is also a shame that Jungians are in general not good philosophers, and certainly not good metaphysicians, more or less due to Jung's holding on to Kantianism in order to remain scientific, since it is not psychology but metaphysics that Jung actually inherited as the culminating figure who found the way to the final confines of German Romanticism.