Eyes Wide Open: Late Thoughts, Another Jungian Romance.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

This is the last piece of the SleepNot Trilogy. Earlier volumes are Not the Big Sleep (2005), followed by On Staying Awake (2006). Daryl Sharp is a practising Jungian analyst based in Toronto. At the basis of Jungian psychoanalysis is the concept of individuation, which Sharp defines in his 1991 Jung Lexicon as “a process informed by the archetypal ideal of wholeness, which in turn depends on a vital relationship between ego and unconscious.” This process further conceptualizes the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, Jung (and Sharp) say. Since the unconscious is at the basis of our condition and since, at some perceived level, it is threatening, “the reason why consciousness exists, and why there is an urge to widen and deepen it, is very simple: without consciousness things go less well.”

Despite efforts to minimize and, if you will, humanize the jargon, it is there aplenty. Much of the Jungian theoretical constructs are presented in the form of dialogues between the author and his friend and older colleague, Professor Adam Brillig, himself an analyst. Brillig serves as both sounding board and “sometime mentor.” “When I am in a quandary,” Sharp says, “I read Jung and, if it persists, I call on Adam.”

This final book in the trilogy, says its author, is simply “another romance (or conceit) on the theme of trying to stay conscious … It is a bald-faced vehicle for explaining and promoting Jung’s ideas about the psyche, interspersed with my own brand of mischief and comic relief, illustrated for the most part by my personal experience.”

Sharp does a good job here at familiarizing his readers with what is at the basis of Jung’s archetypal constructs. Those with an interest in these ideas will enjoy the book.