The Jungian Experience: Analysis and Individuation

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

This is the 26th volume in the series: Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts. Hall is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst practicing in Dallas, where he is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Southwestern Medical School.

Earlier volumes in the series (for example, Joseph Henderson’s Cultural Attitudes in Psychological Perspectives (1984) assume a strong knowledge and familiarity of Jung’s metaphysics. Hall writes instead for three types of readers: (1) those considering entering Jungian analysis; (2) those already engaged in the Jungian experience, either as analysts or analysands; and (3) those therapists of other theoretical backgrounds who wish better to understand the classical application of the classical Jungian approach.

The author presents an excellent introduction to the stages of Jungian analysis. The process is taken step by step, from the “temenos,” or boundary conditions of analysis, through the stages of self-examination, the feelings of compassion toward oneself, and the basic analytic stage which depends on what Hall terms “working through the persona.” He cites personal examples, drawn from his experiences as both analyst and analysand; the patient, for example, who told him once that her neurosis was so interesting that doctor should pay patient!

Jung’s two attitudinal types — extroversion and introversion — are carefully explained, as are the four functions of thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation. The basic goal of human life, according to Jung, is encapsulated in the process of individuation, which the book’s glossary defines as “the conscious realization of one’s unique psychological reality, including both strengths and limitations.”

Jung’s own writings are paraphrased at strategic points of the text. In the chapters “Dreams and Techniques of Enactment” and “Beyond Analysis: Scientific and Religious Implications of Jungian Theory,” Hall explains the archetypes which are so basic to the Jungian view of the personality.

There are three appendices: Structural elements of the personality; How and where to find Jungian analysts; and Suggested readings. Notes, glossary and index are included. The glossary is common to all the volumes in this growing and interesting series. This book is for the academic and larger public library.