Jung for Beginners: This is not a Book Review

Jung for Beginners by Jon Platania
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Liked some concepts. The greatest thing Jung did, in my opinion, was to disagree with Freud on the libido theory. From my literature days i liked his concept of collective unconscious. But this book had a new treasure for me. The concept of 'synchronicity'. After so many years i realized what my relationship with her is. It is a good thing that the book gives importance to the women who worked on the same topics at the same time. Most history tend to make it invisible by not mentioning it.

Dr. June Singer, in her definitive exposition Androgyny: The Opposites Within, presents a comparative analysis of Freud's and Jung's theories of human sexuality...

Each of these men were spokesmen for the times and cultures in which they lived. Both Freudian psychoanalysts and Jungian analytic psychologists have often served to promote the ideas of the culture in power at the moment

June Singer also says

Although modern biologists are now aware that we were all female at the beginning, it will probably be a long time before the influence of these discoveries filters down to the level where theologians will be ready to consider an 'Adam-out-of-Eve' version of Genesis

Brought a smile to my lips
Adler's disagreement with Freud needs mention.

One of Jung's first tests as the head of the psychoanalytic movement involved a brilliant young analyst named Alfred Adler. Adler couldn't go along with Freud's notion that the psychosexual libido was the All-Powerful Force that Freud said it was. In Adler's view, man's most basic force was the drive for power

Jung's concept of Synchronicity

A term coined by Jung to designate the "meaningful coincidence" of events that have no cause-and-effect relationship to each other. Synchronistic phenomena occur, for instance, when a mental event (dream, vision, premonition, etc.) corresponds to external reality (the premonition or dream "comes true") or when similar thoughts or identical dreams occur at the same time in different places or to different people. These "coincidences" cannot be explained by causality; they seem instead to be connected primarily with activated archetypal processes in the unconscious

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