> From:         Claire Hershman
> Subject:      FW: (Fwd) A Letter to the New York Times Editor by Karin Barnaby.
>
>
> .
>
>
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
> From:               "Mark Greene" <[log in to unmask]>
> To:                 "Susan A.Rowland" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject:            A Letter to the New York Times Editor by Karin Barnaby.
> Date sent:          Mon, 2 Feb 2004 01:45:38 +0800
>
> Please forward this to the IAJS list; I don't have the address.  Thank
> you, M
>
> http://www.cgjungpage.org/content/view/534//
>
>       Dinitia Smith's Review of Deirdre Bair's
>       by Karin Barnaby
>             Larger Text? | Default Text?
>
>       To the Editor:
>
>       The vehemence of Dinitia Smith's personal attack on C. G. Jung
>       in the preamble to her review of Deirdre Bair's volume: Jung, A
>       Biography, reveals a personal prejudice that is incompatible
>       with the kind of intellectual honesty and balance that readers
>       of the NY Times Book Review would expect to find.
>
>       It is not clear on what authority Ms. Smith makes her
>       assertions. What is clear is that her understanding of Jung's
>       work and influence is misinformed. Ms.Smith disparages Jung's
>       personal behavior, his family, and even his table manners, to
>       subsequently conclude that his writings "read like those of
>       someone on the edges of sanity," and that "his teachings have
>       little importance in the treatment of mental illness." If we
>       were to apply Ms. Smith's standards to Albert Einstein, for
>       example, would we similarly dismiss his scientific genius
>       because he abandoned his wife and children, one of whom
> ended up
>       in a psychiatric hospital? Would we dismiss Thomas Jefferson's
>       political genius because he owned slaves and sired children by
>       his slave? Would we dismiss Michaelangelo's creative genius
>       because he was a homosexual who robbed graves?
>
>       Jung may not have lived an exemplary life, but he was a
>       consummate scientist and psychologist who devoted more than
>       sixty years of his life to the systematic exploration of the
>       human psyche, his own included. He advanced knowledge of the
>       psyche's structure and dynamics by examining psychic
>       productions, such as the symbolic images that appear in dreams,
>       visions, religious myths, symbols and rituals, in all forms of
>       creative expression, and in the arcane and esoteric imagery of
>       astrology and alchemy, among others. One of Jung's great
>       achievements was his discovery that these images represent the
>       metaphorical self-expressions of the psyche itself. He made it
>       his life work to understand as much of their meaning as
>       possible.
>
>       We may ridicule and reject Jung's psychology, but that does not
>       alter the facts of his discoveries. Jung himself had no
>       illusions about the reception of his work and did not expect to
>       be understood for many decades or even centuries. The Catholic
>       church rejected and persecuted Galileo (who fathered numerous
>       children with a woman 14 years his junior whom he never married)
>       because of his support of Copernicus's theory of a heliocentric
>       universe. The church's earth-centered political-religious
>       doctrine may not have accepted Galileo's discovery, but that did
>       not alter its hard facts.
>
>       The hard facts of Jung's psychology are these: every human
>       impulse, feeling, thought and action, for good or ill,
>       originates in the human psyche. Every perception and attitude,
>       every religious conviction and intellectual endeavour, every
>       cultural and creative expression, every social and political act
>       originates in the human psyche. More than anyone, Jung>
>       understood the profound and far-reaching implications of this
>       fact. It is time we all did. Given the proliferation of
>       irrational fanaticism and of religious and ideological extremism
>       in the world, Jung's understanding of the human psyche, perhaps
>       more urgently than ever, has become a matter of life and death.
>
>
>
>
> ============================
> Mark Greene, PhD
> Metamercury Productions, Inc.
> http://www.metamercury.net
>
>
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