Modern Man in Search of a Soul

What It Is

Eleven essays, most of them originally delivered as lectures, gathered and translated into English in 1933 by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes and published in London and New York. It is not a translation of a single German book but a selection made for English readers out of Jung's shorter writings of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The range is wide. There are practical chapters on how Jung worked with dreams and with patients, and on the psychological types that later became a fixture of popular psychology. There is the essay on the stages of life, on what the second half of a life is for, which is the one people press on their friends. There are chapters on literature, on the mind of archaic man, on where he broke with Freud, and, at the end, on why he thought the modern European had a religious problem.

Nobody should call it a system. These are lectures, and they still behave like lectures. Jung is persuading a room.

Why It Matters

This is the book that made Jung readable in English, and much of what the world now vaguely means by Jungian comes out of it, including a pair of words you have almost certainly used about yourself without knowing where they came from.

Its real subject is announced in the title, and it is more serious than the title suggests. What Jung thought the loss of religion had actually done to Europeans is the claim the whole book is built to support, and he arrived at it from the consulting room rather than the pulpit. The sentence in which he finally states it has been quoted, and disputed, ever since. Whether that is a deep observation or a category error is a live question, and the book will not settle it for you.

He was also doing something almost nobody in his profession would: taking the religious, mythological and symbolic life as data rather than as delusion. It cost him among the Freudians, and it is why he is still read outside psychology altogether.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. The essays are short and the writing is warmer and less technical than anything in the Collected Works.

Read them as separate pieces, because that is what they are. The chapters do not build. Two or three at a sitting is right.

Bring some patience for the essay on archaic man, which carries the assumptions of a European in 1930 and reads that way. It is where he is at his most dated, and it does not contaminate the rest.

Which Translation to Read

• Dell and Baynes (Routledge Classics, 2001) — recommended. The 1933 translation, complete, in the cheapest and most durable edition in print. Cary Baynes knew Jung, worked with him, and translated him for readers rather than for specialists, and the result has a directness the official version never quite recovers. This is the book that made Jung's reputation in English, in the form in which it made it. The cost: the translation is ninety years old. Its vocabulary predates the settled English terminology of analytical psychology, so the words shift under you. View on Amazon →
• The Harvest paperback (Harcourt). The same translation in the American paperback that generations read, and it is in every second-hand shop in the country. The cost: no apparatus, no introduction, and printings of varying quality. Buy it for two dollars, not for your shelf.
• R. F. C. Hull's translations in the Collected Works. Nearly all of these essays exist in Hull's more literal renderings, scattered across Volumes 8, 10, 11, 15 and 16. This is the scholar's Jung and the correct text to quote. The cost: you lose the book. Its shape was an editorial creation of 1933, and the Collected Works dissolve it.

Read the Routledge Classics edition. Go to Hull when you want to be sure of a sentence, and to the Collected Works once this book has convinced you to go further.

Getting the Most From This Book

Start with the essay on the stages of life and the one on the spiritual problem of modern man, then go back to the beginning. They are the reason the book has lasted.

Do not read him as a scientist and do not read him as a mystic. He is a clinician describing what he thinks he saw over forty years of listening to people, and the useful question is not whether the theory is true but whether the description is recognisable.

Jung is unusual among the great psychologists in expecting you to test him on yourself, and the reader who does gets a different book from the reader who does not.