Sunday, December 22, 2013

Opening paragraphs.............................

To understand Carl Gustav Jung one must first understand Switzerland, and this is no easy matter.  People become puzzled when confronted with a republic that has no president but a communal leadership consisting of an executive council.  The technicalities of confederation rather than federation - the technical distinction is that in confederation the central government has powers over the member states but not directly over their citizens - leads to further confusions.  Compound this with a geography that produces cis-Alpine, trans-Alpine and inter-Alpine cantons and a political culture not based on a single language and one is already faced with a social complexity that matches the notorious difficulty of Jung's psychological thought.  Some observers have even suggested a stricter determinism:  that Jung could not have had the theories he had if he had been born elsewhere, since the Swiss constitution is itself "Jungian."
-Frank McLynn,  Carl Gustav Jung

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