C.G. Jung and the Humanities

Book excerpt: C. G. Jung has been and continues to be a pervasive yet often unacknowledged presence in twentieth-century art and intellectual life. This timely volume is the first comprehensive attempt to assess this presence and to demonstrate Jung's far-reaching cultural impact. The distinguished contributors represent a number of views, from traditional Jungian to the most contemporary post-Jungian stances, including feminist, non-Jungian, and anti-Jungian positions. Jung, as seen in this volume, addresses a wide range of contemporary issues related to creativity, gender, religion, popular culture, and hermeneutics. The essays reveal dimensions of his work that extend far beyond psychoanalytical theory and that show his hermeneutics to be a much more subtle and sophisticated methodology than previously allowed by his critics. This methodology appears, in fact, to have anticipated significant aspects of contemporary critical principles and practice. The contributors to the volume were among the participants in a major international conference sponsored by Hofstra University and the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, held in 1986 at Hofstra University. They include Thomas Belmonte, Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, Edward S. Casey, Stanley Diamond, Jean Erdman, Leslie Fiedler, James Hillman, Paul Kugler, Ibram Lassaw, Neil Levine, David L. Miller, Lucio Pozzi, Gilles Quispel, Robert Richenburg, Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Andrew Samuels, Harold Schechter, and June Singer. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.