Striving Towards Wholeness

Book excerpt: Barbara Hannah studies the psychic processes that move people to strive for wholeness of personality, an integration of all innate capacities. Since this inner drama manifests itself with special intensity in the lives of creative individuals, she has taken up the biographies and literary productions of five major English novelists--Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Webb, and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte--along with one nonliterary artist--Branwell Bronte. Not only do Stevenson, Webb, and the four Brontes take on fresh, unsuspected dimensions, but the concepts of analytical psychology are also broadened and deepened as Barbara Hannah indicates how contemporary people may gain insight from these examples in their own efforts to strive towards wholeness. Barbara Hannah (1891-1986) was born in England. She went to Zürich in 1929 to study with Carl Jung and lived in Switzerland the rest of her life. A close associate of Jung until his death, she was a practicing psychotherapist and lecturer at the C.G. Jung Institute. Her books available from Chiron include The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals; Encounters with the Soul; Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir; and Striving Toward Wholeness.