Jung and the Post-Jungians

The Classification of Disagreement Is Itself the Theory

Andrew Samuels’s Jung and the Post-Jungians is not a survey disguised as a book. It is an argument about the epistemological conditions under which a depth psychology can mature. Samuels opens with Fordham’s observation that “very little has been written on the development of the various schools of analytical psychology that have grown up,” and responds not merely by cataloguing those schools but by demonstrating that the act of classification is itself the discipline’s missing theoretical achievement. The three schools he identifies — Developmental (Fordham, London), Classical (the Zürich tradition, Neumann), and Archetypal (Hillman) — do not merely disagree about technique or emphasis. They disagree about what the psyche fundamentally is: whether it is best understood through infantile development and clinical transference, through amplification and mythic pattern, or through the autonomous life of images freed from developmental narrative altogether. What Samuels grasps, drawing on Bion’s concept of the “vertex,” is that these incompatible positions nevertheless share a common point of orientation — the six categories he identifies (archetype, self, ego, development, process, gender) that define the field’s boundaries. The discipline exists not despite its internal fractures but through them. This echoes what Karl Popper argued about science: that a field’s vitality is measured by its capacity for self-refutation, not by its unity of doctrine.

Jung’s “Unknowing Jungians” Expose the Institutional Fabrication of Originality

The book’s most provocative and sustained intervention is the concept of “unknowing Jungians” — psychoanalytic thinkers who arrived at positions Jung had staked out decades earlier, without acknowledging or even knowing the debt. Samuels builds a devastating list: Klein’s innate psychic structures parallel archetypes; Winnicott’s transitional objects instantiate Jung’s theory of the symbol as the bridge between irreconcilables; Kohut’s self psychology recapitulates Jung’s insistence that the self, not the ego, is the organizing center of personality; Bion’s treatment of incestuous fantasy as symbolic mirrors Jung’s lifelong rejection of Freudian literalism. Samuels cites Roazen’s blunt assessment that “few responsible figures in psychoanalysis would be disturbed today if an analyst were to present views identical to Jung’s in 1913.” This is not triumphalism on Samuels’s part — the book contains too many stringent criticisms of Jung for that. It is a structural diagnosis of how intellectual history works in the analytic professions: priority is suppressed when the originator has been institutionally excommunicated. Readers familiar with Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious will recognize the pattern. Ellenberger showed how Janet’s contributions were erased by the Freudian ascendancy; Samuels performs the analogous recovery for Jung’s influence on post-Kleinian and self-psychological developments. The credibility gap, Samuels insists, is sociological, not intellectual.

The Symbol-to-Image Shift Marks the Deepest Fault Line in Analytical Psychology

One of the book’s richest analytic passages traces how Jung’s original distinction between sign and symbol has been pushed further — by Hillman especially — into a distinction between symbol and image. Samuels identifies this as the point where the Archetypal School breaks most decisively from both Classical and Developmental positions. The Classical tradition, exemplified by Neumann and von Franz, tends to “fix” symbols: birds always mean spiritual intuitions, the Great Mother always follows a specific developmental sequence. Hillman’s counterattack is that this symbological approach kills what it claims to honor. Before something can function as a symbol, it must first be encountered as an image — particular, contextual, alive with mood and scene. The moment an analyst looks up a symbol in Jung’s Collected Works or Cirlot’s dictionary, the image has already been murdered into a sign. This is not merely an aesthetic complaint. It has direct clinical implications: the analyst who amplifies by rote imposes a mythology onto the patient rather than attending to the specific psychic reality presenting itself. Samuels links this to Fordham’s parallel concern that the Zürich style of analysis assigns patient material to “one particular slot or other,” treating the pre-existing model of the psyche as more real than the patient’s actual productions. James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology develops this critique into a full counter-program; Samuels’s achievement is to show that even this radical move remains intelligible within the shared vertex of analytical psychology rather than constituting an exit from it.

Individuation Belongs to Pathology, Not Perfection

Samuels quietly dismantles the popular image of individuation as spiritual achievement or midlife culmination. Drawing on Fordham’s “democratisation” — the argument that individuation requires nothing more than ordinary good mothering — and Hillman’s “iconoclasm” — the insistence that individuation is merely one myth among many — Samuels constructs a post-Jungian synthesis in which individuation necessarily includes psychopathology. Guggenbühl-Craig’s concept of the “individuation marriage” that by normal standards looks “quite crazy” captures the point: wholeness is not health, and the attempt to purify individuation of its shadow components produces exactly the inflation that Jung himself warned against. This resonates powerfully with Edward Edinger’s work in Ego and Archetype, where the ego-Self axis must repeatedly be disrupted and reconstituted, and with Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s own The Emptied Soul, where the helping professions’ fantasy of cure becomes the primary vehicle of shadow. Samuels pushes further than either, suggesting that individuation must eventually be connected to group and social functioning — a move that the Jungian tradition, with its notorious discomfort around groups, has resisted.

Why This Book Remains Structurally Irreplaceable

For anyone entering depth psychology today, Jung and the Post-Jungians does something no other single volume accomplishes: it makes visible the architecture of disagreement within analytical psychology and demonstrates that this architecture is not a scandal to be concealed but the discipline’s primary intellectual resource. It provides the only systematic mapping of how Jungian concepts have been independently reinvented across psychoanalysis, making it essential for any reader trying to understand why Jung’s ideas permeate contemporary clinical thinking while his name remains conspicuously absent from psychoanalytic bibliographies. And it establishes, through its comparative method, that the future of analytical psychology lies not in doctrinal loyalty to any school but in the capacity to hold the tension between incompatible positions — which is, of course, precisely what Jung meant by the transcendent function, now applied to the profession’s own self-understanding.