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Jung and the Post-Jungians
Jung and the Post-Jungians
Published in 1985 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Jung and the Post-Jungians is the text that first gave the post-Jungian field a stable taxonomy. Samuels reads three earlier attempts at classification — Fordham’s geographical division (Zürich and London Schools), Adler’s ideological one (orthodoxy, neo-Jungians, archetypal psychologists), and Goldenberg’s generational one (second and third generations) — and finds them “mutually exclusive” and productive of “a confusing and unpleasant state of affairs” (Samuels 1985, p. 12). In their place he proposes three schools distinguished by the ordering of six theoretical and clinical priorities: the definition of the archetypal, the concept of the self, the development of personality, the analysis of transference-countertransference, the emphasis upon symbolic experience of the self, and the examination of highly differentiated imagery.
Structurally, the book moves through eleven chapters covering archetype and complex, the ego, the self and individuation, the development of personality, the analytical process, gender, dreams, and archetypal psychology. Each chapter traces the specifically Jungian contribution, the critiques made of it from within and without, the parallel developments in psychoanalysis, and Samuels’s own reading. The book’s final chapters stage explicit comparison between the three schools and conclude that the post-Jungian future will be one of irreducible plurality: “individuals will wish to express themselves by drawing on the work and ethos of all the schools” (Samuels 1985, p. 217).
The book is load-bearing for the Lineage because it demonstrates that the Jungian inheritance is structurally plural, not a single orthodoxy. Its vocabulary — Classical, Developmental, Archetypal — has remained the standard idiom of post-Jungian self-description for four decades.