God and the Unconscious. By Victor White, O.P. With a
Foreword by C. G. Jung. (Harvill Press. 21s.)
THIS series of reprinted essays and addresses is a substitute for a book unwritten. Its purpose is to reconcile Jungian psychology with Roman Catholic belief, to show where each is complementary to the other, and to warn each off the other's territory. For Father White is willing to grant the practis- ing psychologist autonomy in his own sphere and, whilst claiming with Jung that the neurotic's problem is, particularly in the case of patients in middle life, essentially a religious one, he would not have the. analyst approach it from a sectarian point of view. His chapter on the analyst and the confessor firmly -sets out the difference between their functions ; that on Gnosis, Gnosticism and faith attempts to repel any analytical incursions on the field of theology; that on the dying God, which reproduces a broadcast talk, sets out to prove the vital difference between the New Testament story and earlier dramas of death and resurrec- tion. Other chapters, however, having been in the first place addressed to Catholic audiences, contain too much scholastic argument for the non-Catholic reader. A proposition does not become the clearer for being stated in mediaeval Latin ; the dialectic employed, in fact, seems to become an end in itself. This book, however, is interesting, as the product of a cogent mind, bent rather on reconciling divergent points of view than on insisting that his own
contains the whole truth. J. M. C.
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