The reader is treated to both a concise statement of Carl Gustav Jung's theories of life-stage development and a parallel narrative of Jung's experiences as he moved through each of these stages. Jung was the son of a clergyman and grandson of a physician who established a home for mentally retarded children and attempted to establish a psychiatry chair at the university in Basel, Switzerland. His maternal grandfather was a spiritualist "who held regular conversations with his first wife after her death" (p. 5) and his second wife (Jung's grandmother) was a clairvoyant from a family of clairvoyants. Growing up in such an atmosphere, where matters of the spirit were daily fare and things that go bump in the night were an accepted part of life, it seems quite natural that Jung had a lifelong interest in the paranormal. Stevens traces the idea of the unconscious from its conception (which he believed to be around 1700) to the earliest investigations by Freud in the 1890s. The split between Freud and Jung (essentially spirituality versus sexuality) is described as having a profoundly shattering effect on Jung, as it had on others ejected from the Freudian camp for their failure to endorse, without question, Freud's theories that all neuroses is based in sexual development. (Two of these ex-Freudians actually committed suicide after being spurned by Freud). Stevens's unique method of combining a primer of Jung life-stage theory with a biography of Jung is an effective introduction to the man and his work. (February 1995)

According to Stevens, Carl Jung's search for forceful father figures was brought on by his parents' failings; his love-at-first-sight meeting with his wife was a "classic case of anima projection"; and his midlife breakdown was an archetypal journey. "Brimming with fresh insights, this Jungian biography of Jung throws sharp light on the inner recesses of his psyche," said PW.