Jung and Steiner and the Birth of a New Psychology
* Book: Jung & Steiner. The Birth of A New Psychology. by Gerhard Wehr. Anthroposophic Press/NY in 2002
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Contextual Quotes
"Thanks to Jung, the field has been ennobled, and the word "psychology" has been somewhat restored as the discipline of the soul. A true discipline is far more than an academic area of interest. One takes up a discipline, enters it — one becomes it. It then becomes a way of knowing oneself and knowing the world.
[page 7, 8] Thanks to Steiner, the possibility exists of taking this discipline of the soul and placing it within the context of understanding the place and work of the human being in the whole cosmos. The kind of psychology that could come from working through the whole of Jung and Steiner in an inner, experiential way is a practical psychology. It is not confined to the therapy office but is rather the work of living a conscious soul life.
If it seems to you that I devoted a lifetime of study to Jung and Steiner, you are right. And Sardello says that they are both worth a lifetime of study.
[page 7, 8] Both Jung and Steiner have given us a cosmology within which we can see ourselves soulfully. That is why both are worth lifetimes of study. We should not make our task easy by considering these two individuals as only providing systems that agree in certain ways and diverge in others. Nor should we try to simply determine which one to follow. Both decried followers, but hoped to see independent workers inspired by their efforts."
(http://www.doyletics.com/arj/jungstei.shtml)
Review
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne:
"I owe an enormous debt to Jung who cleared the view of my spiritual horizon and prepared me for the next great encounter in my life, with Rudolf Steiner. My path to Steiner was much more tortuous than my path to Jung, and equally fruitful. My first impression of Rudolf Steiner was a recondite author of a few obscure books on the bottom shelf of the Golden Leaves Bookstore. The proprietor's method of stocking her bookstore was if someone ordered a book from her, she would order an extra copy for the shelf. I bought a couple of the Steiner books and tried to read them. Couldn't do it. What he said made no sense to me. I put the books on my shelf and years later tried again. I managed to finish one or two and since I had by the time begun reviewing books as I finished reading them, the reviews of those early books are available. They are short, terse, and show little insight into Steiner's work for the very good reason that I still didn't know what he was talking about actually. I had been reading lectures he gave to audiences who were familiar with the foundations of his work. Me, I was wandering in a new wilderness without a guide. When the Internet started up, I found a group of people who were familiar with Steiner's work and they directed me to his basic works and I began to read them in earnest and I found that what I had been searching for during all those hours I had spent in bookstores of all kinds was what Steiner was writing about — the reality of the spiritual world. He had actually gone further than Jung and I was ready to follow along his path. My reading and reviewing of Steiner's works are too numerous to outline here, except to point you to my books, A Reader's Journal, Volume I and Volume II. Volume I was available for a short time in hardback, and since then both volumes have been available on-line. Volume I has the short reviews and Volume II has detailed and longer reviews. (As of 2012, I have read and reviewed over 186 Steiner Books.)
With that prologue, I can explain why this book by Gerhard Wehr is such an important book to me: he ties together the works of Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner. This pulling together of the two is something I had been doing in my own mind over the years as I read Steiner's works. I could begin to discern some of the connections, but wondered if anyone would agree with me on them. As I began to read the book, I found the confirmation I had sought, first in Robert Sardello's Foreword, then in Hans Erhard Lauer's Lectures, and then in Gerhard Wehr's comprehensive comparing and contrasting of Jung and Steiner works.
Wehr is amply suited to the task of tying together the work of these two men. He wrote the definitive biography of Carl Jung and is a student of the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy. The importance of Wehr's work is accentuated by the presence of the Foreword by Robert Sardello who has innovated a "Spiritual Psychology" which embraces the works of both Jung and Steiner and the three lectures by Han Erhard Lauer in which he looks at the answers to the riddles of the soul as given by Jung and Steiner."