ABSTRACT
There are several debts I owe to Andrew Samuels, and this is about the intellectual ones. Almost single-handedly, he created the field of Jungian Studies by getting all the separate and split-off strands of Jungian thought talking to each other, or at least aware of each other’s existence. Prior to Andrew Samuels, the field was fragmented and thin, with competing interest groups ‘doing their own thing’ without even so much as looking sideways at each other. Samuels urged, perhaps even forced, us to start thinking about where we all stood in terms of his critical and taxonomical model put forward in Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985). This work impacted on everyone and made us all think more clearly about our indebtedness to Jung and where we departed from him. It also helped many of us to separate ourselves from the widespread devotionalism and subservience to Jung, which had stifled debate and intellectual vitality in the Jung field for a generation, with certain important exceptions. Samuels’ clear thinking enabled us to differentiate Jung’s thought from his prejudices and opinions, to disentangle what was authentic and enduring about his work from what was merely ephemeral and a product of his time and conditioning.
