2003

Erich Fromm fought long and hard for the rights and freedoms of the individual. He also recognized that fundamental to this pursuit is the promotion of self-knowledge. In encouraging people to analyze their own behavior, Fromm identified the crucial link between psychology and ethics that underpins all our actions. Moreover, he saw in this a way out of the meaningless impasse which he regarded as the plight of the modern human race. The task that Fromm sets himself, therefore, in Man for Himself is no less than to identify “what man is, how he ought to live, and how the tremendous energies within man can be released and used productively.” The resulting book is ample witness to Fromm’s success. It makes for exciting, illuminating, even life-changing reading.

Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell.’ So Jung advises while reflecting on ‘The Love Problem of a Student’, an essay contained in this volume. But it is not just love that Jung speaks of in this book. Taking as its theme Jung’s interpretation of the feminine principle in his hugely influential theories about the inner world of the individual, it guides the reader from the mythological archetype of the mother-figure to the experience of women in twentieth-century Europe, explaining along the way concepts crucial to Jung’s understanding of the personality, such as animus and anima. Many of his contentions have become the assumptions of the generations growing up in the twenty-first century. Aspects of the Feminine is a provocative, controversial book which offers readers the opportunity to discover at first hand just how radical Jung’s arguments were.