Anyone who has read anything else by Marie-Louise von Franz knows what to expect from one of her books - erudition, encyclopedic knowledge and plenty of down to earth clinical advice. The spirit of Jung breathes out of every single page and can't help but capture and hold your attention.

Whether or not is simply a brilliant collection of the obscure poet, Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Her short prose can either slap you in the face with its eerie stories or calm and enlighten with her insightful, yet subtly scarcastic vignettes. In "Remains to be Seen", her moody descriptions of the bleak future that she predicts is enough to shake settled nerves yet leave them soothed by her trademark, enigmatic conclusions. In "Threatening Letter", she writes her most effective character analisis. She writes this story of a paranoid man that expects some kind of an alarming message, as if she were the man's psychiatrist. It reads like a medical perscription, translated into poetry. With the under appreciated brilliance of Lisel Mueller, translating her works, Marie Luise Kaschnitz shines in English as she does in her native tongue of German.

If you're looking for an introduction to the symbolic life lived close to the unconscious, it doesn't get much better or more concise than this. In a question and answer format, you'll find an easily accessible introductory guide to analytical psychology and Jungian dream analysis.

"The Way of the Dream is based on an extraordinary series of films made by Fraser Boa, who collected first-person accounts of dreams in street interviews with ordinary men and women in various parts of the world. He then asked the eminent psychoanalyst Marie-Louise von Franz to interpret these dreams on film, just as she would in a private analytical session. The resulting text is a primer explaining and demonstrating the art and science of dream analysis for the general public. The material covered includes dreams of men, dreams of women, what dreams tell us about ourselves and our relationships, the historical significance of dreams, and dreams about death and dying. Dr. von Franz concludes that one of the healthiest things people can do is pay attention to their dreams: 'Dreams show us how to find meaning in our lives, how to fulfill our own destiny, how to realize the greater potential of life within us.'"

This book was a very interesting, readable, understandable introduction to Jungian psychoanalysis. Reading like the transcript from Boa's documentary film, it introduces von Franz' comments between quotes from everyday people about their own dreams. Fascinating dialogue and question/answer format makes this easily understandable and prompts an appetite to learn more. For everyone who ever had a dream and wondered about its possible meaning, this book is a treat and can set you on a journey of self-discovery that is both fun and challenging.

An interesting topic knowing Nairobi, however after the first couple of chapters the books gets rather boring.

"The Comforts of Home" is a major work on Africa by any standard. By analyzing "prostitution" as domestic labor & tying it to urban history, White breaks new ground, avoiding the moralizing outlooks common to many studies of the subject. The book also displays the value of Africanists' interdisciplinary approach to history, especially in using evidence, not least because of her remarkable oral data collected under very demanding conditions. This book deserved, & won, the 1991 Herskovits Prize for best book from the African Studies Association. It is consistently readable and intellectually challenging.

It's astonishing that one could present a biography of Jung and not deal with the many allegations of unprofessional, irresponsible, and certainly bizarre behaviors that have been advanced about this man. For shame!

The author, who is one of THE most under-rated and under-written-about female theorists who studied under Jung (where is there a substantial biography for her??), is always brilliant to read, her work packed with fascinating insights and an almost superhuman erudition. This book is no exception.

At the same time, however, it gets nowhere near the quality of her other books. Propped up by endless quotes from Jung's supposedly autobiographical MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, a book I often go back to but always with the knowledge that it's been heavily censored, von Franz sustains a justificatory tone throughout that is embarrassing to read.

At one point, for instance, she deals with the accusation that Jung had anti-Semitic tendencies, perhaps because he had some shadow issues to work on. She quashes this notion strenuously and puts it all down to Jung's "optimism" and tendency to say too much (not to mention his opponents' projections...always a good place to go when defending one's allies). God forbid that Jung should cast a shadow!

It saddens me that von Franz so seldom struck out on her own without checking in with Jung first or crediting him with the tremendous innovations she brought to his thinking. But nowhere is her unwillingness to question Jung more evident here, where scarcely a paragraph escapes the praise piled high on the Great Man's head.

That he was a great man, a truly daimonic genius who gave us the golden key to transpersonal symbolism, does not change the fact that he was a human being who could be narcissistic, irritable, arrogant, impatient, misogynistic, intolerant, racist, bad-tempered, and downright cruel to the women he supposedly loved.

When I write I often refer to teachers who've impacted my insights about human nature; ordinarily, it would be inconsiderate for me to bring in their human flaws and blind spots. But were I to undertake a biography of any of them once they had shuffled off the mortal coil, it would be incumbent upon me not to whitewash them. You will find many interesting observations about Jung's life in this book; but the picture it offers of him is thoroughly one-sided.

This is Jung from the inside, by one of his most talented and most authentic followers. It is not just the dry facts but deep personal experience. All life is story and this is Marie-Louise von Franz's story of Jung as she knew him. An invaluable work.