Stern Sigmund’s Rebel Son : JUNG A Biography<i> by Gerhard Wehr; translated by David M. Weeks (Shambhala: $25; 505 pp.) </i>

Toward the end of the 19th Century, Sigmund Freud left the safe haven of the neurophysiology lab and conventional psychiatric classification to explore the depths of his own and his patients’ unconscious. He listened carefully to communications that evaded conscious censorship--his own and others’ dreams, jokes and slips of the tongue -- and the half-formed memories that emerged from the minds and mouths of his patients as they lay, free associating, on his couch.

Freud traced neurotic and normal thoughts, feelings and behavior to the early childhood longings and frustrations that first gave rise to them. And, to the horror of the Viennese medical establishment and the fascination of the psychiatric seekers who read his early papers, he showed how libido, sexual energy, animated these longings and was diverted and dammed by these frustrations.

When potential disciples appeared at Freud’s lectures or entered his consulting room, he swiftly organized them. They could, he assured them, free themselves and others from their thrall to unconscious drives and be part of a revolutionary vanguard, conquerors and colonizers of the vast psychic territories he was exploring.

Most of Freud’s students were content to work within the borders that the master established. They applied his dynamic concepts--repression, sublimation, projection and transference among them--to their understanding of individual patients’ problems and sought to delineate ever more precisely the map of the mind he sketched--the instinctual id in conflict with a censorious superego and both mediated by the synthesizing ego.

However, some of Freud’s most brilliant and devoted disciples, among them Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, chafed against the limits the master established. They had been attracted to a brave explorer whose search mirrored and inspired their own, but in time, they found themselves dealing with a stern autocrat who seemed more concerned with preserving his ideas--particularly his concept of libido--and propagating his movement, than with encouraging his disciples in their own researches. To pursue the path of self-knowledge, scientific inquiry and therapeutic efficacy that had brought them to Freud, they had to part company with the man who had become their intellectual and spiritual father.

Carl Gustav Jung was the man whom Freud had selected as his successor, the brilliant and versatile gentile “crown prince” who would rescue psychoanalysis from its status as a “Jewish science” and ensure its acceptance in the world at large. And in spite of his apostasy it is Jung whose work now commands the respectful, even idolatrous, attention that Freud’s once did.

Even before he read Freud, Jung was a brilliant and prescient therapeutic innovator. As a young psychiatrist working at Eugen Bleuler’s Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, he “took neurotic patients seriously” and eagerly explored the dreams that he believed to be “the most important source of information concerning the unconscious.” While virtually all of his contemporaries, including Freud, were dismissing psychotic patients as radically different from the rest of us and unavailable to verbal treatment, Jung, who had worked closely with them, was declaring that “at bottom we discover nothing new in the mentally ill. Rather we encounter the substratum of our own nature.”

After his traumatic break with Freud in 1913, Jung entered a prolonged and painful period of self-analysis and self-discovery, which he described in eloquent detail in his posthumously published autobiography, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections.” During this time, Jung began to construct his own distinctive anatomy of the unconscious and to elucidate the psycho-spiritual themes which would preoccupy him for the remainder of his long life.

Human beings, he believed, are not simply the sum of their drives and conflicts. They are embarked on a journey toward wholeness or integration, a process that he described as “individuation.” The crisis of meaning and faith that he experienced after his break with Freud was, Jung came to understand, both an example of the “midlife crisis” that will almost inevitably afflict modern men and women who are on the path to individuation and an individual manifestation of humanity’s collective crisis.

The first half of life, Jung concluded, is a time of activity and achievement in the outer world, of constructing careers, begetting children, making money and a home. In the second half, the arc of achievement gradually turns into a circle, and the inward journey begins. This, Jung discovered, was the time to recover and integrate what had previously been ignored or suppressed--the “shadow,” the “hidden repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality” and the “anima,” the feminine aspect of his male unconscious. This hopeful transformative process of recovery and integration had been absent from Freud’s retrospective analysis. Over the years, its exploration and elaboration would become the basis of Jung’s own “analytic psychology.”

Jung believed that his own process of transformation was representative as well as personal. Western civilization was itself in a collective crisis of meaning and faith. Its several-hundred-year-long emphasis on activity and technology, on dominating and exploiting the Earth, had obscured the sense of the divine, the numinous, which had once infused life with meaning and wonder. Modern men and women were exiled from their place in nature and from their own natures. Long before ecologists forced us to face the facts, Jung realized that a balance had to be restored between people and the Earth as well as within each person, a balance to which his psychology could contribute.

The crucial step in restoring this wholeness and balance was, he believed, a reawakening of the spiritual through a direct experience of the “overpowering psychic fact of God.” This was “the real therapy” Jung would boldly declare--anticipating all the spokespeople of both the New Age and the New Right--one which would release individuals from the “curse of pathology” and modern society from its rootless anomie.

Most of Jung’s subsequent researches were guided by his abiding interest in discovering systems of integration and symbols of wholeness that prefigured and might inform his own. He found them in his library researches on Zen and Taoism, on Christian Gnosticism and alchemy, and in his timorous encounters with Africa, India and the North American Plains Indians--civilizations that fascinated him but threatened to overwhelm his ordered world view with their emphasis on non-rationality.

In his new biography, “Jung,” Gerhard Wehr traces the path that took Jung from Freudian acolyte to modern prophet. He notes Jung’s childhood connection to the natural world in which this rural pastor’s son grew up and his continuing reliance on nature as a source of inspiration and renewal. He details Jung’s intensely ambivalent relationship with Freud, his early importance to the psychoanalytic movement and the reasons for his defection. He describes a few of the sources from which Jung drew his vision of wholeness and mentions his life-long reliance on his wife Emma and Toni Wolff, his longtime mistress and collaborator. Unlike Jung himself--who declared “outer experiences” not to be “essential”--Wehr also retells many of the events of Jung’s 85 years.

Some of Wehr’s book is interesting even to one who is familiar with “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” and some of the other available biographies of Jung. For example, his account of Jung’s 1934 opportunistic professional alliance with a Nazi-controlled German psychiatric society, which excluded Jewish physicians, and of Jung’s dangerous distinction between the “unconscious of the Jewish race as a whole” and that of the “German people” seems more fair than his critics’ bilious diatribes and his supporters’ whitewashes. And all of Wehr’s biography may serve some extremely patient reader as a useful general introduction to Jung. For the most part, however, this book seems sadly unnecessary, a gloss on Jung’s life rather than an independent assessment of it. It is very long on detail, very short on in-depth discussion of Jung’s theories and almost totally bereft of insight and analysis. From beginning to end, it is burdened by excessive quotations and hobbled by ponderous prose.

Wehr, who has edited the works of the 17th-Century German mystic Jakob Bo’hme, one of Jung’s spiritual forebears, obviously sympathizes with his subject, but he is unable to make him come alive. However, almost in spite of the author, a reader glimpses some of the contradictions in Jung’s character:the arrogance and shyness of his youth; the misguided romanticism that led him to rhapsodize about Germanic culture and deprecate Jewish culture; the strange mixture of whining self-pity and great generosity that he exhibited in his old age. But one looks in vain for a clear picture of how Jung worked with his patients and colleagues, how he related to his wife and Toni Wolff. We learn the names of the remarkable people who came into the orbit of “The Famed Swiss Psychologist”--from Martin Buber and James Joyce to Winston Churchill and Herman Hesse--but we are given little sense of the quality of the man to whom they, and hundreds of would-be Jungian analysts and therapists, were drawn.

Jung’s healing journey away from the restrictions and pessimism of his great mentor Freud through the disintegration and re-integration of his mid-life crisis toward wholeness is a remarkable one. His lifelong quest to synthesize East and West, earthy realism and spiritual aspiration, was studded with self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement and even self-deception. But it was also rich in courageous experience and in the kind of psychological awareness and spiritual fulfillment that so many modern men and women are seeking.

Jung’s life and work deserve a treatment that includes but is far larger than the outline of his interests and achievements that Wehr presents. In spite of a dozen efforts, including Wehr’s, it still demands a biographer equal to the task--a relentless psychohistorian and an empathic poet.