Ruth Williams Audiobooks

C. G. Jung from first principles, an introduction written for The Basics line

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

43 listener ratings

Who is Ruth Williams?

Introductory guides are harder to write than they look. The task is to make a difficult body of thought usable without flattening it, and a listener who arrives knowing nothing has to leave with something sturdier than a handful of catchphrases. Ruth Williams takes on Jung under exactly those terms, in a volume our catalogue lists simply as C. G. Jung, within The Basics, a line of primers built for precisely this job.

The shelf we file it on is health and wellbeing, which says something about how Jungian ideas travel now. Archetypes, the shadow, individuation and the collective unconscious left the consulting room long ago and turned up in therapy, in criticism, and in the ordinary vocabulary people use about themselves. A primer that treats them seriously rather than decoratively earns its keep.

Ruth Williams in audiobooks

Lisa Coleman narrates, and clarity is the entire job in work of this kind: ideas arriving in order, with enough space around each technical term for it to settle before the next one appears. Six and a half hours is about right for a primer, long enough to be thorough and short enough to be revisited when a particular concept refuses to stick.

Early scores are excellent at 4.7, though from a modest pool, so read that as a good sign rather than a settled verdict. Anyone approaching Jung for the first time, or returning after years of second-hand summaries, can begin here without any prior reading at all. What is currently available is listed below.