But a creative illness cannot be reduced to a psychotic interlude and, as Henry Corbin never tired of pointing out, a theophanic vision is not a schizoid delusion. Hayman's reductive nosedives are sporadic and therefore do not seriously undermine the narrative. As the researches of F.X. Charet and Dan Merkur show, the technique of active imagination evolved out of the seances. However he did not acknowledge this debt. The biographical works of Noll and McLynn portray Jung as a man who institutionalised his charisma and remained fixated at the prerational level.
Any evidence pointing to a different conclusion tends to be disregarded.
By contrast the Hayman biography adopts a more differentiated perspective and shows how Jung was pulled between these opposites. At times he came perilously close to a disastrous regression. Indeed he only extricated himself from his fascination with Nazism on the eve of the Second World War. Wolfgang Pauli lived out this conflict in a different way. After reading Hayman's account of this remarkable partnership it is clear to me that Jung failed to address himself properly to Pauli's dilemma.