Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization by Hans Peter

Duerr; Felicitas Goodman

Review by: Gail Hinich
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 356-357
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Journal of Religion
Professor Clift has extensive knowledge of Jung's works and experience of
Jungian therapy, and he knows the history of both in context. Here he has
given us an erudite, in effect, pastoral appreciation ofJung, but by the time I
completed the book I was fairly well convinced that its usefulness would be
limited to the very people with whom Clift was working when he wrote the
book-religious and intellectual parish members and college students who
want to be introduced to Jung and to explore further contemporary Catholic,
Protestant, orJewish theology. I believe that Clift would probably agree with
me because I saw no evidence that he wanted to offer alternate ordering and
clarifications to the classic explanations of Yolande Jacobi, Edward
Whitmont, and June Singer, that he wanted to submit Jung's whole corpus to
reevaluation in the light of Jung's personal experience and place in the social
history of psychology with its varied religious connections after the manner of
Peter Homans's magistral Jung in Context, or that he wanted to round out his
own interpretations of Jung with anything beyond a few quotes from Jaffe,
Whitmont, and White. This is not to say that Clift's efforts are trivial. He has
a graceful way of writing and appears to be well able to handle the subtleties
of Jung's vast, meandering corpus and turgid prose. Of course, anyone who
takes on the complete works of Jung is going to have his or her own arrange-
ment of materials, choice of emphases, and resolution of apparent contradic-
tions-the complete Jung can appear as imposing as the prelims data for a
history doctorate. So, even when the individual chapters have titles that are
commonplaces for Jungians, one can hear the voice of the concerned pastor
and teacher of undergraduate theology.
I shall venture, however, a criticism. The book is not in the main, it seems
to me, about the way or ways to reconcile Jung and Christianity. This
problem is tackled only in the last section-only the last chapter or two of the
last section. The rest of the book is a straightforward, somewhat personalized
presentation of basic Jung with emphasis on those elements of the theory that
are relevant to an interpretation of the religious experience. And the author in
the end effects a rapprochement between Jung and those teachings in Chris-
tianity that Jung himself felt to be congenial. At the beginning of the book
Clift says that Jung's basic challenge was for "the Church to take up its basic
task, the cura animarum, the care of souls" (p. ix). And in his last chapter he
says, "The answer toJung's challenge, for the Christian community, may well
be to give fresh consideration to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit" (p. 150). This
means that the author, not presuming to write a summa theologica,must suggest
a few spiritual paths for Christian individuals and groups and humbly depart.
This is appropriate, but the title and the very publication of yet another book
on Jung and religion entitled us to expect something more.
JOSEPH F. BYRNES, Oklahoma State University.

DUERR, HANS PETER. Dreamtime. Concerningthe Boundarybetween Wildernessand

Civilization. Translated by FELICITAS
GOODMAN.New York: Basil Blackwell,
1985. 448 pp. $24.95.

In a treatment of several themes currently popular in the studies of the history

of religions, comparative mythology, and anthropology, Hans Peter Duerr

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 Book Reviews
explores how Western civilization has been shaped by a series of reactions to
challenges posed to prevailing norms of sanity and reality by a shifting array of
"otherworldly" cults, encompassing witchcraft, ancient goddess worship, the
orgiastic transformation of medieval celebrants into animalistic demons such
as werewolves, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs to produce sensations of
flight (by both medieval European witches and Amerindian sorcerers).
Making no attempt to hide his private preoccupation with psychedelic drugs,
Duerr locates the rise of rationalism and the birth of the scientific method in a
critical history of the gradual reduction of the scope of the cosmos in Western
society.
Duerr's argument follows a path between the two dangers that have beset
our efforts to assess the magical and irrational in other cultures and periods.
On the one hand, he eschews the scientific positivists who have circumscribed
the geography of the possible and confined the world of spirits to islands of
subjectivity. Civilization, which once encompassed an imaginative conceptu-
alization of the world "out there," that is, beyond the boundaries of ordered
society, has, in its expansion, reduced these conceptions to "hallucinations"
and "projections." On the other hand, Duerr takes issue with the extreme cul-
tural relativists who claim that there can be no cross-cultural inquiries into the
nature of the true and the real. Duerr contends that, even though a "conver-
sion equation" between two cultures may not exist, this "does not signify that
the question concerning such equations is meaningless,just because until the
present nobody has asked the question" (p. 95). Duerr pushes toward a
"middle path" interpretation of phenomena such as flying witches, were-
wolves, and Yaqui sorcery. In his view, it is important to recognize that it has
seldom been possible in any society to ascertain the truth status of the magical.
This, Duerr says, is irrelevant to the real function of the otherworldly in a
cultural scheme. Rather, it is the boundary that a culture erects between its
civilized components and the wilderness without, which is important for its
integrity and vitality.
Duerr's obvious personal interest in redressing the tendency of our society
to collapse the "otherworld" into an autistic tyranny of the self imbues his work
with a maverick whimsy and passion. It is, however, surprising that, despite
his immense bibliography, he has overlooked the critical context in which the
intellectual history of the demonized outsider continues to be examined, for
example, in The Wild Man Within, edited by Edward Dudley and Maximilian
Novack (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) and John Block
Friedman's The MonstrousRaces in MedievalArt and Thought(Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Still, the charm and value of the book lie in Duerr's successful use of
recondite materials to stimulate speculation about the status of otherness in
our own society, and he does this without lapsing into the triteness that has
characterized some recent feminist work on the goddess and witchcraft. In all,
the range of his scholarship and intellectual facility provide a good basis for his
critique of the contraction of Western society - in which "the real" became for-
ever equated with "the known," "the tamed," and "the human."
GAIL HINICH, Chicago, Illinois.

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