Russell Brand posted a rave review of Edward F. Edinger’s Encounter With the Self on his YouTube Channel, which currently has 2.6 million subscribers, as part of his new book club “The Books That Made Me.”
On January 3rd, 2021, Brand dropped a YouTube video enthusiastically describing his thoughts on Encounter With the Self as the collision of ideas among “three genii” – William Blake, Carl Jung as interpreted by Edward F. Edinger, and “whoever wrote The Book of Job.”
What is the appeal of this Inner City Book for Russell Brand?
He wants to answer large-scale questions like “how do we cope with our shadow?” and “how do we turn the baser, unacceptable energies of the personality toward benevolence, kindness and service to the world?”
Brand delivers one of the pithiest reviews Edinger has ever gotten:
“This book Encounter With the Self: short, SHORT little book of few pages with some profound and powerful imagery, the engravings of Blake, the language of the Book of Job, is a code to get deep deep into your unconsciousness mind, and in there you will find great power, there you will find the resources you require to cope with your life and its individual challenges.”
Edinger’s writing often will have that mind-expanding effect on people.
A second book we would recommend to Brand, also related to Jung’s Answer to Job and the deep questions of mankind’s developing relationship to God, consciousness and shadow, is The Transformation of the God Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job.
Edward F. Edinger was held in great esteem by Inner City Books founder and Jungian analyst Daryl Sharp, who published many of his lectures and books. The full 18-book catalogue offered by Inner City Books applies Jung’s thought in topics as varied as alchemy, Christianity, consciousness, Shakespeare, the Bible, Goethe’s Faust, and Melville’s albo-cetacean epic Moby Dick.
Edinger was an erudite scholar and medical psychiatrist who challenged the limits of what we know about human consciousness and theology. He believed Jung was an extremely important thinker in a new paradigm of human consciousness.
To learn more about Edinger’s life and work, you could read An American Jungian, an appreciation of Edinger edited by his partner Dianne D. Cordic and George R. Elder, or the memorial written for him by his admirer and Inner City Books founder Daryl Sharp.
Highly recommended: The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for the Modern Man. Edinger’s work proposes “a new world-view based on the creative collaboration between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the religious search for meaning.”
All of these titles ship worldwide free of charge to individuals who order from the Inner City Books website.
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