on Ages of Anxiety
Dangerous Archetypes

Few overviews of W.H. Auden’s career take his interest in Carl Jung seriously. Of the biographers, Charles Osborne (1980) makes no mention of Jung. Richard Davenport-Hines (1995) has just two passing references. Humphrey Carpenter (1981) speaks dismissively of ‘a period of his adult life when he was impressed by the ideas of Jung’. Even Edward Mendelson says ‘Jungian terminology briefly invaded his vocabulary’, as if Auden was entirely passive in the encounter, but survived with superficial wounds at the level of mere lexis (Early Auden, 1981). Nicholas Jenkins (2024) notes ‘Auden’s verbal addiction to Jung’, again seeming relieved that the craving remained skin deep. And I don’t remember Peter Ackroyd (2026) mentioning Jung at all, but my advance copy of his biography has no index with which to check this.

Strangely, at the close of his introduction to the book under review, the Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Craig E. Stephenson says that when Auden was writing The Age of Anxiety, ‘he was wrestling with questions about anxiety and meaning in connection with how war affects consciousness. Jung’s Psychological Types provided him with a vocabulary to formulate that enquiry’. As his own book goes on to show, there’s more to the matter than mere vocabulary; but how much more? The written record certainly shows ample evidence of a need for closer attention to the Jungian Auden, in both life and work, than has generally been paid.

In an efficient, biographical chapter on Auden ‘the war poet’, Stephenson pays due tribute to the poet’s father’s ...