A Jasmine Journey contains the actual map and specific researched details of Jung’s journey through India and Ceylon at a turning point in world history. Rand elaborates the often understated but enormous influence of Jung’s lifelong relationship with India on the overall body of his work. Additionally, highlighting Jung’s vision during illness, when “something new†emerged, Rand shows us Jung’s enterprise in a surprisingly new context, that is, in the polluted cluster/industrial area of deepest ecological crisis off India’s northeast coast where “root people,†indigenous people, confront state, national, and global corporate forces.
This book’s form constitutes a new genre of psychological commentary, interweaving as it does the author’s personal and family history in India with the tracing of C.G. Jung’s trip to India. Supported by archival and on-site research. Written with rare passion with regard to the relationships among psyche, place, and time. Accompanied by photographs that give flesh to the double narrative.
– Don Fredricksen, (PhD), Professor of film and theatre studies, Cornell University
This empathic investigation of intuitive connections that may have informed the change in Jung and his work after his fateful 1938 trip to India is as close as we are likely to come to understanding how the great psychologist managed to bring the body of the sacred feminine into his work as a consequence of this journey. Mother India, as Evangeline Rand enables us to see, was both the Kali that ritually strangled masculine onesidedness and the long-term yoni to the lingam of Jung’s genius. As Rand shows by weaving Jung’s story with her own, depth psychology, for all of its ability to bring mind in relation to soul, is never fully transformative until it enters the body as well. One of the greatest stories of a transformation in Jung, who was to have received an honorary doctorate in Calcutta and couldn’t go because of dysentery, is how being laid low by India brought up his capacity to care for the world in ways he had only imagined before. This is the story of Jung’s anima development after age 60, as only as developed a woman psychologist as Evangeline Rand could tell it.
–John Beebe, Jungian Analyst
A Jasmine Journey is a daring and experimental voyage into feminine representation as well as a deep personal appreciation of Jung and psychology. Rand's work combines personal, historical and mythical research into a powerful psychic quest for our times.
–Susan Rowland, (PhD), former Professor of English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich and now teaches for Pacifica Graduate Institute
There is a deeply intoxicating quality to this narrative. Each image, woven by the author from both personal history and imaginative fantasy, carries a rich, heady, jasmine-infused scent that seems to permeate the pages. The title is well chosen — one does not perhaps so much read the images as sense them like olfactory experiences. In this sense, the experience of reading becomes quite visceral; each of us, as corporeal beings, becomes intimately connected to the nuances of this highly particular personal story as it unfolds. In effect, one appears to enter into a truly symbolic journey through an India punctuated with sensations embedded in the people, land, and landscape. The images thread their way through each lived experience, weaving past and present in a dance of delight with the sights and sounds recorded in the memoirs and journals of the author and her lifelong study of Jung’s work.
–David Parker, PhD, Reader in Fine Arts and Psychological Studies in the School of Arts, University of Northampton
