Just finished Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel, Demian. It had been recommended to me quite some time ago by my friend Bret. And I can totally see why. Great book, and a nice short read at 109 pages. Before this, I’d only ever read Siddhartha, which I’d always liked, and that book of fairy tales that he did. An ex-girlfriend loaned that to me, and I never gave it back to her. Actually, I didn’t like that book very much, and never really finished it.

But anyway, I liked Demian quite a lot and was surprised to find so much Jungian psychological stuff in it. The book is chock full of it, actually. I guess it turns out that Hesse was undergoing psychoanalysis for a period with one of Jung’s students, JB Lang. It’s nice that he doesn’t club you over the head with the terminology and theory though, which Jung is sometimes guilty of. I might even go so far as to recommend to people interested in Jungian psychology that they start with this novel, so they can get kind of a “firsthand” account of how the whole process is undertaken. Anyway, I’m going to post some quotes from this book, but will do that in separate posts.

Oh, one thing. The version of the book that I picked up had footnotes. Not many, but they were not written by the author, but by some nincompoop. It was really annoying. So watch out for that. They were totally pointless ones too.