“Toub succeeds in both enriching and challenging the reader’s inner life. He encourages us to look beyond our normal, day-to-day skins and examine what attracts and infuriates us, and why, and how we relate to our families and loved ones, and what our dreams are really trying to say. While finding no easy solutions to our messy and flawed lives, he certainly makes the project exciting.” Read More…

“There’s nothing more endearing than a family memoir in which the author is actually fond of his family. It’s rare; it’s close to miraculous…
I hated to see this book end. I loved every person in it… Growing Up Jung is a gem.” Read more…

“Toub has had an undeniably unique upbringing, being the child of two Jungian analysts, and uses the psychoanalytical perspectives passed down from his parents to find greater meaning in his experiences, from early childhood to high school drug-taking, homosexual experimentation, his parents’ divorce, crazy girlfriends right through to his own marriage — and all the dreams in between.” Read more…

“Toub writes with wit, humor, and a penetrating honesty as he examines his family life, his relationships with various women and his marriage, along with sexual fantasies, masturbation, the I Ching, and meditation.”

“Whenever Micah Toub tells acquaintances that his parents are both psychologists, they say something along the lines of “But you’re so well-adjusted.” That stock response is familiar to anyone who has a shrink for a parent—myself included. As Toub writes in his snappy new memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks, people without therapist parents assume that those of us raised by mental health professionals are total loons. After they ascertain that we are in fact not “insane,” the question that follows is almost always: But did she shrink you?” Read more…

“What could Carl Jung and an American boy raised in Denver, CO possibly have in common? A lot, actually. Especially if that boy is Micah Toub, the son of two Jungian-trained therapists and author of the new memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks. Raised in a version of suburban America in which a trip to Skipper’s seafood chain restaurant could easily veer off into the land of ‘magical beings and visits from E.T.,’ Toub was encouraged by his parents to consult his ally, confront his shadow, linger in ‘double-meta land,’ and, after failing to get a hard-on during his first sexual encounter (yep, he went there), ‘become the erection.’” Read more…

“We all carry lessons, warm memories, and emotional baggage from our childhood but Toronto author Micah Toub is almost unique in having borne such a heavily footnoted and esoteric psychological cargo into adulthood.” Read More…

“Now that Globe and Mail relationship columnist Micah Toub’s memoir Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age As the Son of Two Shrinks has been released into the world with a way-too-packed book party at the Beaver last night, it’s officially cool for me to go “OMG buy it and read it” because I did, in two sittings in the summer (Micah’s a close pal, so I got an advance copy and was floored by how much the book sounds like him), and because it’s soooo good.” Read more…

“All happy families are alike, while all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way — or so novelist Leo Tolstoy informed us. Add to that axiom: Families where both parents are Jungian psychologists can be happy or unhappy, but they are definitely different.” Read more…

In his answers to the Proust Questionnaire, Micah tells Open Book about his defining characteristic, his idea of misery, his secret favourite colour and more.

“There’s nothing out of place about a Jew in therapy and, for that matter, nothing unusual about a strong dose of psychoanalytical or psychological jargon in a contemporary Jewish book.” Read more…