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In this volume of the collected works we have the forty-five-year-old “Psychology of the Unconscious” partially re-written and re-translated. I have known the original work in its translation for about twelve years, and its influence has since then always been with me, though from year to year I do not now so much as glance at it. I have come to regard it as a most natural expression of life and the life force not to be surpassed in any other psychological work known to me. This may seem somewhat strange in view of the extreme difficulty the material often presents to comprehension, especially to intellectual comprehension. It is enough to break one's head if one tries to grasp it with the intellect alone. It was as Jung says in the introduction to the present volume: “a landslide that cannot be stopped … the explosion of all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathing space, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology, and its narrow outloo.”. It was a landslide which launched him upon the course of his own development into the second half of life', and which led to his own unique contribution to the understanding of the psyche, and opened paths for the development of personality. It contains the emotional force of this eruption, the emotion being congruous with the material presented. What gives shape and expression to this force is above all poetry, of which the book is full, in the form both of quotations and of the author's own expression in the text. This poetic vehicle of feeling is not just a decoration, it is absolutely essential to the finding of one's way amongst these images. The work is also an intellectual tour de force of a very considerable calibre, as witnessed by the quite extraordinary amount of mythological material put into it, and the extensive research this must have required.
The basic theme is extremely simple: the poignant yearning for the mother, the mortal yearning for that from which separation almost means dea