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Some of us may wonder how a man of Jung's many-sided activities could find time to write so much, and with such apparent objectivity, but as he said towards the end of his life, ‘What else are all these books about, if they are not to understand myself?’ Thus we are reminded that whatever views may be taken about the workings of the human psyche, they are likely to be highly personal, so that we may not be deceived into thinking that if one school of thought is right, another must be wrong. As Jung himself has not hesitated to say, truth has many facets. The title of this volume itself testifies to this, since it deals with a changing world, in which values themselves may change and are changing, with Jung as a kind of self, observing and being observed.
Most of the papers are concerned with the problem of the shadow in its political aspect as reflecting that of the inner man. The keynote to the whole volume is ‘The role of the unconscious’, published in after the first world war, in which Jung outlines the contents of the unconscious with particular reference to ‘mythological fantasies’ and to the ‘blond beast’ which prowls about, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences, in nations as well as in individuals. In , when the Hitler menace was growing, the theme was taken up again in his paper ‘Wotan’; then again after World War II in ‘After the catastrophe’, and in ‘The fight with the shadow’ and the ‘Epilogue to Essays on contemporary events’, both written in , in which he justifies and amplifies the views he had formerly expressed regarding mass psychology as opposed to individual self-realization. It is in ‘After the catastrophe’ that he develops his main theme of psychic epidemics and of the systematic dissociation of the shadow leading to mass hysteria. Under the domination of power-seeking dictators who assume the responsibility which the masses have ceded to them, the people become sheep led to the slaughter by promises of infantile omnip