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This book, which was published posthumously in German, now appears for the first time in English. The author died in 1961 without having completed the work, but it remains an important and unique contribution to the spectrum of analytical psychology and of the author's own thought.
As we are told in an explanatory editorial comment—‘The author's last manuscript of the present work has been published almost unchanged despite the repetitions that are only natural in a rough draft. This, however, has served to bring out the intensity of the author's thinking’ (p. 205). The intensity extends also to his feeling and intuition, so that his formulations have an experimental quality. This impression is increased by the notes to each chapter, which as well as giving references add a commentary in the free manner of a lecture. The substance of the book is a psychological constellation which brings together much that is familiar and much that is new in analytical psychology and sets it not only in a context of mythology, anthropology and ethology, but also in intimate critical relation to psychoanalysis. The author makes it clear that he stands on ground prepared by Jung, and he distinguishes his position both in general terms and in detail from the reductive system of Freud and from the concretizing emphasis of Klein. ‘Analytical psychology’ he says (p. 8), ‘must devise a new terminology, because borrowing terms, created by Freud and his school tends to blur the profound differences between our thinking and theirs’. Nevertheless, he focuses his attention on the early years of childhood, and the importance of early development and early relationships for the whole life-span. The pre-ego phase, for instance, is seen to be governed by a manifold movement of the Self between mother and child, containing both in a ‘dual union’, a state of objectless unity. Failure in this phase produces primary guilt but success generates primary morality. At the same time the basis is laid not onl