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In 1925 Christiana Morgan, an American girl of 28, fell in love with a man other than her husband and went to Jung for help. (If that is an over-simplification it is Jung's own and perhaps characteristic.) He quickly told her that he did not know the answer to her problem but he was pretty sure the unconscious would, and they should watch its activity in her dreams. After a month he showed her his own paintings and taught her active imagination. She went home to America in something over a year and kept on sending him paintings and stories of her visions. In October 1930 Jung began a series of seminars in English about these visions, and went on until March 1934, when the careful secrecy hiding the identity of their originator somehow leaked and the seminars were abruptly stopped. In any case Jung's enthusiasm for the visions had begun to fail when, back in Massachusetts, their quality and trend fell short of what he needed to illustrate the laws of the unconscious. Instead he moved on to giving seminars on Zarathustra.
The Visions Seminars were taken down verbatim and reproduced with some black-and-white photographs of the patient's pictures, with a very strict rule that they were for the members of the seminar only and not to be passed to anyone outside the chosen little circle without written permission from Jung himself. (It would be interesting to know how far the pattern of the small closed circle is repeated in the social structure of the various societies of analytical psychology now.) Whatever this arrangement did to those excluded, it must have been rather pleasant and exciting for those inside, and it certainly loosened Jung's tongue. In uncannily excellent colloquial English he spoke with a relaxed, intelligible ease that general readers were not to know until the publication of his autobiography, which was also primarily a spoken work. In his formal publications he often seems to be writing for an imaginary readership of clever and learned enemies, in an