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This is the second volume of the series of selected essays by Neumann, the first having been Art and the Creative Unconscious.
Five essays, not previously translated into English, are included that discuss the relationship between the personal and transpersonal in the works of a writer, Kafka, a painter, Chagall, and a poet, Trakl. There is a short essay on Freud and an appreciation of Jung on his Soth birthday.
The essay on The Trial by Kafka is in two parts. The first part, ‘The court house’, was written in 1933 before that author was well known. The second part, ‘The cathedral chapter’, was not written until 1958. The two parts hang together uneasily and the writing is close and overlong. However, it repays the determination needed to read it, as it is a fascinating study of denial, of the gradual breaking down of ego defences, and of the growing awareness of guilt and development of a persecution mania. Neumann takes a philosophical standpoint, not an analytical one, and Jungian concepts are not spelled out, but the whole essay is full of the relationship of the ego with a shadow that adheres to a negative anima. Neumann treats all the figures in the story as parts of the psyche of the central character K, and all the events as intra-psychic ones.