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In the autumn of 1937, while he was in the United States giving the fifteenth series of the Terry Lectures (on ‘Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy’) at Yale University, Jung met Paul and Mary Mellon, a wealthy and vivacious young couple whose enthusiasm and generosity over the next three decades this book chronicles. The Mellons had been in analysis with Ann Moyer van Waveren for three years, and it was through her that they had attended the ‘Dream Seminars’ in New York and met Jung at a supper party afterwards.
Mary Mellon, a bright and vivid young woman who had already by that time passed through an unsuccessful earlier marriage, was for many years bedevilled by devastating attacks of asthma, and quickly caught fire at Jung's personality. During 1938 and 1939 she and Paul Mellon went to Zürich, attended some of Jung's seminars at the Psychological Club and the Eidgenössisches Technische Hochschule, and laid the foundations of a long and intimate involvement with analytical psychology and some of its pioneers: Emma Jung, Toni Wolff, Mary Foote, Cary Baynes, Hans Baumann, Eugene Henley, Marie-Louise von Franz, et al. This initial élan was concretised and harnessed, in the beginning, by the Mellons' support for Olga Froebe-Kaptyn's Eranos centre, and lectures at Ascona, and, in the late Thirties, they gave her a substantial amount of money to assemble and mount an exhibition of photographs on the theme of the great mother, pictures which eventually became the basis of Erich Neumann's book of that title.
Before long, Mary Mellon had invented a plan whose benefits to the cultural heritage of the world were, and remain, almost incalculable; in many cases they formed the solid and secure basis for the physical survival of some of the great scholars caught up in the maelstrom that society had become by 1939. With Jung's works, written and unwritten, as what she called ‘the backbone of the Bollingen Series’, she pledged herself to publish ‘books that other publi