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This supplementary volume to the Collected Works consists of five lectures which Jung delivered to his fraternity, the Zofingia, between 1896 and 1898, after he had become a medical student at the University of Basle in 1895. It is well to recall that Jung's first love had been philosophy and natural science. If he nevertheless took up medicine, it was in order to earn sufficient money. Certainly there is little evidence of his interest in medicine in these lectures. But nobody who listened to the outpourings of this twenty-one to twenty-three-year-old student, when they were first delivered with verve and rhetoric, could have been in doubt that a super-star had arisen: what originality of vision, what breadth of knowledge in one so young! It must be admitted that the fire in the belly was often accompanied by ‘knocking’ the establishment. He even used quotations from Goethe to poke fun at his adversaries, which sometimes seems a little unnecessary (p. 72), or when he speaks disparagingly of a certain Ritschl, a theologian, who rejected the unio mystica. Jung accuses modern theologians of using terms which are abstruse and misleading so that ‘one can only gape in amazement and patiently endure the incredible spectacle’ (p. 99). The second of five photographic illustrations which make this book historically so interesting shows Jung in the regalia of the Zofingia Club. Here he strikes a pose which can leave little doubt about the young man's pugnacity.
The present volume is introduced by von Franz with such admirable conciseness and clarity that it would be almost unnecessary to read the lectures were it not for their great historical interest in that young man who showed already, at that early age, that the person and his work would become one.
The first lecture, ‘The border zones of exact science’, attacks the materialistic physical theories of his time. He seems to sponsor vitalism and considers that immaterial phenomena might manifest materially, a thesis which was