Obituary Notice

Fred Blum, a long-standing member of the Society of Analytical Psychology, was German by birth, his father being a lawyer in Stuttgart and his mother a co-founder, with Martin Buber, of the Jüdische Lehrhaus in Heidelberg. Both died in Auschwitz.

He left Germany in 1938 to study economics in Geneva, and then went to America where he practised as a sociologist and served with the Senate Committee on Labour Relations under John F. Kennedy. He came to England during the 1950s, and joined Scott Bader in his scheme to begin an industrial commonwealth.

He then became interested in the theories of C. G. Jung and after training became a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology. Religion, however, was playing an increasing part in Blum's life as he grew older and he began to develop his own psychological viewpoint, believing that there existed something in man deeper than the Freudian id, and the Jungian archetypes, which for him was a universal divine source of life and truth. This was the inner light, or the light of Christ. He also became interested in the work of the Society of Friends, and was drawn to Gandhi, after whose death he visited India interviewing Gandhi's friends and associates.

He had made Judaism and Christianity the twin poles of his life and, like Charles Peguy before him, made a pilgrimage to the cathedral of Chartres. A year after this visit he founded the New Era Centre at Sutton Courtenay, in Oxfordshire, where the Benedictine abbey is located. This was devoted to teaching his idea of a change in human consciousness, whereby the ego is transformed into the true self, this change so he believed being necessary if a change is to be brought about in the structure of society. As he himself put it in 1988, speaking at an international conference in Oxford, ‘We must dedicate ourselves and do our utmost to develop a human community and society in which the true being of man, within each human being, is acknowledged and respected’.

At Easter, 1986, he was b