You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Suppose that in opening your mail today, you were to find a postcard announcing a series of lectures to be given live somehow by C. G. Jung on the historical development of psychology as an intellectual discipline. This is not far from the actual experience that the Philemon Foundation has given us with the publication of this set of sixteen public lectures that Jung gave in 1933-1934 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (known by its German acronym ETH). Reconstructed to preserve Jung's voice from contemporary shorthand transcriptions and other materials, the lectures have been seamlessly edited by Ernst Falzeder, who provides a brilliant introduction and thorough notes that unlock all of Jung's passing references and correct all his little mistakes in a way that rescues Jung even from himself. And for this first, definitive English edition, the translators have attended to how Jung must have sounded in the original German. These lectures convey an impression of a mature Jung speaking to an audience of his own countrymen about territories of the mind he had by then made his own.
This was brave. Psychology had not been considered essential to the German-born medical psychiatry in which Jung was formally trained, and he was essentially on his own in his studies of psychology. Here we find him nevertheless willing to stake his claim as an expert in the field. The lectures served that purpose; the Swiss Federal Council granted him ‘titulary professorship’ in 1935 and Jung continued under that title at the ETH until 1941. (As the first in a series of eight volumes of the entire ETH lectures, this one begins with a generous foreword by Ulrich Hoerni describing ‘C. G. Jung's Activities at ETH Zurich’. It also includes a definitive chronology of ‘Events in Jung's Career’ between 1933 and 1941, compiled by Falzeder, Martin Liebscher, and Sonu Shamdasani, and set against the ‘World Events’ that marked this period.
It was a time when consciousness was stressed, and in t