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This volume, the third in a series sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation, contains twelve selections from Eranos Yearbooks XVII (1949) and XX (1951). (The Eranos symposia, held in Ascona, Switzerland, were started in 1933.) A wide range of specialties is represented, among them archeology, history and comparative study of religion, zoology, and electrical engineering. Only a few of the papers seem of more than passing interest for the psychoanalyst.
Erich Neumann's contribution, Art and Time, follows essentially the Jungian persuasion: 'The roots of every man's personality extend beyond the historical area of his factual existence into the world of the numinosum. And if we follow the course of these roots, we pass through every stratum of history and prehistory. We encounter within ourselves the savage with his masks and rites; within ourselves we find the roots of our own culture, but we also find the meditation of Asia and the magical world of the Stone Age medicine man. The challenge of this transpersonal world of powers must be met by modern man, despite his characteristic sense of inadequacy.' This is a fair sample not only of this author's thinking, but also of the pretentious and cryptic style pervading most of the papers.
Neumann maintains that in the early stages of development of human consciousness art is 'a collective phenomenon, which cannot be isolated from the context of collective existence'. Although from the very beginning the group receives its main impulse from outstanding individuals, 'even they themselves, in accordance with the dialectic of their relation to the group, never give themselves as individuals credit for what they have done but impute it to their inspiring predecessors, to the spirits of their ancestors, to the totem, or to whatever aspect of the collective spirit has inspired them individually'. The author stresses 'disintegration of the cultural canon' as one of the characteristics of modern art. 'The disappearance of th