Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934 by C. G. Jung

Description

For C. G. Jung, the beautiful and gifted 28-year-old Christiana Morgan was an inspirational and confirming force whose path in self-analysis paralleled his own quest for self-knowledge. By teaching Morgan the trance-like technique of active imagination, Jung launched her on a pilgrimage of archetypal encounters in a quest for psychological integration--encounters she recorded in the words and brilliant paintings that formed the basis of the seminar Jung would give to his circle in Zurich. Here the careful transcriptions of the seminar notes are combined with color reproductions of the visions paintings, offering an unprecedented view of Jung as a teacher and as a man. He speaks candidly and brilliantly in a dialogue with members of the seminar about the Morgan visions, even as he struggles with the feminine principle in his subject and in his own psyche. The theories of his years of intellectual research--the anima and animus, the process of individuation, the mythopoetic archetypes of the collective unconscious--all spring to life in the fiery imagery of the vision quest. Morgan paints an imaginal landscape where the feminine self crosses into the unconsciousness of night and death. In her visioning she links earth and sky, body and spirit, the infernal and the sublime. Recounting her journey, Jung employs his full range of scholarship and professional experience as he unravels the skein of archetypal parallels from western myth and eastern yoga.

The editor of this volume, Claire Douglas, is the author of Translate this Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan.

"The Visions seminars constitute a brilliant and demanding masterpiece that was too long circulated in small circles and kept secret from the general public. The publisher and editor are to be congratulated for bringing this noteworthy historical work into the public domain."-Polly Young-Eisendrath, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jung "An extraordinary archival treasure of Jung's work in progress, his style and evolving encounters with the unconscious-his own and his analysands'. Claire Douglas and Princeton University Press are to be applauded for bringing together this inimitable work by the grand master of analytical, archetypal and depth psychology, Carl Gustave Jung."-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., diplomate senior Jungian analyst, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, The Gift of Story, and The Faithful Gardener