Opicinus de Canistris: some notes from Jung's unpublished Eranos Seminar on the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993

Abstract: Jung held an informal seminar for a limited number of students after the end of the Eranos Conference in August, 1943. All traces of this seminar were lost until the notes taken on it by one of the students, Alwine von Keller, were found in 2006. Jung's talk consisted of a psychological commentary on a series of images in the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, attributed to Opicinus de Canistris (1296‐c.1352), a fourteenth‐century Italian clergyman, mystic, miniaturist, and cartographer. Jung interpreted Opicinus’ images as a series of mandalas in which the Shadow, the dark principle, does not manage to be integrated into a balanced system. Opicinus tried to settle this division into opposites, which constitutes the main problem in modern times, while remaining inside the system of Christian doctrine. However, he did not succeed in his attempt to integrate the principle of the Shadow on the doctrinal level because he was not aware of the very same division in his own unconscious. Our article points out the features in the seminar where Jung seemed to show much more originality in his interpretation than other psychoanalytic studies on Opicinus or other analytical‐psychological readings of medieval Christian art.     

Preface to Opicinus de Canistris: concluding lecture by C.G. Jung,Eranos, Ascona, 1943 and Further studies on Jung's Eranos seminar on Opicinus de Canistris

In 1943, Jung held a seminar at Eranos for a limited number of students dedicated to ‘solar myths’, which were exemplified specifically in the cartographic art of Opicinus de Canistris (c. 1296–1352). This seminar has stayed out of print until a few years ago. Notes taken during the seminar by one of Jung's students, Alwine von Keller (1878–1965), were discovered in the Eranos archives and published. Now, for the first time ever, the notes of another of his students, Rivkah Schärf Kluger, taken during the same seminar, are being published. This second series of notes are more extensive. They complete the first series by adding many features and so allow us to put together a more complete picture of Jung's seminar. James Hillman, who received these notes from William McGuire in 1976, firmly believed that they were important enough to be published. Now, seventy years after this seminar, thanks to the support of the Stiftung der Werke von C. G. Jung, the Eranos Foundation and the Journal of Analytical Psychology, these notes are finally being published.     

My Art by the Numbers

The author explains his affinity for numbers as it relates to his work as an artist spanning his long career. This affinity helped him invent one of the first systems for making four-color digital prints. Having been only recently introduced to the book Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, the author finds that he is in full agreement with her depth psychology theories on number. Recounting a synchronicity that he experienced while writing this paper helped the author to understand Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, as explained by von Franz in Number and Time. He speculates that number archetypes must have evolved in human consciousness over very long periods of time and writes about the number zero as a “recent” example. The author also describes his experience of a spontaneous mathematical vision that led him to create an algorithm, which in turn led him to realize that crystals having fivefold symmetry could exist in nature, which was considered impossible at the time. The author discusses his new inventions of quasi-periodic and random tile patterns, which were inspired by 15th-century Islamic tile patterns, as they related to the aperiodic patterns invented by Roger Penrose in the 20th century. He speculates about the ability of artificially intelligent computer software to be able to generate random quasi-periodic patterns. Lastly, the author recounts a synchronistic experience that occurred during the month of his 72nd birthday, in which his work with numbers is seemingly reciprocated by nature.     

Jung and the Kabbalah

Jung's use of Kabbalistic symbols and ideas as well as his personal Kabbalistic vision are critically examined. It is argued that as great as Jung's acknowledged affinity is to the Kabbalah, his unacknowledged relationship was even greater. Jung has been accused of being a contemporary Gnostic; however, the interpretations Jung placed on Gnosticism and the texts Jung referred to on alchemy were profoundly Kabbalistic, so much so that one would be more justified in calling the Jung of the Mysterium Coniunctionis and other late works a Kabbalist in contemporary guise. Although Jung, at least during the 1930s, appears to have had powerful motives that limited his receptivity to Jewish ideas, his highly ambivalent and at times reproachable attitude toward Judaism should not prevent one from appreciating the affinities between Jungian psychology and Jewish mystical thought.     

After liber novus

This paper reflects on the conference question concerning the clinical and theoretical significance of Jung's Liber Novus, two years after its initial publication, and looks at how Jung himself reflected upon it and how it informed his turn to alchemy, with particular attention to the theme of opposites and their reconciliation in Liber Novus, later taken up in Mysterium Coniunctionis.     

One Thousand Dreams

The dreams in Psychology and Alchemy were important to Jung because they portray a natural process in the unconscious in which the mandala symbolism gradually takes form, with emphasis on a centre. The dreamer is led through a labyrinth of archetypal symbolism which lays in evidence the dynamic structure of the psyche.
Jung was obviously not permitted to reveal the identity of the man behind the dreams. This paper introduces the historical dreamer, Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), together with a sample of his significant dreams as discussed by Jung. The intent is to bear witness to the suffering which hides behind the archetypal imagery, as well as the transformative power of the archetype, lending support to Jung's statement that 'behind every neurosis there is a religious problem'.
Pauli was a genius, who as a Nobel laureate ranked with the top physicists of this century. As a one-sided intellectual atheist alienated from his feelings, in his early thirties he met with an emotional crisis, which led him to Jung for treatment. The dreams that Pauli experienced at that time carried him through a depth experience, a nekyia, that transformed his attitude toward life. They were also a precursor to a dream life that stimulated his investigation of non-causal influences common to quantum physics and (analytical) psychology, i.e. the 'psychophysical problem', including synchronicity.
A legacy of Pauli's life was to show that the non-rational unconscious can give meaningful expression to the functioning of a scientific mind.     

Alchemy as a Psychological Model

In Part I, this article traces the history of how Jung came to his realization that alchemy was a precursor for his concept of individuation. This includes his key dream of 1926, which he only slowly understood; a Short History of Alchemy; and how Jung was finally able to Bring Order out of Chaos. Part II examines the key elements of Jung's great late work, Mysterium Coniunctionis. This includes the Conjunction of Opposites; Personification of Opposites; Nature of the Conjunction; the Alchemical Creation Myth; and an amplification of each of The Three Unions: (1) the unio mentalis, or mental union; (2) the union of the mind with the body; and (3) the union of the mind and body with the unus mundus, or unitary reality.     

The White–Jung Friendship: The Untold Story

For decades Jung searched in vain for a theologian with whom he could deeply and openly converse about his new vision of Christianity. Only very late in his life did he find and form a deep friendship with Victor White, a Dominican theology professor, whose own psychic life was saved by Jung's teachings. Jung saw White as the first theologian he had met who truly understood his psychology. Jung wanted to use White's expertise in Catholic theology in his pioneering efforts to transform Christianity, through his psychology, into a living, breathing, vital faith in the divine. For his part, White wanted to resuscitate Thomistic theology by infusing its dry, cerebral character with the emotional vitality of the original Thomas Aquinas by using his newly discovered Jungian teachings combined with some of the original teachings of Aquinas. In the process of their work together, Jung and White became close, trusting friends. However, White was pushed beyond the limits of his psychological resources by political events within his order, whose superiors destroyed his career as a theologian and sent him into exile. In his scathing review of Answer to Job, White displaced his anger/rage onto Jung instead of the appropriate objects. This attack wounded their friendship deeply, and it was only toward the end of their lives that a partial reconciliation was possible. And yet, Jung's friendship with White was perhaps the closest and most trusting relationship he had with a man during his lifetime. Finally, I suggest that White's mission in this life was to resuscitate Thomism rather than help Jung achieve his purposes, and that White achieved his mission.     

Freud and Jung: an incomplete encounter

The author discusses the bases of the close, personal and professional relationship between Freud and Jung, and conjectures that the eventual schism between them was the result of the different profound psychological needs that each had for the other. Because of his identification with the psychoanalytic enquiry, particularly as it was based in large measure on his own self analysis, Freud looked to Jung as a collaborator who would not deviate from the principles at the basis of psychoanalysis, seeking psychoanalysis' acceptance within the established scientific community. From Jung's point of view, Freud fulfilled the role of a respected father figure who, Jung hoped, would grant him the autonomy and freedom to pursue his own scientific enquiry, based on Freud's ideas, but which he would revise according to his own researches. These led Jung to certain revisions and additions, such as the nature and function of the libido, the broadening of the idea of the complex (as in the Oedipus complex) to include a number of universal, archetypal themes, and the elaboration of the concept of the self. During the years of their relationship, they shared a mutual psychological support which was deeply important to each, based on reciprocal love and respect but also on a fantasy that each would be able to supply to the other a key capacity that the other lacked. Jung was able to offer important scientific verifications of a number of psychoanalytic notions via the Word Association Test, such as the concept of repression, of the complex, including the Oedipus complex, and the proof of the existence of the unconscious. However, neither could supply to the other what each looked for in the other at the psychological level. The final breakdown and rupture in their relationship was caused by their theoretical differences and by the fact that they became bitter competitors in a race to publish treatises on the nature and origins of spirituality and religion. It has left in its wake the implicit traces of discord and misapprehension which have characterized much of subsequent professional relationships between the two traditions.     

Beyond synchronicity: the worldview of Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli

While exploring the phenomena of synchronicity, Carl Gustav Jung became acquainted with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and eventually began a collaboration with him. During that collaboration Jung's study of synchronistic phenomena underwent a considerable change; prior to the collaboration, Jung had stressed mainly the phenomenological and empirical features of synchronistic phenomena, while in association with Pauli, he focused his attention upon their ontological, archetypal character. Pauli, on the other hand, became increasingly sensitive to the philosophical aspects concerning the unconscious. Jung and Pauli's common reflections went far beyond psychology and physics, entering into the realm where the two areas meet in the philosophy of nature. In fact, as a consequence of their collaboration, synchronicity was transformed from an empirical concept into a fundamental explanatory-interpretative principle, which together with causality could possibly lead to a more complete worldview. Exploring the problematic character of the synchronicity concept has a heuristic value because it leads to the reconsideration of the philosophical issues that drove Jung and Pauli to clear up the conceptual background of their thoughts. Within the philosophical worldview arising from Jung and Pauli's discussions about synchronicity, there are many symbolic aspects that go against mainstream science and that represent a sort of criticism to some of the commonly held views of present day science.     

Encounter with the west—From my life and works

This short essay grew out of remarks made by Dr. Rhi, the leading Jungian psychiatrist in Korea, to friends, colleagues, and students at the end of term in 1996 at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he had been a visiting professor. He shows briefly, succinctly, with that mixture of earnestness and diffidence which characterizes him as a person and as an analyst, what led him to psychiatry as a profession and how his Jungian convictions and understanding brought opposites into easy relationship for him. Shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity come together here. East meets West in that wholeness which Rhi, like Jung before him, holds always before him as both goal and achievement.     

Gnosticism and Psychology

In this paper, I have attempted a historical analysis of what Jung might have been thinking when he wrote the 'Seven sermons'. To this end, I tried to ascertain which Gnostic texts Jung may have consulted before writing it. These documents were then compared with the 'Seven sermons', and numerous affinities noted between it and the Gnostic texts. Jung's contemporaneous academic works were then compared with this treatise, and parallels were established between the 'Seven sermons' and Jung's emerging psychology of the unconscious. In the process, an attempt was made to show how Jung made use of Gnostic themes in his emerging psychology. While there is no way of knowing precisely what Jung was thinking when he wrote the 'Seven sermons', it is clear that he was well acquainted not only with the work of Basilides, but also with the work of other Gnostic thinkers. It is not enough to assume that because Jung chose the pseudonym of Basilides, he was necessarily Jung's primary Gnostic influence. At the same time, it is also evident that Jung was developing his own psychology during the writing of the 'Seven sermons'. We recall Jung's observations regarding the 'Seven sermons', which we quoted on page 17: These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images (Jung 21, p. 192). On the basis of what has been published, there are enough affinities between his academic work and this treatise to posit that the 'Seven sermons' played an important role in the emergence of Jung's psychology. Given these numerous parallels, I suspect that Jung's unpublished writings, including the Red Book, would only strengthen the arguments put forth in this paper.     

Learning from the patient: The East,synchronicity and transference in the history of an unknown case of C.G. Jung

This article presents the history of one until now unknown case of C.G. Jung: Maggy Reichstein. Born in Indonesia in 1894 in a very aristocratic family, she brought her sister to Zurich to be treated by Jung in 1919, and later she herself was in analysis with him. Jung used her case as example in his lecture in 1937 on the realities of practical psychotherapy, relating it to the process of transference and countertransference. Jung deepened his studies in Eastern psychology after a series of dreams she had, which culminated in the Yoga Kundalini Seminars. She was also the case presented in his article of 1951 on the concept of synchronicity. Jung wrote that her case, concerning synchronicity, remained unique in his experience. Jung also published some of her mandalas. He considered her able to understand his ideas in depth. Reichstein was for Jung an important case, which challenged and triggered his interests in different subjects.     

The introverted jung: Conversations with barbara hannah

Barbara Hannah was in the original circle of talented people who recognized Jung's genius early in his career and became deeply involved with him in the ongoing work of analytical psychology. Born in Brighton, England in 1891, daughter of a Dean of the Anglican Church, Barbara Hannah lived most of her adult life in Switzerland, practicing as an analyst, reaching and training younger analysts, and writing on various themes central to Jung's Analytical Psychology. Her book, Jung His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir, is a rich portrait of the human side of the development of analytical psychology and offers many anecdotes and discussion which only a close and intimate friend of Jung's could offer. Many important issues are treated in this book with warmth, wit, understanding, and a love of humanity that is unparalleled in the psychological literature. Other books of substantial value came from her hand: Striving Towards Wholeness and Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination

Because of Barbara Hannah's early training as a painter, her portrait of the “introverted Jung” throws an interesting light on the creative aspect of the inner side of Jung, which he called his No. 2 personality. Following is an excerpt from a conversation filmed with Dr. Suzanne Wagner at the retreat in Bollingen, which Miss Hannah shared with Marie-Louise von Franz for many years. This conversation took place on a beautiful spring day in March of 1977, nine years before her death at the age of 95. Further excerpts will be forthcoming in future issues of Psycholomgical Perspectives     

Winnicott's dream: some reflections on D. W. Winnicott and C. G. Jung

The author discusses D. W. Winnicott's 1964 review of C. G. Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, emphasizing the psychological effect the reviewing process had on Winnicott himself. Writing the review constellated Winnicott's unconscious, and he reported having a healing dream 'for Jung and for some of my patients, as well as for myself'. Winnicott's 'countertransference' to Jung helped him personally, and the review was Winnicott's first written formulation of his theory on 'The use of an object'.     

荣格的《易经》心理学思想探微

荣格作为心理学家在研读《易经》的过程中获得了诸多启示,他对《易经》中关于人类心理的潜意识呈现做了较为详细的论述,并从《易经》的感应观中获得启示,成为他大胆质疑因果率的唯一性,并最终提出"同时性"原则的关键.但是荣格对于《易经》的心理学思想并没有任意夸大,而是极为客观的做出评价.他指出《易经》的精神对某些人,可能明亮如白昼,对另外一个人,则熹微如晨光;对于第三者而言,也许就黝黯如黑夜.     

The visions of Luciano Perez,contemporary native American Shaman

This paper presents an interview on the visions of the contemporary Native American shaman Luciano Perez. Born of southern Mexican Indian (P'urepecha) ancestry in Laredo, Texas, on 31 December 1950, he was trained in shamanic practice by the Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog. He begins the interview with general comments on visions, how he experiences them and how they have matured him as a visionary providing him with spirit contact, revelation and power. He then remembers visions in childhood of the ‘little people’ and of hearing voices calling him. His first adult experience was a revelatory vision at the beginning of his spiritual quest (1973). Finally, he reports a healing vision from 1989 in a chiropractor's office where he sought medical help for severe back pain.     

Jung, the trickster writer, or what literary research can do for the clinician

This paper aims to show how literary scholarship can contribute to clinical debates by offering different methods of reading and interpreting works by Jung. Firstly, as texts form much of the means by which Jungian ideas are transmitted and worked upon, literary research offers methods of examining the way we read for authority and orthodoxy. Secondly, it is invaluable to look at the way in which Jung actually wrote. Jung portrays a dynamic psyche in action in his writings. His works are not only about a creative archetypal psyche, they enact and perform this creativity in the way in which he uses words. The rich playfulness demonstrated in The Collected Works is an example of a writer as a mythmaker of the psyche, one who absorbs unconscious creative energies into his writing in ways that dissolve modernity's cultural boundaries of science and art. In addition, the aesthetic component in Jung's writing is not a decoration of his ideas. Rather, his 'literary' qualities are themselves forms of argument about the fragile state of modern subjectivity. Using his essays on 'Synchronicity', and the 'Trickster', the paper will show these works to be responses to three related crises that still face clinicians and scholars today: the problematic role of the hero myth as an individuation narrative, the nature of 'science', and the crisis of western modernity itself in desperate need of psychic healing. The paper will show that where writing on synchronicity aims to individuate science by adding a 'feminine' Eros to its Logos biases, the Trickster essay is designed to ameliorate modernity by providing frameworks to make visible marginal or excluded material. In these works Jung tries to rejuvenate the modern world by re-connecting traditional symbolic systems with the psyche through myth as a language of psychic relating.     

Jung and Pauli

In his early theories of the structure of the psyche, psychic energy and psychodynamics, Jung was influenced by William James's understanding of the complementary insights of depth psychology and the discoveries of subatomic physics, and his concept of field in physics and the study of the subconscious. In his relationship with Freud, Jung initially struggled with a sexually-based drive theory. But he gradually came to conceive libido as a quantitative concept, a psychic analogue of physical energy. In their own languages, both C. G. Jung and Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli explored the evolution of scientific thought from the naive insights about process in alchemy through Newtonian causality, space-time theories of relativity to quantum mechanics. Jung had access to thirteen hundred of Pauli's dreams. The first four hundred were basis for his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. In a later collaboration, Pauli supported Jung's synchronicity principle as scientific, and Jung fostered Pauli's understanding of the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. They each explored the interconnections between the energies of psyche and matter, and the possibilities of acausal order and synchronicity. Pauli's ground-breaking discoveries gave scientific demonstration of alchemical intuitions. Through him, alchemical and archetypal insights entered the discourse of physics. Through Jung, the apprehensions of microphysics entered our psychological language and thought.     

Some reflections on the influence of Chinese thought on Jung and his psychological theory

Jung claimed that Richard Wilhelm, whose masterful translations of Chinese wisdom literature into a European language (German) and thence into Western consciousness have brought Chinese modes of thinking to so many, was one of the most important influences on his own life and work. The contacts between the two men, which took place from the early 1920's until Wilhelm's death in 1930, were few but intense and for Jung decisive in several ways. Wilhelm's translations of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower opened new avenues for Jung that had far-reaching consequences on his research and writing after 1930. The latter opened the door to the study of alchemy as a key to the archetypal process of individuation as rooted in the collective unconscious. 'Synchronicity' is a term that grew out of his contact with Chinese thought, in particular with the I Ching. From his contact with Chinese thought, additionally, he received confirmation of the view, independently arrived at, that adult psychological development is not linear but rather circular and spiral-like. The letters between Jung and Wilhelm illuminate the great importance Jung ascribed to Wilhelm's contribution toward bridging East and West and the potential value of Chinese philosophy for psychotherapy.