In 1918 Jung published a paper, “The Role of the Unconscious,” which sounds the keynote of the present volume. There he put forward the arresting theory that the conflict in Europe, then almost exclusively interpreted in materialistic terms, was basically a psychological crisis originating in the collective unconscious of the individuals that form groups and nations. Subsequently he wrote a considerable number of essays bearing on the contemporary scene and, in particular, on the relation of the individual to society.
The first two sections of this volume, written during the years between the World Wars, develop the themes broached in the opening essay, and are largely concerned with modern man’s discovery of his unconscious premises and the importance of self-knowledge in enabling the individual to maintain himself against social pressures. Specific questions, such as the influence of social changes on the relations between the sexes and of ethnic factors on the development of psychological theories, are also discussed. The third section presents four papers previously published in Essays on Contemporary Events (1947). In these Jung shows that the dreams and fantasies of individual patients, no less than social and political upheavals, which he explains as psychic epidemics, can reflect tendencies in the unconscious life of nations. In an essay first published in 1936 Wotan is presented as an archetypal figure symbolizing the unconscious agencies active in Germany which found expression in the Nazi movement.
The psychodynamics which Jung inferred from the behaviour of individuals and groups, though easier to perceive in Germany, had, however, a much wider application, as he made clear in two major essays written in his last years. In “The Undiscovered Self” (1957) he reverts to the relation between the individual and a mass society, and in “Flying Saucers” (1958) he examines the birth of a myth which he regards as compensating the scientistic trends of our technological era. Since the crisis in civilization is maintained by Jung to be moral, his late views on good and evil and on the psychological function of conscience, in section six, are necessary and relevant amplifications of his theme.
The reviews and short articles in section seven present Jung’s lively and emotional responses to the pronouncements of his contemporary, Count Hermann Keyserling, on national problems, and to his own visits to the United States and India. Finally, the appendix brings together the documents relating to the years when Jung was president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and editor of its organ, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. His energetic nature and feelings of obligation both to society and to his colleagues compelled him to accept this position as a vantage point from which to combat, to the best of his ability, the threat to psychotherapy in Germany under the Nazis. Unjustly, he was subjected to a barrage of tendentious and largely uninformed criticism because of his action. The aims he consistently sought to achieve are now set forth fully for the first time, with the necessary documentation.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, for permission to quote from the Bellows translation of The Poetic Edda; to the Viking Press, New York, for permission to quote from The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and copyright 1954 by the Viking Press, Inc.; and to Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg, for permission to reproduce an illustration from Maria Böckeler, Hildegard von Bingen: Wissen die Wege. For advice and assistance, the Editors are grateful to C. A. Meier, M.D., of Zurich; Walter Cimbal, M.D., of Hamburg; W. Morgenthaler, M.D., of Bern; Miss Liselotte Bendix, librarian of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; and the staff of the Warburg Institute, London.