“The Structure of the Unconscious” and “New Paths in Psychology” together marked a turning point in the history of analytical psychology, for they revealed the foundations upon which the greater part of Professor Jung’s later work was built.
Both these essays were considerably revised and expanded for the successive editions mentioned in the Prefaces to the present volume. These Prefaces indicate the extent of the changes which were made on each occasion. As C. F. and H. G. Baynes say in the introduction to their English translation of an intermediate version, where the title Two Essays in Analytical Psychology was used for the first time: “Of the first essay only the framework of its earlier form can be recognized, and so much new material has been added to the second essay that both works start afresh, so to speak, full of the amazing vitality of Jung’s mind.” The essays are indeed remarkable for the number of revisions to which they have been subjected, each reflecting a new development of thought based upon increasingly fruitful researches into the unconscious.
However interesting the intermediate versions may be in themselves, the original drafts of these essays are undoubtedly far more significant to the student of analytical psychology. They contain the first tentative formulations of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious, as well as his germinating theory of types. This theory was put forward, partially at least, as an attempt to explain the conflicts within the psychoanalytic school, of which he had been so prominent a member and from which he had so recently seceded.
With these considerations in mind the Editors decided to include the original drafts of these two essays in separate Appendices. It was felt that their historical interest fully justified the duplication of reading matter which comparison of the texts would involve.
Acknowledgment is gratefully made of the kindness of Faber and Faber, Ltd., London, and the Oxford University Press, New York, in permitting quotation from the Louis MacNeice translation of Goethe’s Faust.