Editorial Guidelines

WITH THE EXCEPTION of a few preparatory notes, there is no written text by Jung. The present text has been reconstructed by the editors through several notes by participants of Jung’s lectures. Through the use of short-hand, the notes taken by Eduard Sidler, a Swiss engineer, and Rivkah Schärf—who later became a well known religious scholar, psychotherapist, and collaborator of Jung—provide a fairly accurate first basis for the compilation of the lectures. (The short-hand method used is outdated and had to be transcribed by experts in the field.)

Together with the recently discovered scripts by Otto Karthaus, who made a career as one of the first scientific vocational counselors in Switzerland, Bertha Bleuler, and Lucie Stutz-Meyer, the gymnastic teacher of the Jung family, these notes enable us to not only regain access to the contents of Jung’s orally delivered lectures, but also to get a feeling for the fascination of the audience with Jung the orator.

There also exists a set of mimeographed notes in English that have been privately published and circulated in limited numbers. They were edited and translated by an English-speaking group in Zurich around Barbara Hannah and Elizabeth Welsh, and present more of a résumé than an attempt at a verbatim account of the content of the lectures. For the first years Hannah’s edition relied only on the notes by Marie-Jeanne Schmid, Jung’s secretary at the time; for the later lectures the script of Rivkah Schärf provided the only source for most of the text. The edition was disseminated in private imprints from 1938 to 1968.

The Hannah edition does deviate from Jung’s original spoken text as recorded in the other notes. Hannah and Welsh stated in their “Prefatory Note” that their compilation did “not claim to be a verbatim report or literal translation.” Hannah was mainly interested in the creation of a readable and consistent text and did not shy away from adding or omitting passages for that purpose. As her edition was only based on one set of notes she could not correct passages where Schmid or Schärf rendered Jung’s text wrongly. But as Hannah had the advantage of talking to Jung in person, when she was not sure about the content of a certain passage, her English compilation is sometimes useful to provide additional information to the readers of our edition.

In contrast to a critical edition, it is not intended to provide the differing variations in a separate critical apparatus. Had we faithfully listed all the minor or major variants in the scripts, the text would have become virtually unreadable and thus would have lost the accessibility that is the hallmark of Jung’s presentation. For the most part, however, we can be reasonably certain that the compilation accurately reflects what Jung said, although he may have used different words or formulations. Moreover, in quite a number of key passages it was even possible to reconstruct the verbatim content, for example, when different note takers identified certain passages as direct quotes. Variations often do not add to the content and intelligibility, and often originated in errors or lack of understanding by the participant taking notes. In their compilation, the editors have worked according to the principle that as much information as possible should be extracted from the manuscripts. If there are obvious contradictions that cannot be decided by the editor, or, as might be the case, clear errors on behalf of Jung or the listener, it will be clarified by the editor’s annotation.

Of the note takers, Eduard Sidler, whose background was in engineering, had the least understanding of Jungian psychology at the beginning, although naturally he became more familiar with Jungian psychology over time. In any case, he did try to protocol faithfully as much as he could, making his the most detailed notes. Sometimes he could no longer follow, however, or clearly misunderstood what was said. On the other hand, we have Welsh and Hannah’s version, which in itself was already a collation and obviously heavily edited, but is (at least for the first semesters) the most consistent manuscript and also contains things that are missing in other notes. Moreover, they state that “Prof. Jung himself . . . has been kind enough to help us with certain passages,” although we do not know which these are. In addition, over the course of the years, and also for individual lectures, the quality, accuracy, and reliability of the scripts by the different note takers vary, as is only natural. In short, the best we can do is try and find an approximation of what Jung actually said. In essence, it will always have to be a judgment call how to collate those notes.

It is thus impossible to establish exact editorial principles for each and every situation, so that different editors would inevitably arrive at exactly the same formulations. We could only adhere to some general guidelines, such as “Interfere as little as possible, and as much as necessary,” or “Try to establish what the most likely thing was that Jung might have said, on the basis of all the sources available” (including the Collected Works, autobiographical works or interviews, other seminars, interviews, etc.). If two transcripts concur, and the third is different, it is usually safe to go with the first two. In some cases, however, it is clear from the context that the two are wrong, and the third is correct. Or if all three of them are unclear, it is sometimes possible to “clean up” the text by having recourse to the literature, for instance, when Jung summarizes Kerner’s story of the Seeress of Prevorst. As with all scholarly works of this kind, there is no explicit recipe that can be fully spelled out: One has to rely on one’s scholarly judgement.

These difficulties not only concern the establishment of the text of Jung’s ETH lectures, but also pertain to notes of his seminars in general, many of which have already appeared in print without addressing this problem. For instance, the introduction to the Dream Analysis seminar mentions the number of people that were involved in preparing the notes, but there is no account of how they worked, or how they established the text (Jung, 1984, pp. x–xi). Some manuscript notes in the library of the Analytical Psychology Club in Los Angeles indicate that the compilation of the notes involved significant “processing by committee.” It is interesting in this regard to compare the sentence structure of the Dream Analysis seminar with the 1925 seminar, which was checked by Jung. On 19 October 1925, Jung wrote to Cary Baynes, after checking her notes and acknowledging her literary input: “I faithfully worked through the notes as you will see. I think they are as a whole very accurate. Certain lectures are even fluent, namely those which you could not stop your libido from flowing in” (Cary Baynes papers, contemporary medical archives, Wellcome Library, London).

Our specific situation seems to be a “luxury” problem, as it were, because we have several transcripts, which was often not the case in other seminars. We also have the disadvantage of no longer being able to ask Jung himself, as for instance Cary Baynes, Barbara Hannah, Marie-Jeanne Schmid, or Mary Foote could do. We can only work as best we can, and caution the reader that there is no guarantee that this is “verbatim Jung,” although we have tried to come as close as possible to what he actually said.

REFERENCES

Avalon, Arthur [Sir John Woodroffe] (ed.) (1919). Shrî-chakra-sambhâra Tantra. Trans. Kazi Dawa-Samdup. Tantrik Texts, vol. 7. London: Luzac & Co; Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co.

Flournoy, Théodore (1900 [1899]). Des Indes à la planète Mars. Étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie. Paris, Geneva: F. Alcan, Ch. Eggimann. From India to the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages. With a Foreword by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Ed. and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Hesse, Hermann (2006 [1916–1944]). “Die dunkle und wilde Seite der Seele”: Briefwechsel mit seinem Psychoanalytiker Josef Bernhard Lang 1916–1944. Ed. Thomas Feitknecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

(Saint) Ignatius of Loyola (1996 [1522–1524]). The Spiritual Exercises, in Personal Writings: Reminiscences, Spiritual Diary, Selected Letters Including the Text of The Spiritual Exercises. Trans. with introductions and notes by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. London: Penguin, pp. 281–328.

Jung, C. G. (1929). Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower.” CW 13.

Jung, C. G. (1932). The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 by C. G. Jung. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. Bollingen Series XCIX. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Kerner, Justinus Andreas Christian (1829). Die Seherin von Prevorst. Eröffnungen über das innere Leben und über das Hineinragen einer Geisterwelt in die unsere. Two vols. Stuttgart, Tubingen: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung. 4., vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage: Stuttgart, Tubingen: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag. Reprint: Kiel: J. F. Steinkopf Verlag, 2012. The Seeress of Prevorst, Being Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life of Man, and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One We Inhabit. Trans. Catherine Crowe. London: J. C. Moore, 1845. Digital reprint: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Maas, Philipp A. (2006). Samâdhipâda: das erste Kapitel des Pâtañjalayogaśâstra zum ersten Mal kritisch ediert. Aachen: Shaker.

Müller, Max (1894). Introduction to Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts, The Sacred Books of The East, vol. 49. Ed. Max Müller. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.