Paper written in honour of Csaba Pléh

on the occasion of his 75th birthday

Kristóf Nyíri

FOREVER JUNG

Dunabogdány 2020
Paper written by Kristóf Nyíri
in honour of Csaba Pléh on the occasion of his 75th birthday

Kristóf Nyíri (1944), PhD, Dr. h.c., is Full Member of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, and a retired philosophy professor.

www.hunfi.hu/nyiri
https://bme.academia.edu/KristofNyiri

Kristóf Nyíri: Forever Jung

© Kristóf Nyíri 2020

Dunabogdány 2020
 Kristóf Nyíri
Forever Jung

0. The Jung Mystery

1. The Jung-code
2. The Jung-image
3. The Jung Picture-Book

0. The Jung Mystery

My paper’s title is an attempt at a pun, suggesting that Csaba Pléh,

becoming seventy-five this November, is indeed forever young and
thriving; but it is also an implicit reference to a task Csaba has com-
pleted in 1985, the translation into Hungarian of Bartlett’s Remem-
bering. In that book Bartlett has some interesting pages on C. G. Jung.
Bartlett focusses on, and attempts to come to terms with, a talk given
by Jung in 1916,1 a time at which the latter was already suffering
from a neurosis that continued to torment him for quite a number of
years. Bartlett finds Jung’s argument “exceedingly obscure”, his dis-
cussion “tangled”. Jung’s celebrated notion of a “collective uncon-
scious” Bartlett takes as designating “a storehouse of pictures, of ideas,
of themes”. The collective unconscious comprises “images, ideas, for-
mulae and laws” which “express the views of our ancestors about the

1
The talk had been held in Zürich and appeared in French under the title “La Struc-
ture de l’inconscient” (Archives de Psychologie, XVI [1916]), this is the publica-
tion Barlett quotes. The English translation of an earlier, less elaborated version
of the originally German talk has been published in C. G. Jung, Collected Papers
on Analytical Psychology, 2nd edition, London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1917,
pp. 445–474. For the English translation of the fully reconstructed version see The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung [hereafter: CW], vol. 7: Two Essays in Analytical
Psychology, 2nd ed., revised and augmented, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1966.

3
objective world”. Bartlett asks “whether there is any way of showing
in actual fact that there does exist this common stock of images, ideas
and formulae which continue independently of individual acquisi-
tion”.2 His view is, obviously, that there is no such way, and the dis-
cussion he offers of Jung stops short at this point. My aim in the
present paper is to answer Bartlett’s question, albeit somewhat dif-
ferently put. The question I will try to answer is: Do primordial im-
ages in Jung’s sense, that is those famous “archetypes” making up
our collective unconscious, actually have a visual dimension?
Before however facing this question, let me refer to an encoun-
ter Pléh had with Jung that was more direct than the one I mentioned
above by way of introduction. In his magisterial History of Psycho-
logy (in Hungarian)3 he allots some important passages to Jung, re-
ferring, first, to the word-association test as developed by the young
physician working under the direction of Bleuler in a Zürich hospital.
Jung built on the work of Galton and Wundt – both are discussed by
Pléh, in Galton’s case he specifically mentions the latter’s combining
the theme of mental images with that of word-associations, and also
refers to Galton’s method of “allowing the mind to play freely”, hav-
ing “fleeting, half-conscious thoughts”.4 Jung’s insight, recalls Pléh,
was that prolonged reaction times point to “complexes”, clusters of
disturbing ideas, which in the patient’s unconscious become associat-
ed with the stimulus word. Pléh then proceeds to offer nutshell expla-
nations of the Jungian collective unconscious, of archetypes as mani-
fested in mythology, religions, and dreams, and touches on Jung’s in-
terest in primitive cultures and Eastern religions. A text by Jung that
Pléh quotes in some detail is the much-read On the Psychology of the
Unconscious, or more precisely the 1944 Hungarian translation of the
1942 so-called “fifth edition” of Jung’s Über die Psychologie des Un-
bewußten. And here we have to pause.

2
Frederick C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Sudy in Experimental and Social Psycho-
logy (1932), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 285 and 287.
3
Csaba Pléh, A lélektan története, Budapest: Osiris, 2000.
4
Pléh, loc. cit., p. 242. The reference is to Galton’s 1883 book Inquiries into Hu-
man Faculty and Its Development.

4
 In 1912 Jung published, under the title “Neue Bahnen der Psy-
chologie”, a short paper in vol. III of the Rascher Yearbook (Zürich:
Verlag von Rascher & Co., Jahrbuch für Schweizer Art und Kunst).
In 1916 he revised and enlarged this paper, the preface to the new
piece is dated December 1916, the volume of 135 pages appeared in
1917, under the title Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse: Ein
Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen
Psychologie (Zürich: Verlag von Rascher & Co.). A second – unal-
tered – edition was published in 1918. For the third edition he re-
wrote the text, and gave a new title to it: Das Unbewußte im norma-
len und kranken Seelenleben (1925). The fourth edition, 1936, is an
unaltered version of the third. The fifth edition was substantially re-
written, and appeared in 1942, titled Über die Psychologie des Unbe-
wußten (Rascher being the publisher throughout), the further editions
henceforth remaining unaltered. Jung’s writings were translated into
English in an amazing mass and at an amazing rate, and the sequence
I have just described formed no exception. The “Neue Bahnen der
Psychologie” appeared under the title “New Paths in Psychology” as
chapter XIV of Jung’s Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology in
1916; 5 a translation of the Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse
came to be included a year later in the second edition of the Collected
Papers volume;6 the next version, Das Unbewußte im normalen und
kranken Seelenleben, was published as “The Unconscious in the Nor-
mal and Pathological Mind”;7 while after 1942, for translations of
Über die Psychologie des Unbewußten, and so of course also for the
Collected Works edition (vol. 7)8, the title On the Psychology of the
Unconscious became binding.
Slightly prior to the “Neue Bahnen der Psychologie” there ap-
peared Jung’s work Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido – a lengthy
5
London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1916, pp. 352–377.
6
Published in 1917, cf. note 1 above. The piece was translated by Dora Hecht as
“The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes: Being a Survey of the Modern
Theory and Method of Analytical Psychology”.
7
In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, translation by H. G. and C. F. Baynes,
London: Bailliere Tindall & Cox, 1928.
8
Cf. note 1 above. The first version of CW 7 was published in 1954.

5
and difficult text complemented by a number of images – a work of
decisive importance for the author’s oeuvre, and for the influence
that oeuvre exerted. It was written in 1911, published in the Jahrbuch
für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1911
and 1912, and in book form (subtitle: Beiträge zur Entwicklungsge-
schichte des Denkens) in 1912 (Leipzig – Wien: Franz Deuticke). The
second – unaltered – edition (with a preface written for that edition)
appeared in 1925, the third (with only inessential modifications, as its
preface says) in 1938. By contrast, Jung radically rewrote and ex-
tended the fourth edition, giving it, also, a new title and subtitle: Sym-
bole der Wandlung: Analyse des Vorspiels zu einer Schizophrenie
(Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1952), with dr. Jolande Jacobi adding 300
images. A translation of the first edition appeared as early as 1917,
under the title Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Trans-
formations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the His-
tory of the Evolution of Thought (New York: Moffatt, Yard and Co.,
and London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner), while the translation of
the rewritten version was published in 1956: Symbols of Transforma-
tion: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia.9
What I have here presented are two prominent examples from
the fuzzy history of Jung’s publications. Further examples could easi-
ly be added. Systematizing efforts by editors of the Collected Works
(and the German Gesammelte Werke) notwithstanding, one faces an
extreme lack of transparency when embarking on the road to grasp
exactly which book title or which paper title belongs to which piece
by Jung. Not just the simple reader, but even the expert librarian en-
counters a mystery here. Let me call it the second Jung mystery. The
first Jung mystery of course is how this author of works which so
often border on esotericism and mysticism was at the same time also
able, until the very end, to write clear and interesting essays.
The present paper is, in what follows, divided into three sec-
tions. The title of section 1, “The Jung-code”, refers to Jung’s asso-
ciation theory, to delayed – revealing, decodable – word-associations
as pointing to suppressed, unpleasant ideas the patient is disturbed by.
9
CW 5, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

6
Section 2, “The Jung-image”, focusses on my main topic, the Jungian
notion of primordial images, while alluding, also, to the image Jung
made up of himself, and presented to the world, throughout his life.
Finally, section 3, “The Jung Picture-Book”, on the one hand draws
attention to the fact that the image which after Jung’s death his school
(or schools, some would say his sects) painted of him is not in every
respect a reliable one, and on the other hand provides a glimpse of
the so-called Red Book, a hand-written, richly illustrated codex Jung
began to prepare around 1915, shortly after the unset of his neurosis.

1. The Jung-code

Invited by Australian colleagues, Jung in 1911 gave a talk in Sydney,

with the title “On the Doctrine of Complexes”. Looking back on the
beginnings of his professional activities – on his word-association re-
searches conducted with a close collaborator – this is the exposition
he gave:

[association experiments] are used for the demonstration of cer-

tain intellectual types, but I must here mention that an impor-
tant point was formerly disregarded, namely, the disturbing in-
fluence of the experiment on the subject. … I have now given
special attention to these disturbances. Noting at which stim-
ulus-words they occur, we find that it is principally where a
stimulus-word refers to a personal matter, which, as a rule, is of
a distressing nature. … [We] have introduced for this “personal
matter” the term complex, because such a “personal matter” is
always a collection of various ideas, held together by an emo-
tional tone common to all.10

Towards the end of his talk Jung comes to refer to those neu-
roses and indeed psychoses which the association method helped him
to diagnose and better understand. This is how, in particular, he char-
acterizes the schizophrenic outlook: “The direction of thought is …
10
CW 2 (Experimental Researches), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1973, § 1350.

7
entirely turned away from reality, and prefers thought-forms and ma-
terial no longer of interest to modern man; hence many of these fan-
tasies appear in a purely mythological garb. Owing to the loss of the
recent biological train of suitable thought, there is apparently substi-
tuted an antiquated form.”11 As a concluding bibliographical reference
Jung mentions the 1911 journal appearance of his Wandlungen und
Symbole der Libido: “Proofs of the resumption of antiquated forms of
thinking”, he writes, “are as yet published only in part.” On the ho-
rizon there unmistakably arises the shadow of the future Jung. But let
me continue focussing, for a minute, on his association theory. In
1909 Jung gave a talk at Clark University.12 We here encounter the
following passage: “Words are really something like condensed ac-
tions, situations, and things. When I present a word to the test person
which denotes an action it is the same as if I should present to him
the action itself… … we must be contented with the linguistic sub-
stitutes for reality…”13
From our present perspective it might perhaps meet the eye
how strongly Jung in this talk still concentrated on the function of
words – how little awareness in his early publications he showed of
the visual, while we know, and I will soon return to this point in the
next section of my paper, that in his own mental life images played a
decisive role. And indeed deeply in the background of Jung’s asso-
ciation theory the image issue was present from the very beginning.
Let me refer to his 1905 paper “Über das Verhalten der Reaktionszeit
beim Assoziationsexperimente”. The paper contains a lucid formula-
tion, as befits the early Jung, pertaining to the notion of a “complex”,
and here I have to quote the original German: “abnorm lange Reakti-
onszeiten [treten] besonders da auf…, wo durch das Reizwort ein ge-
fühlsbetonter Komplex, das heißt eine durch einen bestimmten Af-
fekt zusammengehaltene Vorstellungsmasse getroffen wird”14 . The
11
Ibid., § 1354.
12
“The Association Method”, published in the American Journal of Psychology,
vol. 21, no. 2 (Apr. 1910), pp. 219–269.
13
Loc. cit., p. 223.
14
C. G. Jung, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Experimentelle Untersuchungen), Ost-
fildern: Patmos Verlag, 1995, p. 253.

8
gist of the formula is entirely lost in this paper’s 1919 translation,15
where the wording runs: “abnormally long reaction-times more espe-
cially occur when an emotionally accentuated complex was aroused
by the stimulus-word”.16 By contrast, the 1973 Collected Works trans-
lation17 does succeed in getting the syntax across: “abnormally long
reaction-times occur particularly when the stimulus-word touches on
a feeling-toned complex, i.e., a mass of images held together by a
particular affect”18 – it preserves the “held together by a particular af-
fect” construction, has however “images” instead of “ideas” which
latter is the standard English translation, in the Jung editions too, for
“Vorstellungen”. The choice of the word “image” here I feel frustrat-
ingly misleading, precisely because, as I have suggested above, at
this stage of his association researches Jung was not consciously con-
cerned with visuality. Unconsciously, we might say, he of course very
much was. In the paper I have just quoted he discusses the literature
on word-associaton reaction times, including in his references also
the 1879 essay “Psychometric Experiments” by Francis Galton.19 Now
what Galton in that essay, while assembling a mass of word-associa-
tion statistics, continuously connects his observations with, is precise-
ly the phenomenon of inner mental images.

15
“Reaction-Time in Association Experiments”, in Studies in Word-Association:
Experiments in the Diagnosis of Psychopathological Conditions Carried Out at
the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich, under the direction of C. G.
Jung, authorized translation by Dr. M. D. Eder, New York: Moffat, Yard & Com-
pany.
16
Loc. cit., p. 239.
17
“The Reaction-time Ratio in the Association Experiment”, in CW 2 (cf. note 10
above).
18
Loc. cit., § 602.
19
Ibid., § 569. – Galton’s essay first appeared in vol. 2 of Brain: A Journal of Neu-
rology (pp. 149–162), and was reprinted in his 1883 book, this is the one Pléh re-
fers to (cf. note 4 above).

9
2. The Jung-image

Telling about his early childhood, in the volume Memories, Dreams,

Reflections20 Jung writes: “[I] had learned to read before I went [to
school]. However, I remember a time when I could not yet read, but
pestered my mother to read aloud to me out of the Orbis Pictus, an
old, richly illustrated children’s
book, which contained an account
of exotic religions, especially that
of the Hindus. There were illustra-
tions of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shi-
va which I found an inexhaustible
source of interest. My mother lat-
er told me that I always returned
to these pictures.” 21 In the next
paragraph we read: “Between my

“The Besieging of a City”. From

the 1664 edition of Orbis pictus

20
Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, revised edition,
New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Originally: C. G. Jung, Erinnerungen, Träume,
Gedanken, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Zürich – Stuttgart: Rascher Ver-
lag, 1962.
21
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 17. According to Jaffé the chapters dealing
with Jung’s childhood and youth belong to the part of the book written by the au-
thor himself (ibid., p. vi). The Orbis sensualium pictus is a kind of encyclopaedia
for children, prepared by Jan Amos Comenius, illustrated with woodcuts. It deals
with everything, from God through Heaven and Earth to plants, animals, occupa-
tions, geographical regions, moral judgments and of course the great religions.
During the centuries the book was published in a number of languages, various
versions, and many hundred editions. The first edition – published in 1658 in
Nürnberg – was Latin–German bilingual, as was, similarly, the 1664 Nürnberg
edition. They carried the subtitle Die sichtbare Welt. These editions have entries
on “paganism” (listing in some detail the ancient Greek gods), Judaism, Christian-
ity, and “Mahometism”. Likewise, say, the London 1777 English–Latin bilingual
version (subtitle: Visible World). I have not yet found an edition in which Brahma,
Vishnu, and Shiva were mentioned, but it is of course possible that around 1880
the child Jung was exposed to one.

10
eighth and eleventh years I drew endlessly battle pictures, sieges,
bombardments, naval engagements. Then I filled a whole exercise
book with ink blots and amused myself giving them fantastic inter-
pretations.”22
The adult Jung, too, went through phases when he was enthu-
siastically drawing and painting, and he also did not miss the chance
to exploit these activities for therapeutic purposes. His best paper on
the topic is probably the 1929 talk “Aims of Psychotherapy”.23 As
Jung here tells us, it often happened that patients would recount some
dream in which the colours were particularly vivid, or in which there
appeared a strange figure,24 and the patient said: “Do you know, if
only I were a painter I would make a picture of it.”25 Sometimes the
dreams were directly about photographs, or images painted or drawn,
or illuminated manuscripts, or even about the cinema.26 Jung urged
his patients to translate into paintings their dreams and fantasies, and

22
Memories…, p. 18.
23
“Ziele der Psychotherapie”, published in C. G. Jung, Seelenprobleme der Gegen-
wart, Zürich – Leipzig: Rascher Verlag, 1931. English translation in C. G. Jung,
Modern Man in Search of a Soul, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,
1933, translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. Revised translation by R. F. C.
Hull, in CW 16 (Practice of Psychotherapy), 2nd edition, revised and augmented,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966, third printing, with corrections,
1975.
24
In the German original: “ein besonders farbiger Traum … oder einer von seltsa-
mer Figur”. The Dell–Baynes translation has “an especially colourful or curious
dream” (loc. cit., p. 78), misunderstanding the phrase “besonders farbig” and fail-
ing to note the expression “seltsame Figur”, while in the Hull translation – “a par-
ticularly vivid or curious dream” (CW 16, § 101) – all traces of both “farbig” and
“Figur” are lost.
25
CW 16, § 101.
26
Ibid. – Jung greatly influenced the film director Fellini, both his personal life
and the images he created, see on this in detail Peter Bondanella, The Films of
Federico Fellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, cf. pp. 5, 10, 27
and 29, in particular pp. 94 and 96: “Jungian psychoanalysis defined the dream
not as a symptom of a disease that required a cure but rather as a link to arche-
typal images shared by all of humanity. … Under Jung’s influence, Fellini began
to rely more and more heavily upon the irrational quality of his own fantasy, im-
ages inspired by his dreams…”).

11
not to worry about the worth or worthlessness of their work when
judged by the canons of art. The patients endeavoured, writes Jung,
“to give form, however crude and childish, to the inexpressible. – But
why do I encourage patients”, he continues, “to express themselves
by means of brush, pencil, or pen at all?”27 The explanation: it will
definitely have an effect if one struggles for hours with “refractory
brush and colours”. He goes on:

the physical shaping of the image enforces a continuous study

of it in all its parts… This invests the bare fantasy with an
element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater
driving power. And these self-made pictures do indeed produce
effects… a patient needs only to have seen once or twice how
much he is freed from a wretched state of mind by working at a
symbolical picture, and he will always turn to this means of re-
lease whenever things go badly with him.

And Jung continues: “The patient can make himself creatively inde-
pendent… … by painting himself he gives shape to himself. … that
which is active within is himself, but no longer in the guise of his
previous error, when he mistook the personal ego for the self…”28
There is one more passage I will quote from this paper, but
first we have to consider the opposition Jung here suggests between
the “personal ego” and the “self”. It was in his 1916 Zürich talk29 that
he first contrasted the expression “das Ich” – the I – with the expres-
sion “das Selbst” – the self. However, Jung’s notion of das Selbst is
not really covered by the term “self”. A somewhat intelligible refer-
ence as to the actual content of this notion is offered by Jung in his

27
CW 16, §§ 104 f.
28
Ibid., § 106. I have put “the physical shaping of the image” for “die materielle
Gestaltung des Bildes” where Dell–Baynes has, perplexingly, “give visible form
to the image”, and Hull has “concrete shaping”; also, I have put “self-made pic-
tures” for “selbtsgefertigte Bilder”, where Dell–Baynes has “crude pictures” and
Hull has “rough-and-ready pictures”.
29
Cf. note 1 above.

12
1950 paper “Concerning Mandala Symbolism”, where he describes
“a special category of symbols, the mandala”30:

Their basic motif is the premonition of a centre of personality,

a kind of central point within the psyche, to which everything
is related, by which everything is arranged, and which is itself
a source of energy. The energy of the central point is manifest-
ed in the almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become
what one is… This centre is not felt or thought of as the ego but,
if one may so express it, as the self.31

The self, Jung sums up, is the completed total personality, a totality
comprising, beyond the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and
an indefinitely large segment of the primordial collective unconscious.
Between 1916 and 1927 Jung him-
self, too, drew and painted mandalas, and
gradually came to believe they had heal-
ing powers. “We know from experience”,
he wrote, “that the protective circle, the
mandala, is the traditional antidote for
chaotic states of mind. … Mankind has
never lacked powerful images to lend
magical aid against all the uncanny things
that live in the depths of the psyche. Al-
ways the figures of the unconscious were
“Systema munditotius”, the expressed in protecting and healing im-
first mandala painted by ages and in this way were expelled from
Jung, in 1916 the psyche into cosmic space.”32 Let me
add three more, related, passages. The

30
CW 9/I (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious), 2nd edition, Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, § 627.
31
Ibid., § 634.
32
“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (“Über die Archetypen des kollek-
tiven Unbewussten”, first published in 1934, rewritten in 1954), in CW 9/I, §§ 16
and 21.

13
first is from On the Psychology of the Unconscious33, with Jung writ-
ing that the human personality tends towards the “production and un-
folding” of an “original, potential wholeness. The symbols used by
the unconscious to this end are the same as those which mankind has

Mandala drawn by Jung on The painted version of the

Aug. 2, 1917, in one of the same drawing in the Red
Black Books Book

Mandala prepared by Jung

in 1927, published in
sinologist–theologian–
missionary Richard
Wilhelm’s translated volume
The Secret of the Golden
Flower (1929), to which
Jung wrote a commentary

always used to express wholeness, completeness, and perfection:

symbols, as a rule, of the quaternity and the circle.”34 The second:
“the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind com-

33
See the present essay, p. 5 above.
34
CW 7, § 186.

14
pensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state … through
the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or
by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of
contradictory and irreconcilable elements.” 35 And the third: “My
mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which
were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self – that is,
my whole being – actively at work.”36
We are back at Jung’s notion of the “self”, having gained, on
the way, an impression of his views on mandalas, and can now return
to the “Aims of Psychotherapy” paper, closing with one more quote.
Characterizing his patients’ paintings, Jung writes:

A feature common to all these pictures is a primitive symbol-

ism which is conspicuous both in the drawing and in the col-
ouring. The colours are as a rule quite barbaric in their intensity.
Often an unmistakable archaic quality is present. … We may
therefore take it that our pictures spring chiefly from those re-
gions of the psyche which I have termed the collective uncon-
scious. By this I understand an unconscious psychic function-
ing common to all men… It is as if a part of the psyche that
reaches far back into the primitive past were expressing itself
in these pictures…37

35
C. G. Jung, “Mandalas” (1955), English translation in CW 9/I, § 714.
36
Memories… (cf. note 20 above), p. 196. I am indebted to Csilla Fehér for shar-
ing with me the experiences she gathered as a mandala painter and mandala paint-
ing teacher.
37
CW 16, § 111. – “In Jung’s works”, writes one of his closest associates, Jolande
Jacobi, “we do nowhere find systematic instructions as regards how one has to in-
terpret ‘the images from the unconscious’. So I strived, labouring for twenty years,
to put together a guideline that will help us to get closer to the understanding of
these images.” (Jolande Jacobi, Vom Bilderreich der Seele: Wege und Umwege zu
sich selbst [1969], Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1981, p. 51.) In the introductory chap-
ters of her book Jacobi provides a fascinating sketch of the psychology and the
medieval history of pictorial representation, but also of its primordial history, re-
marking: “Preconceptual language, expressed in images, was already thousands of
years ago the language of primitive peoples. Rock paintings and myths tell us
about that” (ibid., pp. 28 and 30). Theodor Abt’s Introduction to Picture Interpre-
tation: According to C. G. Jung (Zurich: Living Human Heritage Publications,

15
 It is in his 1916 Zürich talk38 Jung for the first time uses the
expression “collective unconscious”,39 but the notion itself is clearly
anticipated in the Wandlungen,40 where the term “urtümliches Bild”
– primordial image – is explicitly applied. The alternative form “Ur-
bild” – at the time actually quite widespread – Jung might have taken
from his revered Goethe,41 or especially from an author he contin-
uously quotes in the Wandlungen: Friedrich Nietzsche.42 The source
of the expression “urtümliches Bild” is Jacob Burckhardt. The pas-
sage by him Jung here cites: “ ‘Faust ist … ein echter und gerechter
Mythus, d. h. ein großes urtümliches Bild, in welchem jeder sein We-
sen und Schicksal auf seine Weise wieder zu ahnen hat.’ ”43 Or as

2005) begins, similarly, with pictures of ancient rock paintings. The author points
to some essential philosophical and psychological recognitions. On p. 17 he
writes: “We are all born with [the] ability to read pictures. All small children and
their mothers understand each other with the help of body language that is simply
a language of pictures. And every child also has a natural pleasure, urge and
ability to draw and to paint.” I have to note however that the main chapters of
Abt’s book are addressed, obviously, to Jungian art teachers, to art teachers well-
versed in the details of Jung’s theory of psychological types.
38
Cf. the present essay, note 1 above.
39
The central passage being: “The most important contents of the collective un-
conscious appear to be ‘primordial images’, that is, unconscious collective ideas
(mythical thinking) and vital instincts” (CW 7, § 520). In the Gesammelte Werke
edition the text runs: “Die wichtigsten Inhalte des kollektiven Unbewußten schei-
nen die ‘urtümlichen Bilder’, das heißt die unbewußten kollektiven Ideen und Le-
bensantriebe (mythisches Denken und Leben) zu sein” (GW 7, Ostfildern: Patmos
Verlag, 1995).
40
Cf. the present essay, pp. 5 f. above.
41
“Und die seltenste Form bewahrt im geheimen das Urbild”, runs the well-known
line in Goethe’s didactic poem „Metamorphose der Tiere”.
42
See e.g. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872),
sect. 8: For the Greeks the satyr was “the primordial image of man” (“war das Ur-
bild des Menschen”), Engl. transl. by Ian C. Johnston. The impact of Nietzsche on
Jung is brilliantly analyzed in Paul Bishop, The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung’s Re-
ception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Berlin – New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995.
43
Wandlungen…, p. 35, note 1. The 1917 English translation misses the point
(“Faust is nothing else than pure and legitimate myth, a great primitive conception,
so to speak”), the lapse is rectified in the 1956 translation: “a genuine myth, i.e., a
great primordial image” (CW 5, § 45, note 45).

16
The Psychology of the Unconscious will have it: “There are present
in every individual, besides his personal memories, the great ‘primor-
dial’ images, as Jacob Burckhardt once aptly called them, the inherit-
ed possibilities of human imagination as it was from time immemori-
al. The fact of this inheritance”, Jung there adds, “explains the truly
amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends re-
peat themselves the world over in identical forms. It also explains
why it is that our mental patients can reproduce exactly the same im-
ages and associations that are known to us from the old texts.”44
Let us note that neither the expression “Urbild” nor the ex-
pression “urtümliches Bild” refers, in the contexts from which Jung
has borrowed them, to visual images. By contrast, the Wandlungen
does indeed touch on the pictorial, and not just in the sense that this
book, as I mentioned before,45 contains some illustrations (of which
alas only a fraction are reprinted in the 1917 translation, the first one
being, on p. 229, a series of drawings representing specific symbols,
prepared by Jung on the basis of “a late Roman mystic inscription”),
but also in that it discusses important questions pertaining to the is-
sue of the visual mind. One of the opening ideas of the book relates
to the problem of the origins of language. “Language”, writes Jung,
“should … be comprehended in a wider sense than that of speech,
which is in itself only the expression of the formulated thought which
is capable of being communicated in the widest sense. Otherwise, the
deaf mute would be limited to the utmost in his capacity for thinking,
which is not the case in reality. Without any knowledge of the spoken
word, he has his ‘language’.”46 Now the language of the deaf, as was
of course clear to Jung, is a pictorial language: a language of gestures
and facial expressions.47 Some pages later in the Wandlungen there

44
CW 7, § 101.
45
Cf. the present essay, p. 6 above.
46
Psychology of the Unconscious (1917 English edition of Wandlungen), pp. 13 f.
47
Immediately after the passage just quoted Jung refers to p. 365 of the 1902 edi-
tion of Wilhelm Wundt’s Grundriß der Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engel-
mann), citing the paragraph where Wundt touches on how in the course of the
development of language word meanings change, moving from the concrete to the
abstract. Three pages earlier Wundt writes about deaf children “who have grown

17
follows a reference to James, a quote from the 1909 German transla-
tion of Psychology: Briefer Course: 48 “Our thought consists for the
great part of a series of images, one of which produces the other; a
sort of passive dream-state of which the higher animals are also cap-
able.”49 Jung adds: “Here, thinking in the form of speech ceases, im-
age crowds upon image, feeling upon feeling… The material of these
thoughts … can naturally be only the past with its thousand memory
pictures.”50
Now the border line between day-dreaming – fantasy – and ac-
tually dreaming, contends Jung, is a blurred one. It is this contention
that leads him, in the Wandlungen, to the first of his Nietzsche quotes
here – and, in the background, to the notion of the collective uncon-
scious as the guardian of our primordial history. In his work Mensch-
liches, Allzumenschliches (“Human, All Too Human”, 1878), Nietz-
sche wrote: “in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he rea-
soned when in the waking state many thousands of years. … In the
dream [the] atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within
us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty de-

up without any systematic education. In spite of this lack of education, an energet-

ic mental intercourse may take place between them. In such a case, however,
since the deaf and dumb can perceive only visual signs, the intercourse must de-
pend on the development of a natural gesture-language made up of a combination
of significant expressive movements. Feelings are in general expressed by mimet-
ic movements, ideas by pantomimetic, either by pointing at the object with the
finger or by drawing some kind of picture of the idea in the air…” (This passage I
am quoting from the English translation published in 1897: Wilhelm Wundt, Out-
lines of Psychology, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann / London: Williams & Norgate
/ New York: Gustav E. Stechert, p. 299). The topic of gesture language receives a
very detailed discussion in the first volume of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (Die
Sprache, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900), I heavily relied on that work in the
chapter “Time and Image in the Theory of Gestures” of my volume Meaning and
Motoricity: Essays on Image and Time, Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang Edition, 2014,
pp. 121–143.
48
William James, Psychologie, translated by Marie Dürr, Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer.
49
Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 21. The quote here, in the 1917 English edi-
tion of Wandlungen, is a re-translation into English of the German translation by
Dürr, with Jung’s italics.
50
Ibid., p. 21.

18
veloped, and which is still developing in every individual. The dream
carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a
means of understanding it better.”51 A few pages later Jung will add:
“through all our life we possess … a phantastic thought which corre-
sponds to the thought of the centuries of antiquity and barbarism. …
our minds, too, which apparently have outgrown those archaic ten-
dencies, nevertheless bear the marks of the evolution passed through,
and the very ancient re-echoes, at least dreamily, in phantasies. … the
soul”, Jung then continues, “possesses in some degree historical stra-
ta, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the uncon-
scious.”52 Jung’s reference here, clearly, is not to the personal but to
the collective unconscious, the content of which is made up by pri-
mordial images.
A basic primordial image is that of the mother, “ ‘the great
primitive idea of the mother’ who, in the first place, meant to us our
individual world and afterwards became the symbol of all worlds”.53
As Jung will write in his 1916 Zürich talk: “This piece of mysticism
is innate in all better men as the ‘longing for the mother’, the nostal-
gia for the source from which we came.”54 The phrase is repeated in
the 1928 enlarged version of the talk,55 in which however the empha-
sis is shifted to the primordial image of the women:

the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically

and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from the
start… Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and death are in-
born in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These a
priori categories have by nature a collective character; they are
51
Ibid., p. 28, I am quoting the Nietzsche passage in the form as quoted in the
translation.
52
Ibid., pp. 35 and 37.
53
Ibid., p. 283. Unfortunately, the translation has “primitive idea” for “urtümliches
Bild”, image, and nor does the phrase “our individual world” express the German
“uns erstmals einzige Welt”, our in the beginning only world. The passage is re-
tained in Symbole der Wandlung and correctly translated in CW 5 (§ 373).
54
CW 7, § 476.
55
“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, for the quoted phrase
see CW 7, § 260.

19
 images of parents, wife, and children in general… We must
therefore think of these images as lacking in solid content,
hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence,
and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical
facts, which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to
life. … – An inherited collective image of woman exists in a
man’s unconscious, with the help of which he apprehends the
nature of woman.56

It is striking that in contrast to the visual perspective occasionally be-

coming apparent in the Wandlungen, Jung here entirely ceases to ap-
ply a pictorial interpretation to primordial images. The primordial
image is merely a “virtual” one, without content, below the threshold
of consciousness, just an “aptitude”. We have arrived at Jung’s actual
view of what an archetype is.
The expression “archetype” Jung first used in his 1919 London
talk “Instinct and the Unconscious”. The expression itself reaches
back to antiquity. In the first minutes / on the first pages of the talk
Jung, in accordance with the title, discusses the relation of instincts to
the unconscious, introducing the expression in question, as we will
immediately see, with a kind of suddenness:

the unconscious is the receptacle of all lost memories, and of

all contents that are as yet too feeble to become conscious. …
intentional repressions of painful and incompatible thoughts
and feelings form an important part of the unconscious. I desig-
nate the totality of the contents just mentioned as the “personal
unconscious”. It contains the acquisitions of the individual life,
in contradistinction to another stratum or form of the uncon-
scious, containing the “supra-individual” qualities which were
not acquired but inherited, as for instance instincts, i.e. impulses
to actions without conscious motivation. Moreover, in this stra-
tum we discover the pre-existent forms of apprehension, or the
congenital conditions of intuition, viz. the “archetypes” of ap-
perception, which are the a priori determining constituents of

56
Ibid., §§ 300 f.

20
 all experience. Just as instincts compel man to a conduct of life
that is specifically human, so the archetypes or categories a
priori compel intuition and apprehension to forms specifically
human. I propose to designate the sum of such inherited psy-
chic qualities as instincts and archetypes of apprehension by
the term “collective unconscious”. I call it “collective” because
it does not possess individual contents of sporadic occurrence,
but qualities of uniform and general occurrence. 57

The problem of instincts and the problem of archetypes, con-

tinues Jung, is fundamentally one and the same problem. And we
have to ask, he goes on, whether mankind possesses merely a few, or
rather a great number of primordial forms of archetypes of apprehen-
sion? The answer for Jung is provided by Plato’s philosophy, specif-
ically by the theory of ideas.58 Now let me note that the Platonic no-
tion of an idea is ambiguous, since on the one hand it suggests some-
thing visual – eidos, form – while on the other hand the idéa, accord-
ing to its Platonic definition, is not part of the perceptible world.
Jung’s notion of an archetype (= primordial image59) is similarly am-
biguous; the archetype is not an image, but rather some unconscious
readiness for acquiring content, say also visual content. Jung’s jour-
ney across the history of philosophy in the event leads from Plato to
Kant. In Kant’s view we can have no sensory knowledge whatsoever
of the world in itself, we achieve such knowledge only through the
intervention of our consciousness. It was Kant himself who drew at-
tention to the partial parallel between the theory of ideas and his own

57
„Instinct and the Unconscious”, British Journal of Psychology, vol. X, no. I
(1919), republished in C. G. Jung Contributions to Analytical Psychology (Inter-
national Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method), translated by
H. G. Baynes és Cary F. Baynes, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,
1928, reprinted 1942, pp. 275 f. Note the markedly Kantian flavour of some of
Jung’s formulations here.
58
“Instinct and the Unconscious”, pp. 278 f.
59
See just “Instinct and the Unconscious”, p. 280: “the archetype, the primordial
image”.

21
strivings,60 this was the parallel Jung exploited in his London talk –
and subsequently, again and again, in his writings on archetypes.
Let me briefly quote from his 1934/1954 paper “Archetypes of
the Collective Unconscious”.61 “ ‘Archetype’, as Jung here puts it, “is
an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic εἶδος. For our purposes this
term is apposite and helpful, because it tells us that so far as the col-
lective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with ar-
chaic or – I would say – primordial types, that is, with universal im-
ages that have existed since the remotest times. … The archetype is
essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming con-
scious…” Here Jung adds a note: “One must, for the sake of accuracy,
distinguish between ‘archetype’ and ‘archetypal ideas’. The arche-
type as such is a hypothetical and irrepresentable model…”62 And a
final quote, from Jung’s 1938/1954 paper “Die psychologischen
Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus”: “In former times … it was not too
difficult to understand Plato’s conception of the Idea as supraordinate
and pre-existent to all phenomena. ‘Archetype’, far from being a
modern term, was already in use before the time of St. Augustine,
and was synonymous with ‘Idea’ in the Platonic usage. … it is Kant’s
doctrine of categories … [that] paves the way for a rebirth of the Pla-
tonic spirit.”63 Some paragraphs later Jung then makes an attempt to
be unequivocal: “Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion
that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other
words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression be
admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are
not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form
and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is deter-

60
Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (The Critique of Pure Reason,
1781 [A] and 1787 [B]), see especially A 313 / B 370: “Die Ideen sind bei [Plato]
Urbilder der Dinge selbst” (“For Plato ideas are archetypes of the things them-
selves”, Norman Kemp Smith transl.).
61
Cf. note 32 above.
62
CW 9/I, §§ 5 f. The expression “irrepresentable” is not an entirely happy trans-
lation of the original German “unanschaulich”, the latter having, among its many
connotations, the meaning not visualizable.
63
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype”, in CW 9/I, §§ 149.

22
mined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is
therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience.”64

3. The Jung Picture-Book

Jung passed away in 1961, but shortly after his death there appeared
two notable volumes that carried his name on their covers, and soon
became famous: the biography Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, ed-
ited by Aniela Jaffé,65 the English translation of which came out in
1963, and has since been published in numerous editions; and the col-
lection Man and his Symbols that appeared in 1964.66 In the introduc-
tion of the biography Jaffé admits that Jung “did not regard these
memoirs as a scientific work, nor even as a book by himself. Rather,
he always spoke and wrote of it as ‘Aniela Jaffé’s project’, to which
he had made contributions. At his specific request it is not to be in-
cluded in his Collected Works.”67 As Jaffé informs us:

Jung read through the manuscript of this book and approved it.
Occasionally he corrected passages or added new material. In
turn, I have used the records of our conversations to supple-
ment the chapters he wrote himself, have expanded his some-
times terse allusions, and have eliminated repetitions. The fur-
ther the book progressed, the closer became the fusion between
his work and mine.68

Notwithstanding the first-person narrative, what the readers of the

Memories have before them is, then, a biography, not an autobiogra-
64
Ibid., § 155.
65
See note 20 above.
66
According to the cover page and the imprint the collection was conceived and
edited by Carl G. Jung, the editor after his death being Marie-Louise von Franz,
assisted by co-ordinating editor John Freeman. I am not mentioning here the very
many collections/selections published after 1961 but actually based on Jung’s ear-
lier publications, and am of course not taking into account the Collected Works
and the Gesammelte Werke.
67
Memories…, p. ix.
68
Ibid., p. vii.

23
phy. So the picture the educated public has of Jung is based, to a
large extent, on the one painted by Jaffé. This holds in particular of
the picture we possess of Jung’s time betwen 1913 and 1918. Jung
was suffering from excessive emotions conjured up by neurotic fan-
tasies. However, as the account goes,

To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into im-

ages – that is to say, to find the images which were concealed
in the emotions – I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I
left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been
torn to pieces by them. There is a chance that I might have suc-
ceeded in splitting them off; but in that case I would inexorably
have fallen into a neurosis and so been ultimately destroyed by
them anyhow. … I learned how helpful it can be, from the ther-
apeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie
behind emotions.69

And a few pages later:

I have learned to accept the contents of the unconscious and to

understand them. I know how I must behave toward the inner
images. … I wrote [my] fantasies down first in the Black Book;
later, I transferred them to the Red Book, which I also embel-
lished with drawings.70 It contains most of my mandala draw-
ings. In the Red Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fan-
tasies, but never finished it.71

69
Ibid., p. 177.
70
Here Jaffé inserted a note: “The Black Book consists of six black-bound, smal-
lish leather notebooks. The Red Book, a folio volume bound in red leather, con-
tains the same fantasies couched in elaborately literary form and language, and set
down in calligraphic Gothic script, in the manner of medieval manuscripts”, ibid.,
p. 188. – I have referred to the Red Book on p. 7 above in the present essay, and
have reproduced images from one of the Black Books and from the Red Book on p.
14 above.
71
Memories…, p. 188.

24
 I will soon come to the Red Book, but just now let me stay
with the thread Jung attaches such importance to in the Memories: his
recovery from the neurosis that began around 1913. During the years
filled with fantasies, runs Jaffé’s rendering of Jung, “my family and
my profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I
also had a normal existence”.72 He “gradually began to emerge from
the darkness”, but it was only in 1918–1919 he really saw the light:
“I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a
mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the
time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic
transformations from day to day.”73 These were the transformations
that in the event led Jung to his notion of the “self”,74 and it was ex-
periencing the magic of this notion, the Memories suggest, that final-
ly healed him.75
The volume Man and his Symbols76 grew out of a successful
media event, and – as a book sold in very many copies – itself be-
came a successful chapter in media history. In the spring of 1959 the
BBC commissioned John Freeman to conduct an interview with the
ageing Jung at his countryside home near Zürich, the film was shown
and had a broad impact. Freeman and others persuaded Jung to take
part in putting together a volume written for the non-specialist reader.
He chose his collaborators from among his closest followers, has
planned – as Freeman tells us – the structure of the entire book, su-
pervised the work of each author, and wrote, in English, the – rather
long – first chapter, finishing it only days before his final illness. The
chapter then underwent, by Freeman, “some fairly extensive editing
to improve its intelligibility to the general reader)”77. The chapter is
indeed intelligible; however – to focus directly on the topic of the
present essay – when one encounters, say, an interesting formulation
like “archetypes … are, at the same time, both images and emo-
72
Ibid., p. 189.
73
Ibid., p. 195.
74
Cf. the present essay, pp. 12 f. and p. 15 above.
75
Memories…, p. 199.
76
See note 66 above.
77
Man and his Symbols, p. 11 f. (John Freeman, “Introduction”).

25
tions”,78 then of course one would be interested to know who exactly
the source of that formulation is: Jung? Freeman? or possibly Marie-
Louise von Franz?
As to the “Red Book”, the idea to publish it at some stage was,
in the 1920s, not entirely ruled out by Jung, he discussed the pos-
sibility with people close to him, he even asked one of his followers
to prepare a second copy,79 but in the event did not complete this
strange work. Many decades later, in the 1970s, from within the cir-
cle of the owners/keepers/exploiters of the Jung estate some images
illustrating the codex at long last reached the public. Another twenty
years went by, and in 1997 both
Marie-Louise von Franz and Jung
expert Sonu Shamdasani submit-
ted transcriptions of the codex to
the Jung heirs, who in 2000 com-
missioned Shamdasani with the
preparations for a publication. I
am here displaying the recto and
verso sides of the first page of the
published work.

The Red Book, 1st page recto. The

title of Book One: “Der weg des
komenden” (“The Way of What is to
Come”, English text here and in the
following quoted from the Shamda-
sani edition)

78
Ibid., p. 96 (C. G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious”).
79
See the afterword of the editor in C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed.
by Sonu Shamdasani, New York – London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, p. 212.

26
The Red Book, 1st page verso

27
 “Wenn ich im geiste dieser Zeit rede” (“If I speak in the
spirit of this time”) … “i habe gelernt daß außer dem
geiste dieser zeit noch ein anderer geist am werke ist
nämlich jener der die tiefe alles gegenwärtigen
beherrscht.” (“I have learned that in addition to the
spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work,
namely that which rules the depths of everything
contemporary.”) The Red Book, 1st page verso (the first
lines of the page enlarged)

28
 “Der geist der tiefe nahm meinen verstand und alle meine kenntniße und
stellte sie in den dienst des unerklärbaren und des widersinnigen. er
räubte mir sprache und schrift, für alles das nicht im dienste dieses
einen stand nämlich der … schmelzung von sinn und widersinn welches
übersinn ergiebt. (“The spirit of the depths took my understanding and
all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and
the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that
was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and non-
sense, which produces the supreme meaning.”) The Red Book, 1st page
verso (some further lines of the page enlarged)
“das ist der kommende gott.
nicht ist es der kommende
gott selbst sondern sein bild
das im übersinn erscheint.
gott ist ein bild und die ihn
anbeten müßen ihn im bil-
de des übersinnes anbeten.
der übersinn ist nicht ein
sinn und nicht ein wider-
sinn er ist bild und kraft in
einem herrlichkeit und kraft
zusammen.” (“That is the
God yet to come. It is not
the coming God himself
but his image which ap-
pears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must
worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a
meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and
force together.”) The Red Book, ibid.

29
 These lines in the Red Book were written by Jung in 1914–
1915, that is at a time when he did not yet use the expression “ar-
chetype”, but did use the expression “primordial image”, the two ex-
pressions for him representing the same notion.80 If now Jung says
that god is an “image”, he must mean, in full accordance with his
characteristic world-view, that god is a primordial image. At the be-
ginning of the present essay the question I asked was: do primordial
images, archetypes, have an actually pictorial – visual – dimension?
Jung’s answer, as we saw, was in the negative: an archetype is a
specific pattern of the primordial possibility of conscious apprehen-
sion, but is in itself without content.81 A fascinating metaphor coined
by Jung is “the two-million-year-old man that is in all of us”.82 A
hypothesis this metaphor might suggest: in the course of the many
millions of years of becoming a human being we have come to store
visual experiences (and motor experiences at their root) which in a
given situation are activated as individual inner, mental, images. And
in fact Jung’s formula in December 1916 was: “the inherited poten-
tialities of human imagination. They have always been potentially la-
tent in the structure of the brain.”83 However, by 1942 the insertion
“in the structure of the brain” has vanished from this formula.84 One
has the very strong impression that, as time went by, Jung became
estranged from any kind of biological-psychological explanation. Af-
ter 1916 it was the mystical notion of the “Selbst” he regarded as the
80
See the present essay, pp. 16 f. and 19 ff. above.
81
See esp. pp. 20 f. above.
82
Cf. C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of his Writings
1905–1961, selected and edited by Jolande Jacobi, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1971, p. 76. The collection was originally published in German: Psychologi-
sche Betrachtungen, Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1945.
83
I am quoting from p. 410 of the 1917 English translation (cf. the present essay,
note 6 above). On p. 413 we have: “imprinted on the human brain for untold ages”,
on p. 432: “the images formed in the brain”, and on p. 442: “the wisdom of the ex-
perience of untold ages, deposited in the course of time and lying potential in the
human brain”. There are essential references to the “universal similarity of brains”
as the basis of the collective unconscious in Jung’s 1916 Zürch talk (see p. 451 of
the Collected Papers, 1st edition, cf. note 1 above of the present essay).
84
For the 1942 formulation, see the present essay, p. 17 above.

30
centre of his theory,85 thereby making it impossible for himself to
find any tangible carrier on which to base his primordial images.
Throughout his life Jung was passionately interested in the pictorial;
he drew, painted, sculpted; healed himself and his patients with
pictures; the Red Book is replete with illustrations, from initials to
mandalas and fantasy paintings; but with the problem of primordial
images as an actual scientific problem he was, due to his mystical
leanings I would say, unable to cope.

85
See the present essay, pp. 12 f. above.

31