[Title not given in source]

These lectures given at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in the academic year 1933 to 1934 are appearing in English for the first time, and this is the initial volume in a series of eight running up to 1941. The lectures are accompanied by extensive scholarly footnotes by the painstaking editors. This volume contains a general introduction setting the scene for these lectures including the founding of the psychology department at ETH in the 1890s. Jung's approach is interdisciplinary, covering biological, ethnic, medical, philosophical, cultural-historical and religious aspects. The authors had access to Jung's own notes as well as those of attendees, and we learn that his work runs to 100,000 pages and 35,000 letters. The editors note that Jung was undoubtedly the most historically and philosophically minded of psychologists in his generation, which comes out clearly in the erudition displayed in the lectures.

I found it impressive that Jung refers with equal facility to the history of philosophy and psychology in French, German and British thought - in the specific introduction, the editor refers to previous histories of psychology and explains the uniqueness of Jung's approach, which includes extensive treatment of cases from spiritualism and mediumship. In France, he mentions the impact of La Mettrie's 'L'Homme Machine', developed further by Condillac and expressed in the prevalence of the mechanistic metaphor. Each lecture is preceded by answers to submitted questions, and it is amusing to find that one attendee commented that they were too popular!

As well as famous names, many lesser thinkers are referred to and the reader gains a good understanding of the development of various currents of thought. Five lectures are devoted to the phenomenology of cases from Jerome Kerner and Theodore Flournoy, then, towards the end, he introduces a fascinating series of diagrams characterising inward and outward facing of human psychic function, which I had not seen in other work. One of these deals with the polarities between light and unity on one hand and dark and plurality on the other. On page 126, he provides a schema which he subsequently applies in discussing a number of historical characters, including Rockefeller, Goethe and Nietzsche. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Goethe emerges as the most balanced and integrated: 'nothing human was strange to him'. Jung also comments on the imbalance within the culture, which is still the case with our predominant orientation towards the outer and analytical thinking, although he also observes that 'every point of view has an inner logic, and is a reality.' (p. 138) This important new series of volumes will be of interest not only to Jung scholars, but also to the wider public as so much of his diagnosis still stands today.