Introduction to Volume 6

Abstract

Carl Gustav Jung’s university lectures, conducted in the winter semester of 1938/1939 (28 October–3 March) and the first half of the summer semester 1939 (28 April–9 June), and announced as “Introduction to the Psy chol ogy of the Unconscious,” were dedicated to the topic of Eastern spirituality. Starting out with the psychological technique of active imagination, he sought to find parallels in Eastern meditative practices. His focus was on meditation as taught by dif fer ent yogic traditions and in Buddhist practice. The final four lectures of the summer semester 1939 (16 June–7 July) dealt with those meditative practices in Chris tian ity that Jung saw as equivalent to the aforementioned examples from the East. Here Jung was particularly interested in The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, which formed the main topic of the following winter semester 1939/1940. Those four lectures will be published together with the lectures of 1939/1940 as volume 7 of this series.14 After a break over the summer of 1940, Jung restarted his lectures with a summary of the previous semesters. As Jung briefly returned to the topic of Eastern meditation as part of a summation, the first and second lectures of the winter semester 1940/f/1941 are published at the end of this volume. Jung’s engagement with Eastern spirituality and yoga can, at least, be traced back to the time of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido15 (1912), which included a psychological reading of the Upanishads and the Rigveda.16 His acquaintance with John Woodroffe’s (aka Arthur Avalon)17 The Serpent Power − Jung owned a copy of the first edition of