Introduction

Abstract

The time of our writing, 2010, is two years short of a century since the original publication of Carl Gustav Jung’s monograph, The Psychology of the Unconscious. In that monograph Jung (1912/1919) introduced the idea of the collective unconscious. It marked the Swiss psychiatrist’s departure from Freudian psychoanalysis and the beginning of analytical psychology, a unique variant of depth psychology. By now, the Jungian movement is well established worldwide both as a practical framework in psychotherapy and as a philosophical approach to the self, and has branched into several post-Jungian schools of thought (Samuels, 1985; Kirsch, 2000). ‘Jung’ is famous even if precise details of his theory are less known and are often misunderstood (a reliable introductory text is Stein, 1998).