The 2025 Zurich Lecture Series

Eranos founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s (1881–1962) unpublished anthology of artwork, which we might rubricate under the name “Blue Book,” is traceable to two distinct periods. The first phase is inherent in a series of “Meditation Plates” painted between 1926 and 1934: these images are expressed through a geometric rigor, eschewing any naturalism of form. As a result of her deepening of Analytical Psychology and the maturation of her intellectual relationship with C.G. Jung, one of the most influential figures in her life and among the most important inspirers of the Eranos Conferences, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s artistic practice increasingly turned toward a figurative style that recalled the active imagination, to which the works of the second period can be traced: a collection of 315 “Visions,” arranged in 12 blue-bound albums, drawn between 1934 and 1938. Convinced that “The deepest things in human life. . .can only be expressed in images,” Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn documented in her “Blue Book” the forms of imagination of a creative and independent subjectivity, capable of holding together the identities of woman, mother, scholar, artist, and spiritualist. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn perhaps hoped that her “Blue Book” would survive her and allow the generations that would follow her to rediscover and make it their own, as a special attestation of that endless search for Self, at once personal and universal, that Jung would theorize with the idea of “individuation process”.