Zurich Lecture Series 2025 – The Art of the Self – Murray Stein interviews Riccardo Bernardini
December 17, 2024 at 09:23PM
International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP)
Zurich Lecture Series 2025
“The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of Eranos”
Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D. (Eranos Foundation, Ascona)
Zurich, October 15-18, 2024
In the case of Carl Gustav Jung, who was among the main inspirers of the Eranos Conferences held in Ascona (Switzerland), the publication of the Liber Novus or The Red Book, as well as even more recently of The Art of C.G. Jung and of his Black Books, helped to further highlight the conjunction between his personal life path, his imaginative world, and the construction of his scientific thought. Until now, some allusions by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1962), the creator of the Eranos symposia, about the link between life and work, have instead sounded less comprehensible. For example, she stated: “The story of Eranos can be found in an unwritten book, which I often leaf through, read, examine, and compare – I also look at the pictures, since there are many of them in this book – and search for the connections that form the whole in a meaningful and unifying way. The overall figure, the pattern that becomes visible, is so twisted and intertwined with the pattern of my life that it is indeed difficult to separate them.” Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s words become clearer today in light of the unpublished anthology of her artworks, which we might rubricate under the name “Blue Book,” traceable to two distinct periods.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, and a choice of predominantly cold colors, almost always on a blue background. As a result of her deepening of Analytical Psychology and the maturation of her intellectual relationship with Jung, 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. Because of the care with which it was drawn, collected, and preserved, 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”. The five lectures will explore the following themes: 1. The “Blue Book” of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the story of Eranos; 2. The life and work of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of Eranos and among the most influential and unknown figures at the origins of Analytical Psychology; 3. The relationship between Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and C.G. Jung: personal, analytical, and archetypal dimensions; 4. Analytic Psychology as a key to the “Blue Book”: analytic reflections and psychotherapeutic techniques in clinical work with images; 5. The female individuation process in Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s “Blue Book”: an initiatic text for our time?
Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D., serves as Scientific Secretary of the Eranos Foundation (Ascona, Switzerland), for which he has worked for more than 20 years. He is the Founding President of the Institute of Analytical Psychology and Psychoterapy (IPAP), Postgraduate School of Psychotherapy (Ivrea, Italy). A Member of the Associazione per la Ricerca in Psicologia Analitica (ARPA, Italy) and the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), since 2019 he holds the elective office of Secretary of the Order of Psychologists of Piedmont, the public authority that administers the more than 9,000 psychologists working in the Piedmont Region (Italy). He teaches Psychology of Evil and Radicalization Processes at Turin University (Italy). His books include Jung a Eranos. Il progetto della psicologia complessa [Jung at Eranos. The Complex Psychology Project] (2011) and Rebirth Symbols in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. From Joachim of Fiore to C.G. Jung (2022). He has also led to publication C.G. Jung’s The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris. Notes of the Seminar Given at Eranos in 1943 (edited with G.P. Quaglino and A. Romano, 2014–2015) and the original edition of Jung’s Rebirth. Text and Notes of the Lecture held at Eranos in 1939 (edited with F. Merlini, 2020). He is the co-editor of the Eranos Yearbooks series.
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