The Jung - Neumann Letters – An Editor's Perspective

Official launch of

The Jung-Neumann Letters

An International Conference in Celebration of a Creative Relationship

Kibbutz Shefayim, April 24-26, 2015, Conference Website Trailer

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You are invited to hear 

The story of the Jung Neumann Correspondence

directly from the Editor

Martin Liebscher will present

The Editor's Perspective

followed by a comparison of

The Jung-Neumann Letters and the Jung-Kirsch Letters

in which Martin Liebscher and Ann Lammers, editor of the Jung-Kirsch Letters, will present and discuss the two correspondences. The discussion will be moderated by Murray Stein. 

In his presentation Dr. Liebscher will introduce the main topics of the correspondence between Jung and Neumann. Whereas the letters of the pre-war years (1934-1940) were mainly concerned with Neumann’s attempt to engage Jung in a debate about his understanding of Judaism and Jewish mysticism, the correspondence after 1945 give an insight into the institutionalisation of Jungian psychology and the rivalries amongst Jung’s followers in Zurich which threatened to marginalise the works of outsiders like Neumann.

Following Martin Liebscher’s discussion of the Jung-Neumann and the Neumann-Kirsch relationships, Dr. Lammers will talk about James Kirsch’s discipleship with Jung and his somewhat prickly sibling relationship with Neumann. She will explore the contrasts between Kirsch’s and Neumann’s reactions to Jung during the 1930s, when Jung’s understanding, regarding both German nationalism and Judaism, was in a process of such rapid growth. Kirsch and Neumann served as two of Jung’s primary critics and teachers in this period, but with striking differences. Now that both correspondences are published, one sees how truly Jung respected these Jewish followers, while responding to each of them in profoundly individual ways. Although Jung certainly loved Kirsch as a friend and colleague, Neumann’s more forthright criticism may, paradoxically, have led Jung to trust him more fully.

Dr. Martin Liebscher is Senior Research Fellow at the German Department and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines at University College London, as well as Philemon Editor of the works of C.G. Jung. His publications include Thinking the Unconscious. Nineteenth Century German Thought (2010) and Libido und Wille zur Macht. C.G. Jungs Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche (2012). He is the editor of the correspondence between C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann (2015) and Jung’s ETH lectures.

Ann Conrad Lammers earned her Master of Divinity at The General Theological Seminary and her doctorate at Yale. After her first book, In God’s Shadow: The Collaboration of Victor White and C. G. Jung (Paulist, 1994), she edited The Jung-White Letters (Routledge, 2007). She later edited and co-translated The Jung-Kirsch Letters (Routledge, 2011), whose German edition has recently appeared (Patmos, 2014). She is a Jungian psychotherapist in southern New Hampshire.

Don’t miss this historical event!

Jung Neumann Letters Conference Website

Analytical Psychology in Exile: 

The Correspondence of C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann,

edited and with an introduction by Martin Liebscher,

will be published in the Philemon Series by Princeton University Press.

Conference attendees will be the very first to purchase and receive copies of the Correspondence,
at a 20% discount by Princeton University Press. After registration, a promotion code is sent to participants.

The Jung Neumann Letters Conference

International Advisory Board

Erel Shalit • Murray Stein • Batya Brosh • John Beebe • Riccardo Bernardini

Jerome Bernstein • Ann Casement • Angela Connolly • Tom Kirsch • Patricia Michan

Joerg Rasche • Nancy Swift Furlotti • Luigi Zoja • Liliana Wahba

Recollection and Recollectivization - a lecture by Erel Shalit

Friday February 13, 2015 at 7:15 pm

A lecture by Erel Shalit at the Park Hill Congregational Church (U.C.C.) 

at 2600 Leyden Street in Denver

for more information, here

Recollection and Recollectivization

The Transient Personality in Search of Memory

On the dark, shadowy side of the postmodern condition, we stumble upon transiency and fragmentation, alienation and rootlessness.

In this lecture, I will look at ‘the never guilty mass man’, of the post-modern condition, related to Erich Neumann’s concept of recollectivization.

Particularly, we may observe the relationship between the individual and the fragmented group, which constellates as transient crowd formation. In the condition of recollectivization, ego and consciousness are lost in the group, however, in a way strikingly different from the early state of oneness with the group.

Recollection serves as an antidote to recollectivization, and may show us “how we should act when the libido gets blocked” (CW 5). A smell and a fragrance, a subtle taste “of a cake dipped in tea,” as Proust says, re-calling a childhood memory, a lost time, a forgotten era, and the recollection of ancient wisdom and the ancestors, may provide the individual, as well as the group, with an anchor across the boundaries of time, by means of linking back to past heritage, and serving as a bridge to future developments. Thus, recollection is a central aspect of the conscious, explored life.

Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Tel Aviv, past President of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology, and founding Director of the Jungian Analytical Psychotherapy Program at Bar Ilan University. He is the author of several books, and chair of the forthcoming Jung Neumann Letters Conference, April 24-26, 2015.