Riccardo Bernardini, The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Prefazione Fabio Merlini, Introduzione di Murray Stein, Postfazione di Sua Altezza Reale Principessa Irene dei Paesi Bassi, Zurich Lecture Series, Vol. XII, Chiron Publications, Asheville, NC 2025

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Register Today for the 

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2025 Zürich

Lecture Series

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ISAPZURICH and

CHIRON PUBLICATIONS
present

Riccardo Bernardini

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The Art of the Self
The Blue Book of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, 

founder of Eranos
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October 15-18

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Registration Deadline – October 8

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The ZLS was established in 2009 for the purpose of presenting annually a significant new work by a selected Jungian psychoanalyst or scholar who has previously offered innovative contributions to the field of Analytical Psychology by either: bringing analytical a psychology into meaningful dialogue with other scientific, artistic, and academic disciplines; showing how analytical psychology can lead to a better understanding of contemporary global concerns relating to the environment, politics, religion; or expanding the concepts of analytical psychology as they are applied clinically.

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For the Series, the selected lecturer delivers lectures over a two-day period in Zürich based on a previously unpublished book-length work, which is then published by Chiron Publication.

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Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) was the pioneering founder of the famous Eranos Conferences, which since the early 1930s have attracted to Ascona (Switzerland) some of the most influential scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries and made an extraordinary contribution to world intellectual history.

The unpublished anthology of her artworks, which we refer to today as the Blue Book, can be traced back to two distinct periods. The first phase was essential for a series of “Meditation Plates,” painted between c. 1926 and 1934, and particularly during her collaboration with theosophist Alice Ann Bailey (1880–1949). The second phase concerns a collection of “Visions,” drawn between 1934 and 1938. These were the crucial years of her enduring intellectual relationship with psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who was one of the main sources of inspiration at Eranos and provided the impetus for the creation of the Eranos Archive for Research in Symbolism. Convinced that “the deepest things in human life … can only be expressed in images,” Fröbe-Kapteyn documented in her Blue Book the forms of imagination of a creative and independent woman.

Because of the care with which she had drawn, composed, and preserved it, Fröbe-Kapteyn perhaps hoped that her Blue Book would survive her and also allow future generations to rediscover and make it their own, as a special testament to that endless search for the Self, at once personal and universal, that Jung would theorize with the idea of the “individuation process.”