Jung's Inscribed Rare Taoist Text
Influential for artists like Jackson Pollock and David Bowie, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that dreams, myth, and art all draw from a shared "collective unconscious," a deep reservoir of symbols and archetypes common to all of humanity. When sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent Jung a German translation of this 17th-century Chinese Taoist text in 1928, Jung later wrote that it was the book that unlocked his understanding of alchemy and redirected the entire course of his later work. Jung provided the commentary for Wilhelm's published translation, and this 1931 first British edition is a copy Jung personally inscribed to his long-time secretary Mary Foote, noting in Latin that she was "well deserving" of the honor. A piece of history, and a reminder that the deepest thinking rarely happens in isolation.
