The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of Eranos - Zurich Lecture Series

The 2025 Zurich Lecture Series, promoted by ISAPZURICH and CHIRON PUBLICATIONS, present

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

by Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D.

Eranos founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s (1881–1962) unpublished anthology of artwork, which we might rubricate under the name “Blue Book,” is traceable to two distinct periods.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”.

On this occasion, it will be presented the book - which collects the texts of the five conferences - by Riccardo Bernardini, The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Founder of Eranos, Foreword by Fabio Merlini, Introduction by Murray Stein, Afterword by Her Royal Highness Irene of The Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau and Lippe-Biesterfeld, Zurich Lecture Series 2025, Chiron Publications, Asheville, NC 2025 (in press).

Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D., is scientific secretary of the Eranos Foundation (Ascona, Switzerland), for which he has worked for more than 20 years. He is director of the Institute of Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy (IPAP, Ivrea), a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and the Association for Research in Analytical Psychology (ARPA), and secretary of the Order of Psychologists of Piedmont (Italy). He teaches Psychology of Evil and Radicalization Processes at Turin University (Italy). His books include Jung a Eranos. Il progetto della psicologia complessa (2011) and, by C.G. Jung, the editions of The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris. Notes of the Seminar given at Eranos in 1943 (with G.P. Quaglino and A. Romano, 2014–2015) and Rebirth. Text and notes of the Lecture held at Eranos in 1939 (with F. Merlini, 2020).

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The Zurich Lecture Series (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. 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 Publications.