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 Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (Asheville, NC: Zurich Lecture Series, Vol. XII, Chiron Publications, 2025, published under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation)

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

Foreword by Fabio Merlini, Introduction by Murray Stein, Afterword by Her Royal Highness Princess Irene of The Netherlands

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 The unpublished anthology of her artworks, which we refer to today as the Blue Book, can be traced back to two distinct periods.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.”

On the occasion of the Zurich Lecture Series 2025, 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 Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Foreword by Fabio Merlini, Introduction by Murray Stein, Afterword by Her Royal Highness Princess Irene of The Netherlands. Zurich Lecture Series, Vol. XII, Chiron Publications, Asheville, NC 2025, published under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation, ISBN 978-16-8503-619-5, 456 pp.

Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D., serves as Scientific Secretary of the Eranos Foundation (Ascona, Switzerland), for which he has been supervising the study, restoration, conservation, and museum exhibitions of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s "Blue Book," the corpus of her works of art, for over twenty years. He is director of the Institute of Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy (IPAP, awarded by the European Commission with the EU Health Award—Mental Health 2021), a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and the Association for Research in Analytical Psychology (ARPA), Secretary of the Order of Psychologists of Piedmont, and Member of the Commission for Typical Acts – Protection of Citizens and the Profession of the National Council of Psychologists (CNOP) (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), Rebirth Symbols in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. From Joachim of Fiore to C.G. Jung (2022), and The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (2025). He also edited C.G. Jung’s 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). Together with Fabio Merlini, he is the editorial responsible for the Eranos Yearbooks series, published since 1933.

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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.