The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jung

Craig Stephenson

Routledge

Synopsis

The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jungcentres on two pivotal meetings: Victoria Ocampo and Hermann von Keyserling’s in 1929, and Ocampo and Carl Gustav Jung’s in 1934. The first section of the book chronicles these encounters, which proved to be key moments in the lives of the players and had repercussions both private and public. The later sections consist of the correspondence and other writings that preceded and followed these meetings, translated from French, German, and Spanish, much of it for the first time.

Jung framed Keyserling’s account of the encounter with Ocampo as “one of the most beautiful animus-anima stories I have ever heard.” But that story, told here from the three points of view of the pioneering Argentine intellectual, the Baltic German philosopher, and the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, can also be read in the contexts of early-twentieth-century feminism and of gender and sexual politics, of the colonizing European gaze on the Americas, of Argentina and its cultural complexes, of typological impasses, and of Eros and the power of words.

The fraught relationships and power dynamics among three influential figures will be of interest to analytical psychologists, historians of psychological disciplines and of South America, as well as general readers.

About the Author

Craig Stephenson is a Licensed Psychoanalyst and a certified Jungian analyst. He studied Analytical Psychology at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich, and Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama at the Institute for Psychodrama, Zümikon, Switzerland. He received his doctorate from the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. He worked in private practice in Paris, France, New York and now in Lisbon, Portugal. He served on the board of directors of the Philemon Foundation and was the Director of Training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York (JPA). His books include Anteros: A Forgotten Myth (Routledge), Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (Routledge), Jung and Moreno: Essays on the Theatre of Human Nature (Routledge), Ages of Anxiety (Spring Journal Books), and On Visionary and Psychological Art: Notes on C G Jung’s Lectures on Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (Princeton University Press). His new book is The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C G Jung: Writing to the Woman Who Was Everything (Routledge).

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