promoting such enterprise during the historical times the lectures were given. I began reading the content of the lectures with this obvious, even painful gap in mind, trying to listen to his understanding of history and historical events.
Transferring the “Archimedean point” (1) inwards, allowing the exploration of mythical phenomena of the unconscious reveals, according to Jung, the pre-existing archetypal sphere and another kind of history that he has referred to elsewhere as natural history:
By “history” we usually mean the history which we “make,” and we call this “objective history.” The truly creative fantasy activity of the brain has nothing to do with this kind of history, but solely with that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely, the history of the brain-structure. And this structure tells its own story, which is the story of mankind: the unending myth of death and rebirth, and of the multitudinous figures who weave in and out of this mystery.
(Jung, 1918: 10)
Although recognising this “touches on a mode of existence that fails to coincide with empirically perceptible reality” (75), for Jung these experiences could teach us about our “true histories” leading to a dimension which is in many ways more “objective” than that of external history and reality. In 1933, the same year this seminar was given Jung has written elsewhere about his views of the concept of history:
When we look at human history, we see only what happens on the surface, and even this is distorted in the faded mirror of tradition. But what has really been happening eludes the inquiring eye of the historian, for the true historical event lies deeply buried, experienced by all and observed by none. It is the most private and most subjective of psychic experiences. Wars, dynasties, social upheavals, conquests, and religions are but the superficial