The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris ─ Notes of the Seminar Given at Eranos in 1943

C.G. Jung held an ‘extemporaneous’ seminar on "The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris" at the 1943 Eranos Conference. In a complete version for the first time, this book presents all of the known material relating to the seminar, including notes taken by two of his students, Alwine von Keller and Rivkah Scharf Kluger, and the outline that Jung himself prepared. Opicinus de Canistris (1296–c. 1352) was a priest and cartographer from near Pavia, Italy. His typically medieval cartography is characterized by historical, theological, symbolic and astrological references along with a curious anthropomorphism, which depicted continents and oceans with human features. Jung recognized this as a projection of Opicinus’ inner world and interpreted the maps of the world as mandalas, where the integration of the shadow, the dark principle, was missing.

C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology.
Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and extraversion and introversion. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archeology, literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death.
The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.
Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, and the concepts of socionics were developed from Jung’s theory of psychological types.