Olga Frobe-Kapteyn
Olga Froebe initially met Jung in 1930 at Hermann Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in Darmstadt. Following her conversation with Otto, she invited Jung to speak at the first Eranos Conference in August 1933. Jung accepted her invitation and lectured the first year on “The Psychological Process of Individuation.” Froebe and Jung are standing outside of Casa Eranos in this 1933 photograph.
Born in London to a feminist/social activist mother and engineer father, Olga attended the North London Collegiate School, where she was a close friend of Marie Stopes.[1] She studied art history in Zürich, Switzerland, and in 1909 married musician and conductor Iwan Fröbe who died a few years later in a plane crash.
At the outbreak of World War I she relocated from Berlin to Zurich, where she had a literary salon known as the “Table Ronde” or round table.
In 1920 she moved to Casa Gabriella in Ascona, Switzerland where she began to study Indian philosophy and meditation and to take an interest in theosophy. Among her friends and influences were German poet Ludwig Derleth, psychologist Carl Jung, and Richard Wilhelm, whose translation of the I Ching made it accessible to her. She also knew many members of the School of Wisdom (Schule der Weisheit), run by Count Hermann Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, whose members were engrossed in investigating the common root of all religions, as well as members of the Ecumenical Circle in Marburg.
In 1928, with as yet no clear purpose in mind, she built a conference room near her home. Carl Jung suggested that she use the conference room as a “meeting place between East and West” This gave birth to the annual meeting of intellectual minds known as Eranos, which today continues to provide an opportunity for scholars of many different fields to meet and share their research and ideas on human spirituality. The name “Eranos” was suggested to her by religious historian Rudolf Otto, whose human-centered concept of religion had a deep impact on the origins and evolution of Eranos.
Carl Jung also remained a significant participant in the organisation of the Eranos conferences. Although the symposia were not specifically Jungian in focus or concept, they did employ the idea of archetypes.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Olga’s ongoing research in archetypes took her to major libraries in Europe and America, including the Vatican Library, the British Museum, the Morgan Library in New York City, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Her diverse and intensive studies provided her with material for her Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism which contains more than six thousand images and assisted the research of many Eranos lecturers and other scholars over the years.
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn died at her home in Casa Gabriella in 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Froebe-Kapteyn
The Visions of Olga Frobe-Kapteyn
Note:
In a letter to Jung dated 24 June 1960 Frau Frobe described the following vision:
Somewhere in an endless night, dimly illuminated, stood the ruins of an old cathedral . . .High up there was a sort of wooden scaffolding beneath the ruins of the roof.
On this scaffolding I was fastened crosswise, facing downwards. . .I knew that I was going to be pierced through the heart with a lance from behind . . .”
Second vision:
“I was in my bed in the clinic in Bellinzona. Around me were the ’little nurses’ . . .
One of the nurses was supposed to sleep on a pile of mattresses beside my bed.
I was afraid because the matron said she was going to Jock us in until she returned at 11 o’clock.
Then I grew frightened and the room changed into a cellar in which my bed stood . . . .
The nurse slept beside my bed . . .and I touched her head to assure myself that she was still there . . . .
I spent the whole night in terror of being locked in.”
The letter says: “Now [a month after the operation] I do not see any more visions, but try every day to reconstruct something [from them].”
To Olga Frobe-Kapteyn
Dear Frau Frobe, 28 June 1960
With great regret I have heard that you have had to undergo an operation for cataract.
I am now greatly relieved to know that the operation has been a success.
As you know, physical events of this kind are always at the same time psychic ones, and what the doctors not unjustly consider to be post-operative shock is in reality the release of concomitant psychic phenomena that are already present.
In so far as cataract causes blindness, it represents psychologically an unconsciousness of those contents which then appear in the shock.
The more of these contents there are and the stronger they are, the more closely does the conscious perception of them approximate to a delirious state.
The medicaments in the prescription you mention do not in themselves cause delirium, but they can bring about an abaissement du niveau mental which helps to make the unconscious contents visible.
The first vision depicts what comes to consciousness in the night of blindness.
The cathedral is an expression of the collective Christianity in which you as a Christian are crucified (imitatio Christi).
This vision indicates that you, as a contemporary, whole human being, are still nailed fast in the Christian form.
The cathedral, however, is in ruins.
Consequently-one might say-you get into the cellar, i.e., from high up aloft down into a depth in which you appear to be locked up.
The presence of the nurse shows that this is the post-operative period, the time of the so-called shock, when you still cannot make out where you are locked up, or at least are afraid of being locked up .
There you feel so absolutely alone with yourself that you have anxiously to assure yourself that the nurse is still there.
This is a clear indication that the unconscious is manifesting a strong tendency to lock you up with yourself, so that you are deprived of any form of communication with the outside world.
Anyone who falls down from the roof or ceiling of the Christian cathedral falls into himself.
Think of the situation of the historical Jesus who felt himself abandoned by God on the Cross and was nothing more than himself alone!
We have believed this for so long and have asserted that someme it must become a reality.
Now the reconstruction has begun.
We must build ourselves up again with all the means at our command (the temple that is built again on the third day).
You have to do this yourself, and I would therefore advise you to carry on with your attempts to create form and at least to build up in pictures what you can build up out of yourself.
If you do that you are wholly on the right track.
From that which you do it will be seen who you are. In your newest attempts the very oldest things of all, the most primordial, become visible.
With best wishes,
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 568-569
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