C.G. Jung And China: A Continued Dialogue

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C.G. Jung and China: A Continued Dialogue shen heyong In the summer of 1994, Murray Stein, his wife Jan Stein, Thomas Kirsch (then president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, IAAP), and his wife Jean Kirsch (then the president of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco) visited China on behalf of the IAAP. At the reception seminar, Thomas Kirsch gave a presentation on “Jung and Tao” at the South China Normal University, renewing the dialogue between China and Jung. As Murray Stein described in his report: . . . We came to China as representatives of IAAP, curious as to what we would find in this vast and ancient civilization which is just now once again opening to the West and aware that this would be an historic event if the contact between Jungian psychology and the Chinese we were to meet turned out to be auspicious. (1995, 12) Shen Heyong Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 3, Number 2, pp. 5–14, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. © 2009 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2009.3.2.5. 6 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:2 / spring 2009 In fact, the visit was auspicious from the outset, but much work had to be done to harvest the potential we all felt possible. Considerable discussion revolved around how to understand and translate Jung’s term Self into Chinese. Following the event, a lively correspondence continued the discussion, and in his “Report on an IAAP Visit to China,” Dr. Stein quoted the following passage from one of my letters: “I prefer to use Zi Xing (self nature) to translate Jung’s Self. Zi Xing originally was a special term of
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