ABSTRACT
In 1916 Jung wrote a manuscript entitled ‘Die Transzendente Funktion’, which lay in his files until 1953. It was translated into English by A. R. Pope and published by the student association of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1957. Jung’s revised version of the original German paper was published in 1958. ‘The Transcendent Function’, in CW8, is based on the revised German essay and the Pope translation. In a short ‘Prefatory Note’ Jung states:
After forty-two years, the problem has lost nothing of its topicality … The essay may therefore stand, with all its imperfections, as an historical document … (the) problem is identical with the universal question: How does one come to terms in practice with the unconscious? … For the unconscious is not this thing or that; it is the Unknown as it immediately affects us.1
