The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of Eranos

The Eranos Foundation, in collaboration with and with the support of the Municipality of Ascona, is pleased to invite you, on Thursday, June 11, at 5:30 pm, at the Teatro del Gatto in Ascona, to the official presentation of Riccardo Bernardini’s book The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, with a preface by Fabio Merlini, an introduction by Murray Stein, and an afterword by Her Royal Highness Princess Irene of the Netherlands (Asheville, NC: Zurich Lecture Series, Vol. XII, Chiron Publications, 2025), published under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation.

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) was the pioneering founder of the famous Eranos Conferences, which since the early 1930s have attracted to Ascona (Switzerland) some of the most influential scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries and made an extraordinary contribution to world intellectual history. The unpublished anthology of her artworks, which we refer to today as the Blue Book, can be traced back to two distinct periods. The first phase was essential for a series of “Meditation Plates,” painted between c. 1926 and 1934, and particularly during her collaboration with theosophist Alice Ann Bailey (1880–1949). The second phase concerns a collection of “Visions,” drawn between 1934 and 1938. These were the crucial years of her enduring intellectual relationship with psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who was one of the main sources of inspiration at Eranos and provided the impetus for the creation of the Eranos Archive for Research in Symbolism. Convinced that “the deepest things in human life … can only be expressed in images,” Fröbe-Kapteyn documented in her Blue Book the forms of imagination of a creative and independent woman. Because of the care with which she had drawn, composed, and preserved it, Fröbe-Kapteyn perhaps hoped that her Blue Book would survive her and also allow future generations to rediscover and make it their own, as a special testament to that endless search for the Self, at once personal and universal, that Jung would theorize with the idea of the “individuation process.”

Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D., serves as Scientific Secretary of the Eranos Foundation (Ascona, Switzerland), for which he has been supervising the study, restoration, conservation, and museum exhibitions of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s "Blue Book," the corpus of her works of art, for over twenty years. He is director of the Institute of Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy (IPAP, awarded by the European Commission with the EU Health Award—Mental Health 2021), a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and the Association for Research in Analytical Psychology (ARPA), Secretary of the Order of Psychologists of Piedmont, and Member of the Commission for Typical Acts – Protection of Citizens and the Profession of the National Council of Psychologists (CNOP) (Italy). His books include Jung a Eranos. Il progetto della psicologia complessa [Jung at Eranos. The Complex Psychology Project] (2011), Rebirth Symbols in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. From Joachim of Fiore to C.G. Jung (2022), and The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (2025). He also edited C.G. Jung’s The Solar Myths and Opicinus de Canistris. Notes of the Seminar given at Eranos in 1943 (with G.P. Quaglino and A. Romano, 2014–2015) and Rebirth. Text and notes of the Lecture held at Eranos in 1939 (with F. Merlini, 2020). Together with Fabio Merlini, he is the editorial responsible for the Eranos Yearbooks series, published since 1933.