PSYCHE

Published in 1846, Psyche is one of the most profound and least known works of German Romanticism. In it, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) — physician, painter, naturalist, and visionary thinker — proposes an organic and symbolic understanding of the soul that anticipates, with astonishing clarity, the developments of Freud and Jung's depth psychology. His reflection on the strata of psychic life, the unity between nature and spirit, and the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious constitutes one of the first systematic attempts to conceive of interiority as a cosmic process. Forgotten for decades, Psyche was a silent source in the configuration of contemporary psychological thought. Carl Gustav Jung recognized Carus as one of his precursors and took up many of his intuitions — the autonomy of the unconscious, the symbolic function of nature, the soul as mediator between body and spirit — to construct his own analytical psychology. Freud, for his part, found in Carus an early formulation of what he would later call "the unconscious." This edition, edited by Juan Arnau, offers for the first time in Spanish a careful translation and an introductory study that place this work in its philosophical and scientific context, revealing the visionary dimension of an author who thought of the soul as the horizon in which nature becomes conscious of itself. "Carl Gustav Carus pointed to the unconscious as the essential basis of the psyche."