About the Author

Richard Wilhelm, C.G. Jung, and Cary F. Baynes, whose collective scholarship made possible the Bollingen edition of the I Ching, also contributed to this presentation of another ancient Taoist text. "The Secret of the Golden Flower," the treatise that forms the central part of this book, was discovered by Professor Wilhelm, who recognized it as essentially a practical guide to the integration of personality. His German translation, published in the autumn of 1929 shortly before his death, was immediately hailed by Jung as a link between the insights of the East and his own psychological research, a relationship explored by the great analytical psychologist in a brilliant and significant commentary. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded the field of analytical psychology. He developed his theories under the tutelage of Eugen Bleuler at Burgholz Hospital, and later worked with Sigmund Freud. His later break with Freud established his system of analysis as different from Freud's psychoanalysis. His development of the concepts of synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, collective unconsciousness, extraversion and introversion were milestones in the understanding of the human psyche.