The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga

Jung’s landmark seminar on kundalini yoga and the symbolic transformations of inner experience

C. G. Jung’s seminar on kundalini yoga, presented to the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1932, is widely regarded as a milestone in the psychological understanding of Eastern thought. Kundalini yoga presented Jung with a model for the developmental phases of higher consciousness, and he interpreted its symbols in terms of the process of individuation. The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga brings together these lectures and seminar discussions into a single illuminating volume. It gives today’s readers an appreciation of some of the questions that stirred the minds of analysts in the 1930s: What is the relation between Eastern schools of liberation and Western psychotherapy? What connection is there between esoteric religious traditions and spontaneous individual experience? What light do the symbols of kundalini yoga shine on conditions diagnosed as psychotic? The book also includes a seminar by the Indologist Wilhelm Hauer, presented in conjunction with Jung’s own, and Sir John Woodroffe’s classic translation of the tantric text, the Sat-cakra Nirupana.