Book excerpt: An authoritative collection of Jung’s writings on contemporary events, including The Undiscovered Self and Flying Saucers Civilization in Transition features Jung’s writings on contemporary events, especially the relation between the individual and society. In the earliest essay, “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918), Jung advanced the theory that World War I was a psychological crisis originating in the collective unconscious of individuals. In other essays included here, he pursued this theory in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the upheaval in Germany, and he gave it a much wider application in two major works of his last years, also featured here—Flying Saucers, which is about the birth of a myth that Jung regarded as a reaction to the scientific trends of a technological era, and The Undiscovered Self.