McCORMICK, Harold F[owler]. From My Experiences Concerning Aviation. Aus meinen Erfahrungen über das Flugwesen.

The Psychology of Flight

McCORMICK, Harold F[owler]. From My Experiences Concerning Aviation. Aus meinen Erfahrungen über das Flugwesen. S.l.: s.n. [Zurich. 1917.]

8vo. Original black goatskin, lettered and ruled in gilt, turn-ins gilt, edges gilt, gilt metallic endpapers in imitation of watered silk; pp. 78, 78; text in facing English and German, numerous diagrams in the text; a few minor scuffs to boards, small abrasion to lower joint, short splits to joints expertly repaired; else a fine copy.

Extremely rare first edition of this privately printed bilingual work, printed in facing English and German, based on a lecture given in December 1917 at the Psychological Club in Zurich, co-founded in 1916 by Carl Gustav and Emma Jung in collaboration with the author and his wife, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller and a former patient of Jung’s.

Chicago-born businessman Harold Fowler McCormick (1872–1941) was born into American industrial aristocracy and developed an early interest in aviation. An officer in the Aero Club of Illinois (est. 1910), he set up a commercial commuter airline connecting Chicago’s North Shore suburbs and Grant Park with the South Shore Country Club of Chicago, of which he was a founder; the endeavour lasted only a year due to treacherous winds and an unfavourable climate.

Here, McCormick explores flying as ‘the concrete realization of many phantasies, dreams, hopes, and aspirations […] It has finally given reality in form to the former symbol, and in turn furnishees new form for new symbols with which the ever searching mind of man seizes and turns and twists for new productions to come’ (pp. 2–3). Touching on the Icarus myth, Leonardo, Faust, the Edda, and the Panchatantra, amongst other sources, McCormick discusses man’s long-standing unconscious desire for flight, innovations in aviation (including the recent use of war planes during the First World War), and the physics behind flight, illustrated by numerous diagrams in the text. The final section is a curious psychological assessment of the aeroplane itself: its ascents and descents ‘are like the ascensions and dips of life’, the biplane is characterised as an extrovert and the monoplane as an introvert, and the plane itself as a means of symbolising ‘development, under analysis, to the point of unity between “thoughts” and “feelings” in “transcendental function”’ (pp. 71–1).

The translator of the speech is unknown, but the fact that it was given at the Zurich Psychological Club is thanks to the work of Edith Rockefeller McCormick (1872–1932), married to McCormick from 1895 until their acrimonious divorce in 1921. Rockefeller had been treated for depression by Jung in 1913, later becoming a Jungian psychoanalyst in her own right; she financially supported the Zürich Psychological Club, providing the society with a physical location, and was instrumental in funding translations of Jung’s writings into English.

OCLC records copies of this edition in Switzerland only; no copies of any edition traced in the UK.

SKU: 2123157