About the Institute

The JUNG Institute of Los Angeles is a nonprofit gathering place for the curious, devoted to Jung’s ideas about the depths of the mind and the lifelong growth of a whole person.

Our work began here in the 1940s, when James and Hilde Kirsch and Max Zeller, three refugees from Nazi Germany, started teaching Jung’s psychology to a small group of interested Angelenos. Analytical psychology was barely written about in English at the time, so for many in the room, these lectures were a first introduction.

The group formed in 1953, calling itself the Society of Analytical Psychology of Southern California, and instantly began operating the first low fee clinic for Jungian Analysis in the world. The Clinic was later named the Kieffer E. Frantz Clinic after the psychiatrist who imagined it. The Society and Clinic’s first brick and mortar location opened in Westwood Village in the 1960s.

In 1973, the Society bought the building the Institute and the Clinic still occupy. The Hilde Kirsch Children’s Center was founded in memory of Hilde Kirsch who had envisioned a children’s center at the LA Institute. Lore Zeller, Max’s wife, helped to create our Bookstore and Library. William O. Walcott founded the Institute’s journal, Psychological Perspectives. Suzanne and George Wagner made the film Matter of Heart, which grew into the Remembering Jung project and the film archive that carries it forward. A branch of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism took root in the same building.

Our founders were refugees, immigrants, doctors, graphologists, an osteopath, a college president, a minister, a lawyer, and queer. Everything the Institute has become grew out of that building and those same founders’ conviction that Jung’s work deserved a wider audience, a conviction their families continue to carry forward today.

Ideas that once needed careful introduction now turn up in pop music, film, and literature without anyone blinking. Wherever you’re starting from, there’s a place for you here.