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--The Undiscovered Self, which is concerned with the relation between the individual and a mass society, and Flying Saucers, on the birth of a myth that Jung regarded as a reaction to the scientific trends of a technological era.