The Red Book of Jung
The opening lines of Sara Corbett’s article ‘The Holy Grail of the Unconscious’ read like something out of a suspenseful Victorian mystery novel:
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus”, which is Latin for “New Book”. Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
Corbett goes on to explain that the book in question was written by Carl Jung. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The Red Book is the name given to a 600-page manuscript written and illustrated by Carl Jung. He began work on it in 1914 during a difficult period of “creative illness” or confrontation with the unconscious, and it is said to contain some of his most personal material. Until 2001, Jung’s heirs refused to permit publication of the book and did not allow scholars access to it. Historian Sonu Shamdasani, an employee of the Jung heirs and their advisor in the handling of unpublished material, created the Philemon Foundation in order to facilitate publication of Jung’s works. The foundation is preparing an edition of the Red Book, with English translation. It is expected to be available in 2009.
Aniela Jaffe (quoted here) writes that after resigning his post as a lecturer at the University of Zurich,
Jung began a “self-experiment”, trying to understand the fantasies and other contents that surfaced from his unconscious and to come to terms with them. This involved a sort of meditation, often accompanied by strong emotion. Contrary to his expectations, it turned out that no fantasy, none of the numerous images, no figure, could be traced back to personal, biographical events. The contents were mythic, originating in the impersonal psychic realm, the “collective unconscious”. Not until six years later did Jung end the experiment. He transcribed his inner experiences in the Red Book, a folio volume bound in red leather, which he richly illustrated. He painstakingly painted in the art nouveau style of the time, but he never regarded the paintings as art, only as an expression of what he was experiencing.
I’m really, really interested in seeing inside that book.
A photograph of Carl Jung, circa 1966.