For more than 80 years, the texts that shape the Red Book They remained in the protection and care of the heirs of Carl Gustav Jung until their publication in 2009.
For some it is the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology, the New York Times After its publication he called it “the holy grail of the unconscious”, and today we can speak of it as the work that marked all of Carl Gustav Jung’s subsequent work and that gave birth to his analytical psychology: The red book.
In the year 1913 there was a turning point in the life of Carl Gustav Jung (among other things, especially marked by the intellectual separation with Sigmund Freud). To this day, what happened to him It has always been a source of discussion and controversy between Jungian analysts and other psychoanalysts This episode has been called in various ways: a creative illness, an attack of madness, a narcissistic self-deification, a mental disturbance close to psychosis, a process of reunion with the soul, etc.
The point is that, during this period, Jung conducted an experiment on himself that lasted until 1930 and which he later recognized as his “confrontation with the unconscious.” The “confrontation” was narrated and portrayed in his work “The Red Book” which remained unpublished for more than eighty years and was described by Jung as the work that gave rise to the development of a “technique to get to the bottom of internal processes (..) translate emotions into images (…) and understand fantasies that mobilized him underground” and that he later called active imagination.
Jung began the book by recording his fantasies in the so-called “black books” that he later revised, complementing them with various reflections. Finally, he calligraphically transferred these texts along with illustrations to a red book called Liber Novus.
Almost a century of mystery
For most of his friends, colleagues and even his own family, the Red Book was always surrounded by mystery, since Jung was always jealous of his work. He only shared his intimate experiences written in the book with his wife Emma Rauschenbach and a few other people he trusted. Furthermore, he left his work on the book unfinished in 1930, attempting to resume it again in 1959, despite which the epilogue remained unfinished.
Although Jung evaluated his publication, the most he showed of it while working on it was Seven Sermons to the Deadprinted and given by the author himself to a few acquaintances in 1916. The reason why he did not decide to publish Liber Novus was simple: the work was still unfinished
Although Jung maintained that the book is an autobiographical work, he was reluctant to publish it in the complete works because he considered that it was not scientific in nature. After his death in 1961, the legacy of the book passed into the hands of his descendants, who, knowing that it was a unique and irreplaceable work, decided to keep it in a bank safe in 1983. After extensive debate among collaborators of his complete works and the group of Jung’s heirs, in 2000 when its publication was authorized
Finally, the book saw the light of day in 2009. Among the reasons that convinced the heirs to publish this work is the fact that it was the subject that shaped all of his subsequent work and the development of analytical psychology.
The “holy grail of the unconscious”
All of Jung’s later work derived from the ideas presented in this book. Jung captures in an almost prophetic and medieval way the study of the unconscious that he himself addressed symbolically during those years It is because of the abstract nature of the topics discussed in this work that the book has a very marked structure.
The parts of The Red Book
In its published version, the work is divided into three parts: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus and the Scrutinies.
In the first, the unconscious symbolic experiences lived by Jung from November 12 to December 25, 1913 where the figure of the hero takes place, understood by Jung as his superior psychic function that has to be killed by him so that his counterpart can resurface and begin the process of individuation, but not before encountering other archetypes such as the anima, the wise old man, the sun god, etc.
In the liber secundus (prepared from December 26, 1913 to April 1914) The successive encounters with other symbolic images are narrated, which are usually characters with whom Jung interacts promoting awareness of processes and functions dissociated from Jung’s personality, and with this opening the possibility of achieving the transcendent function.
Finally, Escrutinios (which was not originally written in the red-covered notebook) and which he wrote between 1914 and 1916 It has a less “poetic” and much more complex content than the previous books since it provides keys and notes from Jung himself for understanding his experiences in the previous books.
The consecration of his theories following the book
Jung wanted to develop a psychological model based on the visions narrated in the book, which became a great odyssey because it was difficult for the scientific community to accept. Although Jung’s personality was always shaped by pseudosciences such as alchemy, astrology, I Ching, etc. Jung always strove to create a unifying theory between the role of the mind and physical phenomena.
The red book It is a testament to these efforts, as well as an essential subject of study for anyone interested in analytical psychology
