The Red Book by Carl Gustav Jung

A summary and several remarks on the book that inaugurated analytical psychology.

For more than 80 years, the texts that give shape to the Red Book remained in the safekeeping and care of Carl Gustav Jung's heirs until its publication in 2009.

For some, it is the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. New York Times after its publication called it "the holy grail of the unconscious", and today we can speak of it as the work that marked all the subsequent work of Carl Gustav Jung and gave birth to his analytical psychologyThe Red Book.

• You can purchase Carl Gustav Jung's Red Book through this link.

Carl Gustav Jung's meeting with Sigmund Freud

In the year 1913 there was a turning point in Carl Gustav Jung's life (among other things, especially marked by the intellectual separation with Sigmund Freud). To this day, what happened to him has always been a matter of has always been a source of discussion and controversy among 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 re-encounter with the soul, etc.

The point is that, during this lapse, Jung conducted an experiment with himself which 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 The "confrontation" was narrated and portrayed in his work "The Red Book" which remained unpublished for more than eighty years and was described by Jung as the work that led to the development of a "technique to get to the bottom of internal processes [...] translate emotions into images [...] and understand fantasies that mobilized him subway" and which he later called active imagination.

Jung began the book by recording his fantasies in the so-called "black books", which he later revised and supplemented with various reflections. Finally, he calligraphically transferred these texts together with illustrations to a red book called Liber Novus.

Almost a century of mystery

For most of his friends, colleagues and even his own relatives, the Red Book was always shrouded in mystery, for 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. In addition, he left his work with the book unfinished in 1930, trying to take it up again in 1959, in spite of which the epilogue remained unfinished.

Although Jung evaluated its publication, the most he showed of it while he was 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 the Liber Novus was simple: the work was still unfinished..

In spite of the fact that Jung maintained that the book was an autobiographical work, he was reluctant to publish it in the complete works, considering that it did not have a scientific character. 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 between the contributors to his complete works and the group of Jung's heirs, in the year 2000 that 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 was the fact that it was the material that shaped all his later work and the development of analytical psychology.

The "holy grail of the unconscious".

All of Jung's later work derives from the ideas presented in this book. Jung Jung embodies almost in a prophetic and medieval way the study of the unconscious that he himself approached in a symbolic way during those years.. It is because of the abstract nature of the topics dealt with 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.

The first records Jung's unconscious symbolic 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 higher psychic function that has to be killed by him in order to be killed.where the figure of the hero takes place, understood by Jung as his superior psychic function that has to be killed by him in order for his counterpart to resurface and initiate the individuation process, not without first encountering other archetypes such as the anima, the old sage, the sun god, etc.

In the liber secundus (elaborated from December 26, 1913 to April 1914) narrates the successive encounters with other symbolic images, which are usually characters with whom Jung interacts. promoting the awareness of dissociated processes and functions of Jung's personality, and thus opening the possibility of achieving the transcendent function.

Finally, Scrutinies (which was not originally written in the red-covered notebook), and which he wrote between 1914 and 1916, has a less "poetic" and much more complex content than the other two. has a less "poetic" and much more complex content than the previous booksIt provides Jung's own clues and annotations for the understanding of his experiences in the previous books.

The consecration of his theories as a result of this book

Jung wanted to elaborate a psychological model as a result of 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 pseudo-sciences such as alchemy, astrology, the I ching, etc., he was always influenced by pseudo-sciences. Jung always strove to create a unifying theory between the role of the mind with physical phenomena.

The Red Book is a testimony to these efforts, as well as an essential subject of study for anyone interested in analytical psychology..

Bibliographical references:

• New York Times article
• Psychology and Mind article on the Daimon or creative impulse developed by Jung.
• Jung, C. G. (2012). The Red Book. Buenos Aires: El Hilo de Ariadna.