Red Book

THE MYSTERIES OF THE RED BOOK

The Red Book or Liber Novus ("The New Book" in Latin) by the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung is one of the strangest and most fascinating books in the entire history of psychology.

"Jung was associated with Sigmund Freud for a period of approximately six years, beginning in 1907. Over those years, their relationship became increasingly stormy. When the final break of the relationship came in 1913, Jung retreated from many of his professional activities to intensely reconsider his personal and professional path. The creative activity that produced Liber Novus came in this period, from 1913 to about 1917.

"Biographers and critics have disagreed whether these years in Jung's life should be seen as "a creative illness, a period of introspection, a psychotic break, or simply madness." Anthony Storr, reflecting on Jung's own judgment that he was "menaced by a psychosis" during this time, concluded that the period represented a psychotic episode. According to Sonu Shamdasani, Storr's opinion is untenable in light of currently available documentation." I agree with Shamdsanai; Jung was not experiencing psychosis. I believe he was doing some very sane and profound poetic, symbolic, and imaginative exploration of deep aspects of the human unconscious during this time.

"During the years Jung engaged with his "nocturnal work" on Liber Novus, he continued to function in his daytime activities without any evident impairment. He maintained a busy professional practice, seeing on average five patients a day. He lectured, wrote, and remained active in professional associations.Throughout this period he also served as an officer in the Swiss army and was on active duty over several extended periods between 1914 and 1918, the years of World War I in which Jung was composing Liber Novus. Jung was not "psychotic" by any accepted clinical criteria during the period he created Liber Novus. Nonetheless, what he was doing during these years defies easy categorization."

Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as "my most difficult experiment." This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through willful engagement of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination." In his introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains:

"From December 1913 onward, Jung carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form.... In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline."

Jung initially recorded his "visions", or "fantasies, or "imaginations" — all terms used by Jung to describe his activity — in a series of six journals now known collectively as the "Black Books". This journal record begins on 12 November 1913, and continues with intensity through the summer of 1914; subsequent entries were added up through at least the 1930s. Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung throughout the last three decades of his life, compared Jung's imaginative experiences recounted in his journals to the encounter of Menelaus with Proteus in the Odyssey. Jung, she said, "made it a rule never to let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him."

After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Jung perceived that his visionary experience was not only of personal relevance, but entwined with a crucial cultural moment. In late-1914 and 1915 he compiled the visions from the journals, along with his additional commentary on each imaginative episode, into an initial manuscript. This manuscript was the beginning of Liber Novus.

"In 1915 Jung began artfully transcribing this draft text into the illuminated calligraphic volume that would subsequently become known as the Red Book. In 1917 he compiled a further supplementary manuscript of visionary material and commentary, which he titled "Scrutinies"; this also was apparently intended for transcription into his red folio volume, the "Red Book". Although Jung labored on the artful transcription of this corpus of manuscript material into the calligraphic folio of the Red Book for sixteen years, he never completed the task. Only approximately two-thirds of Jung's manuscript text was transcribed into the Red Book by 1930, when he abandoned further work on the calligraphic transcription of his draft material into the Red Book. The published edition of The Red Book: Liber Novus includes all of Jung's manuscript material prepared for Liber Novus, and not just the portion of the text transcribed by Jung into the calligraphic red book volume.

n 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffé about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated:

"The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then..."

“The Red Book” reads as a revelation of a new (religious) psychology, which – for Jungians – it is. The underlying narrative is, like many myths and memoirs, the spiritual quest of a man who loses his soul and undertakes a journey to find it.

Jung repeatedly rejected the idea that the “Red Book” was an artistic product – either literary or visual. He insisted that his journey through his unconscious was that of a psychologist, and that working through his visions and the meaning of the symbols in them would result in a new understanding of psychotherapy.

The psychiatry of his time, he believes, was incapable of distinguishing between deeply spiritual experiences and psychopathology. He, on the other hand, believed it imperative to utilize the terrors and beauties of his self-induced spiritual visions and integrate them into consciousness. His “journey” into self, his “journaling” of it, and his belief that the individual had the means to cure him or herself from within thus became the model not only for a psychotherapy of self-realization (Jung called it “individuation”) but for much of the New Age literature in our bookstores.

The “Liber Primus,” or first part of the “Red Book”, consists of a Prologue and eleven chapters with titles such as Refinding the Soul, Experiences in the Desert, Instruction, Resolution. They are written in tiny, cramped calligraphy, two or three columns to a page, with some small but no large illustrations. The first initial is an illuminated D for Der Weg (The Way) embellished with a pot of fire and a crowned black serpent, surrounded by the scene of a lake, a lakeside town with church, and the background of mountains against an azure blue sky.

In this first book he restricts his illustrations to historiated initials like that first D, which is followed by Latin calligraphy that invokes Isaiah (Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?) and the Gospel of John (And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…) then Isaiah again. When Jung begins in his own voice, he writes:

“If I speak in the spirit of the this time, I must say no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you….I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. …The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”

The First Book includes this encounter and dialogue:

“I: Who are you?
“E: I am Elijah and this is my daughter Salome.”
“I: The daughter of Herod, the bloodthirsty woman?”
“E: Why do you judge so? You see that she is blind. She is my daughter, the daughter of the prophet.
“I: What miracle has united you?
“E: It s no miracle. It was so from the beginning. My wisdom and my daughter are one.
“I am shocked. I am incapable of grasping it.”

Thlene figure of Elijah eventually morphs into another old man whom Jung called Philemon and adopted as his spiritual guide. In Roman mythology, the (pagan) Philemon and his wife Baucis, offered hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury when they went from house to house in disguise and no one else would take them in. Jung painted him into the “Red Book” where Philemon represents superior insight. The psychiatrist regarded him as his guru and he reportedly conducted conversations with Philemon as he walked through his garden...

...some of the “Red Book” has a distinctly contemporary quality, and brought to mind Bob Dylan: “The images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. Suddenly a door opens on the right and the old man says to me “Do you know where you are?”

As I dipped in and out of reading Jung’s text and staring at his intriguing, often beautiful, sometimes compelling images, I found myself needing more context. I consulted books by and about Jung – everything from his problematic “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” an uncertain mix of memoir, biography and edited interviews that the publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff tried for years to get him to complete; the biographies by Blair and Hayman, Claire Douglas’ “Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan”; Laurens van der Post’s admiring memoir; and even the satirical and reductive “Jung for Beginners,” which includes a very helpful glossary of Jungian terminology.

I also went to see the exhibit, featuring the original, leather-bound “Red Book,” at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City...

After a brief consideration of Jung’s images, Carey talked about going to Mongolia, where she worked with the shaman brought to western attention in the memoir and film “The Horse Boy,” a little boy with autism whose parents take him to Mongolia in search of a cure.

During the Q and A, audience members made clear their frustration with the limits of western science and its alternatives. The two experts onstage did their best to respond to and open up these issues, in what seemed to embody the best of Jung’s multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary legacy but it was clear that, one hundred years after Jung’s time at Burghölzli, there are still far more questions than answers in the treatment of mental illness.

Watching these two sympathetic healers address autism brought to mind Jung’s multitudinous interests: parapsychology as well as psychiatry, the European as well as many non-western traditions of arts, medicine, and culture, the Christianity that imbued his spiritual life and his crucial role in introducing such non-western spiritual classics as the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the “I Ching” to the West, his interest in the esoteric theories of alchemy, and his use of psychotherapy both to cure the mentally ill and as a means of connecting the individual unconscious to the world...

Whether you’re a Jungian or a Freudian, think Jung was a genius or charlatan, or even if you’re someone who’s never given much thought to psychotherapy, it’s worth a visit."

~ Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”