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Jung - The Red Book - Liber Novus

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first page of the original German manuscript

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The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (Latin for A New Book), is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930, which was not published or shown to the public until 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. Jung originally titled the manuscript Liber Novus (literally meaning A New Book in Latin), but it was informally known and published as The Red Book. The book is written in calligraphic text and contains many illuminations.

Context

Jung was associated with Freud for a period of approximately five years, beginning in 1907. Their relationship became increasingly acrimonious. When the final break came in 1913, Jung retreated from many of his professional activities for a time to further develop his own theories. Biographers disagree as to whether this period represented a psychological breakdown. 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.

Jung referred to the episode as a kind of experiment, a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious. Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung later in his life, compared Jung's experiences 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."

About the Red Book, Jung said:

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 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.

Content

The work is inscribed by Jung with the title Liber Novus (The New Book). The folio size manuscript, 11.57 inches (29 cm) by 15.35 inches (39 cm), was bound in a red leather binding, and was commonly referred to as the "Red Book" by Jung. Inside are 205 pages of text and illustrations, all from his hand: 53 are full images, 71 contain both text and artwork and 81 are pure calligraphic text. He began work on it in 1913, first in small black journals, during a difficult period of "creative illness", or confrontation with the unconscious, and it is said to contain some of his most personal material. During the sixteen years he worked on the book, Jung developed his theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and individuation.

The Red Book was a product of a technique developed by Jung which he termed active imagination. As Jung described it, he was visited by two figures, an old man and a young woman, who identified themselves as Elijah and Salome. They were accompanied by a large black snake. In time, the Elijah figure developed into a guiding spirit that Jung called Philemon (& 934;& 921;& 923;& 919;& 924;& 937;& 925;, as originally written with Greek letters). Salome was identified by Jung as an anima figure. The figures, according to Jung, "brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life."

The Philemon figure represented superior insight, and communicated through mythic imagery. The images did not appear to come from Jung's own experience, and Jung interpreted them as products of the collective unconscious.

Publication and display

Until 2001, Jung's heirs refused to permit publication of the book and did not allow scholars access to it. Until September 2009, only about two dozen people had seen it. Historian Sonu Shamdasani, an employee of the Jung heirs and their advisor in the handling of unpublished Jung material, and Stephen Martin, a Jungian analyst, created the Philemon Foundation in order to facilitate publication of Jung's works.

Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson and manager of the Jung archives, decided to publish it after three years of persuasion by Shamdasani. W. W. Norton & Company was preparing an edition of the Red Book in its original German, with English translation and extensive footnoting. In 2007, DigitalFusion scanned it, one-tenth of a millimeter at a time, with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on 7 October 2009.

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Original German manuscript:

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