Projo Subterranean Homepage News

W.W. Norton
A painting by Carl Jung from his Red Book of notes on his hallucinations, a detail from a large photo showing a few such pages.

Worth noting, Sara Corbett's lovely, long tale in the Times Sunday Magazine (Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious) about the upcoming publication of Carl Jung's Red Book, in stock at Amazon on December 4 for $105.30 and now on my Christmas wish list.

What the Red Book is:

Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations -- what he called "active imaginations." "In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me 'underground,' " Jung wrote later in his book "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," "I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them." He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

Who made it happen: American Jungian analyst Stephen Martin and London-based historian Sonu Shamdasani, founders of the Philemon Foundation. Shamdasani is credited as editor and translator, the translation appearing at the end of the English edition.

Given the Philemon Foundation's aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung's old papers -- lectures he delivered at Zurich's Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example -- both Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung's works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung's descendants. "It's sometimes delicate," he said, adding by way of explanation, "They are very Swiss."

What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung's estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians -- who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians -- inject themselves into the family's business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of Jung's grandsons who manages Jung's editorial and archival matters through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book -- which on one hand described Jung's self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family -- held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants' quandary. "They own it, but they haven't lived it," he said, describing Jung's legacy. "It's very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it." Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. "Thank God I am Jung," he is rumored once to have said, "and not a Jungian."

The book itself:

Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani -- who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz -- these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.

The footnotes map both Shamdasani's journey and Jung's. They include references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that's just naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism -- what he called "the spirit of the times" -- and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate "the spirit of the depths," a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.

A good read, and a welcome piece of long-form journalism about a new clue in the mystery of being human.

More images from the Red Book are at NPR.

Carl Jung's original Red Book will be exhibited from Oct. 7 through Jan. 25 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, New York City.

 Tags  Jung

---

1 Comments

Todd Laurence said:

For those interested in Jung's final
conclusions, this quote offers much:

"man has need of the word, but in essence
number is sacred." Jung....

Link | September 23, 2009 10:13 AM
Report Abuse

---

Leave a comment

Name:

Email:

URL:  

Remember personal info?

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.