This post comes to you from the APTi eChapter President Kathy Howard khoward@hdaconsultants.com – thank you, Kathy, for offering up such nourishing food for thought!
Katherine
A Book for All Who Desire Deeper Knowledge of Self, Soul, and
The Black Hole of Carl Jung
It is a book awaited for decades (eight, to be precise), a book larger than most atlases (16” x 12” x 2” weighing in at ten pounds), a book that retails for more than some people spend on books in an entire year (list price $195.00), a book that will take a dedicated and long-lasting effort to read and comprehend (416 pages of Jung’s astonishingly beautiful paintings, personal writings, and complex insights).
Yet it is arguably the most awaited book in the Jungian psychological community. The liner notes state: “It is possibly the most influential hitherto unpublished work in the history of psychology (Shamdasani, Ed., 2009).” Jungian Analyst Dr. John Beebe stated recently during his Type Resources webinar series: “You must all get this book.”
The book? C. G. Jung’s The Red Book.
Until we opened this full scale replica of his personal, red leather-bound manuscript he titled Liber Novus, little did some of us know of Carl Jung’s gifted artistry at calligraphy and painting or of the exact nature of his self experimentation from 1914 to 1930 to more fully grasp the unconscious.
Some, upon opening The Red Book, describe its contents as otherworldly. I would suggest instead it is “innerworldly.”
See excerpts of this engrossing work online: Public Radio International/Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best of Our Knowledge has posted several paintings from The Red Book as well as a link to the PRI March 21, 2010 program recording which includes an engrossing talk with Sonu Shamdasani, Ph.D, the book’s editor, at http://www.wpr.org/book/100321a.cfm. While the entire recording is intriguing, for the time-challenged the interview with Dr. Shamdasani begins approximately 44:00 into the radio show and gives a first-rate introduction to what this astonishing book is and what an amazing route Jung traversed before and during its creation.
Interviewer Steve Paulson asks whether Jung had undergone a personal crisis that led to his writing The Red Book. Editor Shamdasani states that although having achieved great professional and personal success, Jung felt that he had become “too cerebral” and lost his soul. The Red Book was a way for him to find it again. By 1913 Jung felt he had been existing merely in his head with no feeling, no soul, no true understanding of mysteries that skittered away from him as he tenaciously pursued them on a purely intellectual level. The Red Book is his diary, notebook, journal, sutra – you pick the word – in which he recorded his inner work, his encounter with the unconscious, to recover his soul. Of this period, Jung wrote in 1957:
The years, of which I have spoken to you, 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, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.
(reprinted in Jung, 2009, p. vii)
Paulson and Shamdasani discuss the dark imagery in some of the paintings reproduced in full color and size in The Red Book, the connection to shadow elements, and what soul meant to Jung.
Care of the Soul author, Thomas Moore, reminds us that the soul for Jung was the linked to the unconscious. Moore advises us to “realize although life seems to be a matter of literal causes and effects, in fact we are living out deep stories, often unconsciously” (Moore, pp. 223-224, 1992) and to “…be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul.” (Moore, p. 300, 1992.) Whether we attempt to find personal meaning for ourselves in The Red Book or simply choose to behold Jung’s personal journey documented therein, we can easily see that such advice are not merely platitudes.
To paraphrase the song lyric, do you feel you have been walking in a shadow you cannot see? Or do you believe living a largely intellectual life, living with the intention to understand on a rational level everything about ourselves and around ourselves is at least in part an obstacle blocking full comprehension? If you do, may I suggest The Red Book is for you. If you do not, may I suggest The Red Book is for you.
Shamdasani’s contention is that Jung’s academic writings could not fully represent the dense richness of the inner human experience. (Well, if not, could anyone’s?) The upshot was years of Jung privately documenting his self-experiment as he recorded his observations and paintings in what would become The Red Book. Dr. Shamdasani states that as a result until the 2009 publication of this amazing work, the world has had “a whole psychological movement that has had significant effects on 20th Century thought based in part on a work that no one had read or seen.”
Now don’t you want to lift that ten pound book to begin to explore Jung’s record of his encounter with the unconscious and, just perhaps, to begin your own and to record it in a personal Red Book of your own?
Kathy Howard
2010 APT eChapter President
References:
Jung, C. G. (2009). The red book – liber novus (S. Shamdasani, Ed., M. Kyburz, J. Peck, & S. Shamdasani, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Moore, Thomas (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. New York: Harper Collins.
Paulson, S. (Executive Producer). (2010, March 21). Mind and body. To the best of our knowledge. Recording retrieved May 3, 2010, from http://www.wpr.org/book/100321a.cfm
