Carl Jung’s Red Book…
love NPR. I listen to it whenever I’m driving, while I’m working on projects, while I’m grading papers… wait, should I admit that? Anyway, NPR is fabulous. It rules. And today it especially ruled, because there was a segment on the much-awaited publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book, also known as his “Liber Novus.” Psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and pretty much all psych-related beings have been witnessing a Pavlovian-type response at the news that these once-hidden journals will finally see the light of day: W.W. Norton is publishing the Red Book next month.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) Image: http://www.crystalinks.com/jung.html
The Red Book represents 16 years (1914-1930) of Jung’s profound self-examination, his “confrontation with the unconscious” that resulted in some of his most prominent theories: the theories of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and individuation, to name a few. Jung worried that, were this collection of detailed visions and provocative insights published during his lifetime, he might lose credibility and support from the public, particularly his own followers. The few family members to whom he showed some of his pages later worried that the public might view Jung as psychotic himself. These fears led to the Red Book’s hundreds of pages being locked away in a Swiss vault.
Until now.
After listening to the NPR segment in my car and discovering that some of Jung’s book contained medieval-esque manuscripts and illuminated initials and diagrams, that clinched it. I absolutely COULD. NOT. WAIT. to get to a computer to check out the images that awaited me online.
And now, it is my pleasure to share them with you. I think you’ll agree that they are both unbelievably beautiful and completely curiosity-piquing…
{The first three images above from Booktopia; all others from NPR}
I was also really excited to find the following evocative photograph taken of Carl Jung on Lake Zurich in his later years, featured in Life Magazine:
And this, in the library of his home (also from Life Magazine):
And then this fabulous photo, of a somewhat younger Carl Jung (bottom right) with the psychoanalytic pioneer Sigmund Freud (bottom left), pictured at Clark University (Worcester, MA) in 1908:
Links to further info:
1. More color photos of Red Book pages from The New York Times
2. Sara Corbett’s New York Times article, “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious”
3. Jung Society of Utah’s presentation of the Red Book
The ‘Big Deal’ this week is the publishing
of Jung’s “Red Book.” Personally I think
it’s like walking backwards in time; not
necessary. Jung, working with the physicist
Pauli, (1932-1958) came up with appropriate
conclusions about ‘acausal reality.’ The
letters were published under title, “atom
and archetype.”
The main theme is the nature of “number
archetypes” which Jung concluded is the
most primal archetype of order in the
human mind. “it is here that the most
fruitful field of further investigation
might be found,” said Jung….
http://plus.maths.org/issue51/reviews/book1/index.html
In the new tv show, “flash forward” the
premise is that every human on earth
loses 2 minutes and 17 seconds of consciousness,
or, as stated on the show, 137 seconds.
The same number that Jung and Pauli discussed,
and commented on in the above url….
“numomathematics”
New York
Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing the interesting book review… Quite a read. I haven’t seen Flash Forward, so I wasn’t aware of the 137 link. Is it worth checking out?
[...] The other day, I was fortunate enough to have a FABULOUS new Twitter friend retweet the link to my post on Carl Jung’s Red Book . This new Twitter friend, @roundmyskull, just so happens to have an amazingly overstimulating blog [...]