Jung's Red Book: The Art of Psychology

[rhoenix]

JUST before the first world war, the 38-year-old Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung was troubled by awful dreams and visions. Analytical to the core, he embarked on what he later described as his "confrontation with the unconscious", and documented the lot.

The material went through various drafts before Jung recopied it all, using an ornate gothic script, into the single big, red, leather journal which gives the previously "lost" Red Book its popular name. Jung went on to add historiated (enlarged) initials, ornamental borders and a substantial number of paintings (see Soul pictures).

Though it was written for public consumption, Jung eventually decided not to publish it and put it to one side. After his death in 1961, the Jung family declined access to all comers. But nearly 50 years later, after years of dialogue with the Jungs, translation and editing, it is now published. And for such an arcane work, it is generating quite a buzz. Its true importance, however, will be to the western intellectual tradition as a whole.

Jung and his one-time associate Sigmund Freud are almost synonymous with psychology: their ideas have thoroughly permeated our culture. In the 21st century, both men have become even more controversial - Jung perhaps especially so. But The Red Book, resembling a medieval illuminated text and the works of William Blake, offers us an important insight into a time before the intellectual divide between art and psychology made such a work of inner exploration, of psychology-as-literature (and maybe even as art), less thinkable.

Crucially, the book also turns out to be key to understanding Jung's work. Through his "confrontation", he developed his main theories - of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of becoming an individual. This "individuation" was to encourage Jung to try to transform psychotherapy from a practice exclusively concerned with treating the sick into a means of self-development.

It started in October 1913, when Jung gave free rein to his fantasies, carefully noting what ensued. The imagery (floods, seas of blood, the slaying of German legendary hero Siegfried, the foot of a giant stepping on a city, and so on) troubled him so much he thought he was on the way to what he called "doing a schizophrenia". With the outbreak of war, though, he came to see the visions and dreams as precognitions, and understand that the trouble was aimed at Europe, not at him.

Later, Jung was to make a crucial distinction between the "active imagination" he advocated his patients to use in keeping their own Red Book style journals, and psychosis: "The reason... [this] looks very much like a psychosis is that the patient is integrating the same fantasy-material to which the insane person has fallen victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed up by it."

In 1914, he set to work. Each chapter begins with an account of a dramatic fantasy, in which Jung encounters various characters in strange settings, converses with them, confronts the unexpected, and hears voices making shocking pronouncements. Jung then tries to generalise the encounters into psychological concepts.

For him, the point was that the encounters stemmed from the mythopoeic (myth-making) imagination missing in 20th-century rationalism. The fantasy figures emerged from humanity's collective unconscious, and the task of becoming a true individual lay in establishing a dialogue with them and integrating them into consciousness.

However the use of myths now looks in a neuroscientific 2009, publishing The Red Book opens a new era in understanding Jung's work. It is a unique window on the construction of one of the world's most influential psychologies.

I think this is fascinating. I've always been an admirer of Jung's work more than Freud's, mostly because Jung for all his faults didn't keep things in the safe clinical setting - as this exemplifies, he certainly wasn't above braving the unknown of his own mind, alone.

[frigidmagi]

Freud isn't controversial. He's disproven. Hell his theory on the development of religion is used as humor.

[rhoenix]

Freud isn't controversial. He's disproven. Hell his theory on the development of religion is used as humor.

I did not know that. Upon learning that, I promptly laughed and felt much better.