The Red Book: Jung's Private Descent Into the Unconscious

For most of the twentieth century, the most important book Carl Jung ever made was one almost nobody had read. It was a folio bound in red leather, written out by hand in a gothic script and painted like a medieval manuscript, and it recorded several years in which a respectable Swiss psychiatrist deliberately talked to the figures in his own head.

Jung called it Liber Novus, the New Book. Everyone else called it the Red Book. It was published in October 2009, forty-eight years after his death, and it has been complicating the standard account of his career ever since.

After Freud

The background is a professional divorce. Jung had been Sigmund Freud's chosen successor, and the collapse of that relationship left him, in his late thirties, without a movement and without a theory he fully trusted. The Library of Congress, which exhibited the book in 2010, dates the break to 1912 on one page of its exhibition text and to 1913 on another, which is a fair reflection of how gradual the rupture was.

What followed is easier to date. Jung said that the fantasies and dreams behind all his later work began in 1912. On November 12, 1913, he started recording them in a private journal. In December he changed method. Instead of waiting for images to arrive, he began calling up a fantasy while awake and stepping into it as if it were a play, questioning the characters he met and writing down their answers. He later named the technique active imagination.

He did not describe the experience as pleasant. In the Library of Congress's account he spoke of assaults from the unconscious, of standing helpless before an alien world, and of the whole undertaking as "my most difficult experiment."

Black notebooks, red folio

The raw material went into a series of notebooks now known as the Black Books. The Philemon Foundation, which sponsored their publication, gives their span as 1913 to 1932 and describes them as the records of a self-experiment, not as a diary. Their most intense stretch runs from late 1913 through the summer of 1914.

The Red Book is what Jung built from that material. He drew the main fantasies out of the notebooks into a draft manuscript. Then, in 1915, he commissioned a large bound volume of roughly 600 blank pages and began copying the text into it by hand, with historiated initials, ornamental borders and full paintings. The model was the illuminated manuscript, and the effect is closer to a private scripture than to a casebook.