From the year 1914 to 1930, Carl Jung embarked on a special spiritual journey.
He called it the "confrontation with the unconscious"
and the result of this confrontation was the legendary Red Book.
The Red Book is essentially his personal journal, but crafted in a very artistic and mystical way.
It includes parts of his diaries, called the black books, as well as illustrations, calligraphy and
parts of religious texts, like the bible, in Latin language.
The creation of the red book was a significant endeavor for Jung since it contains the nucleus
of his later works. It was here that he found inspiration for the conception of his principle
theories of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation.
Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung's oeuvre, it was not published or made
otherwise accessible for study until 2009. In 2009 it was published complete with an
English translation, three appendices, and over 1,500 editorial notes.
The editor is professor Sonu Shamdasani who I believe did an
excellent job interpreting and editing this deep and, oftentimes, peculiar work of art.
In 1958, Jung said about his time working on the Red Book the following: "The years when I pursued
the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from
this. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration,
and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then."
It is quite interesting to explore the inner workings of great minds, and
logical questions arise for as to why Jung decided to embark on such a journey.
For starters, we need to understand that this was the beginning of the 20th century.
It was a very tumultuous time and the groundwork for self-exploration was quite fertile. World war
I had started, the church was considered of little importance, economic fatalism was prevailing,
and the modern man was in search of a soul. Psychology was at an embryonic stage and the
top thinkers of the time had to experiment with different practices in order to
understand the mechanics of our inner world. As Shamdasani writes in the beginning of the book:
“Psychologists sought to overcome the limitations of philosophical psychology,
and they began to explore the same terrain as artists and writers. On all sides, individuals
were searching for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience,
in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal.” It could also be that Jung realized at some point
that the material world isn't all there is. Daily life and everyday experience are so
tedious and superficial at times that living becomes quite unbearable.
That is probably the reason he decided to approach life from a more “experimental” way.
He surrendered to his dreams and fantasies and the red book is the manifestation of this surrender.
But before we get into the gist of the book, let’s try to answer an important question.
What is the unconscious?
Jung has grappled with the unconscious for a long time.
For him, the unconscious was a central mechanism in the individuation process.
As it is stated in Wikipedia: “Individuation is the process of transformation whereby
the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness to be assimilated
into the whole personality.” So, there are two parts to the
unconscious. The personal and the collective. The personal unconscious consists of memories
and emotions that the individual has repressed, forgotten, or rejected. These shape our behaviors
and habits in ways that we are not aware of. They emerge to consciousness mainly via the process of
psychotherapy and allow the individual to realize ways in which their unconscious is
orchestrating their lives. The American psychological association
describes the collective unconscious as follows: The collective unconscious is the part of the
unconscious that, according to Carl Jung, is common to all humankind and contains the
inherited accumulation of primitive human experiences in the form of ideas and images
called archetypes and manifested in myths as well as other cultural phenomena (e.g.,
religion) and in dreams. It is the deepest and least accessible part of the unconscious mind.
Think of it this way: every person embodies
patterns of behavior that are a consequence of collective imitation across time and generations.
And most of these patterns have their roots in myths, religions and other cultural phenomena.
In the “Nature of the Psyche” Jung writes: “Everything of which I know, but of which
I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten;
every thing perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; and everything which,
involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do;
all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness:
all this is the content of the unconscious.” It makes sense that a person that holds the
idea of the unconscious in such high esteem would devote such a large part of his life in
investigating it and experimenting with it. The red book is a very intense read.
The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. It should be read slowly, with an open mind,
and with a willingness to immerse oneself in the fantasies of another person.
A deep analysis of the book requires probably a whole movie.
For the purposes of this video, I will focus on three parts that
stood out for me and can help one become enamored with the bedrock of Jungian thought.
The first chapters of the book feel like an ode to the soul.
Jung embarks on a sequence of fantasy adventures, in an attempt to reconnect with the soul,
which he feels he has abandoned due to the materialistic (use and value) nature of his time.
“The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way,
and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak,
beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by
the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me.”
I think that this is something all of us contemplate from time to time. The hectic and
result-oriented nature of our societies, render us oblivious to the demands of our true self.
We focus too much on the pleas of the fabricated world around us and we eventually lose our soul,
until we start crawling back to her. “My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak,
I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all
the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering,
I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen,
experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world?”
“He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find
the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing
time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. My
friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.”
Jung is quite adamant with his approach. For him, the lack of connection with the soul
engenders neurotic behaviors and propagates problematic connections in every stratum of
the social edifice. Most of the world’s ugliness originates from our separation with our psyche.
And as he says, when we don’t nourish the soul, we breed dragons and devils in our hearts.
Sonu Shamdasani writes in the beginning of the book:
“The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise
of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a
new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological
and theological cosmology.” The relationship
between Jung and God is a turbulent one. He wrote a lot about Christianity and
also eastern religions. He mainly tried to understand and
explain religion from a psychological standpoint. Throughout the red book he encounters God and
has thoughts about his relationship with God. After a vision he has, where he has to kill
a figure riding a chariot made from the bones of the dead, which is presumably God,
a spirit of the depths came to him and said: “The highest truth is one and the same
with the absurd.” Then he tries to analyze this thought and writes:
“In that night my life was threatened since I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat,
since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin,
if you want to overcome him. But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be
overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot
kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.
If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest
truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night. As day requires
night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning.”
There is too much to unpack here, but there are two main ideas that stand out.
Absurdity and the death of God, and Jung tries to create a bridge between the two.
Obviously, the death of God refers to the desperately needed renewal of
interpretation of religion, but, also, in the death of God inside us, as he says.
The God inside us must die, so we can experience a spiritual renewal and awakening.
The God inside us must die because we need to kill our obsession with the ways of the superficial
and focus more on the ways of the psyche. The absurd is a liminal space between God and us.
He alludes to that when he says that “The highest truth
is one and the same with the absurd.” We experience this absurd reality while chasing
meaning, but there is also meaning to be found in the absurd. It sounds overwhelmingly unreasonable,
but, for Jung, truth is to be found beyond reason. He likes to play with duality and
rethink our approach towards the divine. “I understood that the God whom we seek in
the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation,
humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new God would be in
the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness
of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman?
How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?”
An interesting figure that appears in Jung’s fantasies is Philemon.
Our first encounter with him in the Red Book is as follows:
“After a long search I found the small house in the country fronted by a large bed of tulips.
This is where ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ [Philemon], the magician, lives with his wife, ΒΑΥΚΙΣ [Baucis]. ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ
is one of those magicians who has not yet managed to banish old age, but who lives it with dignity,
and his wife can only do the same. Their interests seem to have become narrow, even childish.
They water their bed of tulips and tell each other about the flowers that have newly appeared.
And their days fade into a pale wavering chiaroscuro (meaning light-dark in Italian),
lit up by the past, only slightly frightened of the darkness of what is to come.”
Then he approaches Philemon and starts a weird conversation with him about black art.
“People tell me that you understand the black art. I am interested in
that. Will you tell me about it?” Φ: “What should I tell you about?
There is nothing to tell.” I: “Don’t be ill-natured,
old man, I want to learn.” Φ: “You are certainly more
learned than I. What could I teach you?” The conversation goes back and forth in
a similar manner. Jung asks Philemon
about magic and Philemon gives him vague answers. “Φ: Magic happens to be precisely everything that
eludes comprehension.” I: “But then how the
devil is one to teach and learn magic?” Φ: “Magic is neither to be taught nor
learned. It’s foolish that you want to learn magic.”
I: “But then magic is nothing but deception.” Φ: “Watch out—you have started reasoning again.”
I: “It’s difficult to exist without reason.” Φ: “And that is exactly how difficult magic is.”
Philemon is a figure that also appears in the bible.
He was closely related to Paul the Apostle and his name means “affectionate” in Greek.
Not sure why Jung decided to associate Philemon with magic, but it probably
has to do with his interest in magic at the time he wrote this passage. Jung also writes:
“It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot
understand magic. One can only understand what accords with reason. Magic accords with unreason,
which one cannot understand. The world accords not only with reason but also with unreason.”
Probably when Jung speaks of magic, he speaks of everything that we don’t understand.
He alludes to the unconscious, to chaos, to serendipity, maybe to synchronicity.
Philemon is the person who possesses magic, hence he also possesses superior insight.
He was Jung’s Zarathustra. It was quite important I guess for Jung to
establish a fantastic connection with such figures that stemmed from mythopoeic imagination which was
missing in the present rational age. Shamdasani writes:
“The task of individuation lay in establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures—or contents
of the collective unconscious—and integrating them into consciousness,
hence recovering the value of the mythopoeic imagination which had been lost to the modern age,
and thereby reconciling the spirit of the time with the spirit of the depth.”
As you can understand the red book is open to multiple interpretations.
It can be read as a novel. It can be read as mythology. It can be
read as the words of a crazy man. But that’s its beauty and appeal.
Anyone can express themselves on paper in an abstract and symbolic way.
But Jung owns this process to such a degree, that he has created a style that can be called Jungian.
Just like Kafka’s style is called Kafkaesque. Again, let’s not forget that Jung is just
a curious man trying to make sense of the world by surrendering to fantasies.
His personal unconscious in tandem with the collective unconscious
are talking to him and he is transforming their words into images and narrative. In his preface to
the 1952 revision of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung wrote about the Red Book:
“I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “what is the myth you are living?” I found no
answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth,
but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard
with increasing distrust. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get
to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks—for—so I told myself—how could I,
when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation,
which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?”
And Shamdasani adds: “The study of myth had revealed to Jung his
mythlessness. He then undertook to get to know his myth, his ‘personal equation.’”
By reading the Red Book we become fellow travelers in a journey of self-exploration
that prompts us to ask ourselves two quite thought-provoking questions.
Who am I really, and what is my myth?