ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2010 Issue 1

Jung's Red Book has just been released, and I am writing this a week after the material has been made available to the public. What has long been considered the source of all Jung's creative ideas after his traumatic split with Freud is now public. In the seminal chapter ÒConfrontation with the UnconsciousÓ in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his so-called autobiography, Jung writes ÒAll my later discoveries come from the experiences that I had during that period of immersion in my inner fantasies.Ó This is where Jung experienced the reality of the unconscious and ÒknewÓ that there was a layer beyond the personal unconscious as expressed by Freud. This deeper strata of the unconscious Jung variously called the realm of archetypes, collective unconscious, the objective psyche, but no matter what name he used, he identified an aspect of the psyche that is common to all mankind and is similar to other inborn functions of the human organism. Since his break with Freud, Jung has been criticized by scientists and others who have not accepted his theory that there is an inherited level of the psyche, the collective unconscious.
 
Now, thanks to the brilliant editorial work of Sonu Shamdasani, with the support of the Jung Estate, we have the raw data of The Red Book, carefully researched and amply footnoted. It is from this material that Jung developed all his mature thoughts on the nature of the psyche. How does one interpret this book of 54 paintings and over 200 pages of text written in Gothic text?
 
Read the entire paper.

The publication of The Red Book by W.W. Norton & Co. last October was a major publishing event not only for the Jungian community but for all those interested in psychology and 20th century culture. The fact that Jung circulated drafts of it and showed it to many different people makes it clear that he did intend it to reach a wider public. The Philemon Foundation and the Jung family are to be thanked for doing just that. The book is selling well and is now in its sixth printing; the original was on display at the Rubin Museum of Asian Art in New York and now travels to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where a series of events are planned in coordination with its exhibition. (Readers should look for specific information about these events on the front page of this issue.) It then goes to the Library of Congress with final stops in Paris and Zurich. How lucky we are to realize that when we read Jung addressing himself to my friends that we are now included in his salutation. Sonu Shamdasani's commentary and footnotes brilliantly elucidate the text and its evolution while the cross-referencing system helps us navigate its complexities with relative ease.
 
I will confine my observations to its imagery because the text will take time to unravel. The book is like a primeval forest that readers enter at the spot meant for them alone; it is a hermeneutistic delight!
 
It was with a sense of excitement that I opened the book and paged through it for the first time. How would Jung's depictions of his fantasies compare to the images I had formed in my mind over the years from reading Confrontation with the Unconscious? They unfold in the Liber Primus in a series of panels done in a style reminiscent of illustrations found in the popular historical literature of the period which would have inspired his boyhood drawings of battles and castles.
 
Read the entire paper.

The publication of The Red Book has met with tremendous success. Such success, of course, rests on the exceptional quality of the content and the depth and richness of the imagination conveyed throughout; also of central significance is the unique artistic quality. The book immediately impresses by the beauty of the calligraphy, the stunning images and the many beautiful adornments. It amazes by the technical skill and the aesthetical sense of the author, reaching a level of artistry one would not have expected from a scientist. The patience and care with which this precious work has been elaborated is profoundly moving. One finds oneself witnessing an inner process of a rare depth, having taken shape in the silence of a long and loving encounter with the soul.
 
The beauty of the forms one finds in The Red Book did not primarily emanate from an aesthetic preoccupation on the part of Jung: for him this was a soul matter. It is amazing to think that a person, throughout 16 long years, would be willing to produce a transcription of a text containing inner experiences previously written (in the Black Books) and to invest an incredible amount of laborious devotion to embellishment of color and pictures; and all this without the intention of publishing it, at least not while he was working on it. While elaborating his pictures and carefully transcribing his original reflections in a calligraphic style, Jung's mind was not turned towards a future public he wanted to please or to whom he wanted to teach something; this endeavour was a goal in and of itself.

Read the entire paper.