Carl Jung's Red Book, an illustrated chronicle of horror and madness

Anyone who has an interest in Carl Jung will want to read this New York Times article on the upcoming publication of Jung’s The Red Book. For most of the last century, the very existence of this work has been only a rumor.
Jung wrote this illustrated journal between the ages of 39 and 55 and kept it locked in a cupboard. The controversial nature of the subject matter prompted his descendants to keep it there after he died in 1961 at age 85. It was transferred to a safe deposit box in the underground vault of a Swiss bank in 1984 and remained there for another 23 years. Jung’s relatives allowed almost no one to view the book. Jung himself commented: “To the superficial observer it will appear like madness.”

Jung’s midlife breakdown

Jung suffered some type of mental breakdown in 1913, when he 38. As
Sara Corbett writes in the NYT article: “It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. … He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, ‘menaced by a psychosis’ or ‘doing a schizophrenia.’ ”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

“All my works, all my creative activity,” Jung once stated, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”

The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology

The Red Book, named for its cover, is a journal in which Jung explores his inner life. It’s filled with both text and full color drawings. Of its 205 pages, 124 contain images, 53 of them filling the entire page.
After the Jung family agreed to make the work public, the manuscript was carefully scanned in 2007 and prepared for publication. A Jungian relative slept next to the book each night during the scanning process, as “a necessary insurance measure.”
The Red Book has been characterized as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. It’s in this volume that Jung developed his theories of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation, ideas that transformed psychotherapy from treatment of the mentally ill to a means for spiritual development of the personality.
Here’s an announcement (PDF) of the book’s publication from the Philemon Foundation. It includes an English translation, and there are plans for editions in German, Japanese, Italian, and other languages.
The original manuscript will be available for viewing at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York from October 7, 2009 to January 25, 2010.
Some pages from The Red Book:

Source: Amazon

Source: Amazon

Source: Amazon

Source: Amazon

Source: Rubin Museum

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