Product Description

When Carl Jung embarked on the extended self-exploration he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious', the heart of it was "The Red Book", a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principal theories - of the archetypes, the collective unconscious and the process of individuation - that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality. While Jung considered "The Red Book" to be his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Now, in a complete facsimile and translation, it is available to scholars and the general public. It is an astonishing example of calligraphy and art on a par with "The Book of Kells" and the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. The publication of "The Red Book" is a watershed that will cast new light on the making of modern psychology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4161 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

About the Author
Sonu Shamdasani, a pre-eminent Jung historian, is the Reader in Jung History at Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

Customer Reviews

Journey to the centre of [a] man
If you are of sound mind, stout heart, and good character, join CG Jung on the most intrepid and exhilarating journey imaginable: the journey to the centre of [a] man.

Be warned: it's tough going. You'll be exposed to primordial figures that may remind you of some of your own. You'll be thrown into a bewildering desert of early-twentieth century Swiss-protestant metaphysics. You'll see some of the complexes and neuroses of a great man exposed in all their horror and occasional hilarity. You'll marvel as big ideas find their first voice in a seemingly unwilling recipient. You may even share a little of the horror and pain as Jung fails to see the joke his own psyche is playing on him. And you'll see many symbols and wonders of the soul that, whilst being all too familiar, remain elusive, beckoning, and truly awesome to behold. Yep, it's your basic esoteric hero's journey, writ large, for all to misinterpret.

The Red Book is a beautiful, rare, and unique artefact of someone else's process. It's almost like a travel book, documenting CG's personal and idiosyncratic journey across the great undiscovered country within. Like its author, it's a book that will draw out and amplify each reader's deep psychological prejudices (you may have already glimpsed some of mine). And it reveals that author and his psychology in a way his [or anyone else's] more conventional works never have.

If you love exploring the human soul, I'd be surprised if you didn't find this the most fascinating, exasperating and incredible book you've ever read, as I have. Enjoy, but be warned: you may loose some sleep over it!

PS: As befits the subject, the standard of scholarship and presentation of this book is exhaustive, exhausting, and without parallel.

deeply fascinating and inspiring
How can i possibly review this book, was my first thought, and it still is. I decided to do so anyway, because i think it might bring something to the table.
The book is huge, the imagery alone would take a tremendous amount of time to study. These things contribute to a certain "wow" effect that needs to settle before one begins reading the actual text, or, well at least in my case, even think of doing a review of the book.

So here we are: The book itself. The first's part of the book contains a preface by Ulrich Hoerni Followed by Jung's artwork and calligraphy presented as an original re production of Liber Novus. At the back of the book is the translation, which I think is very well done, I should say I do read German, but I'm in no way a professional translator. The book is devided into liber primus and liber secundus and scrutines which contain an entry of black book 5 (bare with me but I'm gonna quote Sonu Shamdasani from a Harpers magazine article instead of explaining the black books myself:
"To begin with, one must clearly differentiate Jung's Black Books, in which he initially wrote his fantasies together with reflections on his mental states, from Liber Novus. The former were records of a self-experiment, while the latter drew in part on these materials to compose a literary and pictorial work."

So is there a "before and after the red book" which has been state before. I cant say, I don't think anyone can for sure. After reading the book I had a lot of AHA! moments contributing to a better understanding of some of Jung's other works. The book has given me a much much clearer image of Jung as a person, but that image is inheritably flawed, simply because I did not know Jung. So weather or not the book, takes away from Jung's image, or adds to it, is in the end, not really that interesting.
The book is more straightforward in its text then many of Jung's academic works and as such is easier to read. The concept though, is far from straightforward and might take a lot longer to absorb then the usual academic material from Jung.