Jung

“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”

Carl Jung

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss-German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman and builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

On Bollingen Tower

“Words and paper did not seem real enough to me. To put my fantasies on solid footing, something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Put another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen. I wanted a room in this tower where I could exist for myself alone. I had in mind what I had seen in Indian houses, in which there is usually an area– though it may be only a corner of a room separated off by a curtain– in which the inhabitants can withdraw. There they may meditate for perhaps a quarter or half an hour, or do yoga exercises. such an area of retirement is essential in India, where people live crowded very close together.”

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

The Red Book

The Red Book is an exquisite red leather bound folio manuscript crafted by Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author’s imaginative experiences between 1913 and 1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914-15 and 1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre, it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.

While the work has in past years been descriptively called “The Red Book,” Jung did emboss a formal title on the folio’s spine: he titled the work Liber Novus (the “New Book”). His manuscript is now increasingly cited as Liber Novus, and under this title implicitly includes draft material intended for but never transcribed into the red leather folio proper.

Its genesis may be briefly stated. In the winter of 1913, Jung deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and carefully noted what ensued. He later called this process active imagination. He wrote down these fantasies in the Black Books. These are not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation. The dialogues that form these active imaginations can be regarded as a form of thinking in a dramatic form. When the First World War broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft manuscript of Liber Novus, which consisted in a transcription of the main fantasies from the Black Books, together with a layer of interpretive commentaries and lyrical elaboration. Here, Jung attempted to derive general psychological principles from the fantasies, as well as to understand to what extent the events portrayed in the fantasies presented, in a symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world.