The Red Book — Liber Novus

The Red Book is the record of Jung’s 1913–1930 “confrontation with the unconscious” — the self-experiment from which the whole apparatus of analytical-psychology was developed. Fantasies first recorded in the Black Books were revised, illuminated, and transcribed into the calligraphic folio Jung called Liber Novus, interspersed with interpretive commentaries that prefigure his later theoretical vocabulary. The editorial apparatus (Shamdasani) states the overall movement plainly: “how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation … Liber Novus presents the prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process” (Jung 2009).

The book is not ornamental biography. It is the document in which active-imagination is invented, philemon appears as the inner Other, the four psychological-functions are first diagrammed (in the 1913 Elijah–Salome–serpent cross), and individuation is named as the synthesis of individual with collective psyche. The Sermones ad Mortuos, included in a later fresh manuscript called Scrutinies with Philemon’s commentaries, extends the material into explicit cosmology.

Every subsequent Collected-Works volume is, in one sense, a systematization of what The Red Book first performed.

Concepts introduced or developed

• active-imagination
• individuation
• philemon
• psychological-functions
• collective-unconscious

Cited by

• carl-jung
• edward-edinger
• murray-stein