Jung’s Biggest Book

• Published in: PsycCritiques Vol. 55; no. 21; p. No Pagination Specified
• Main Author: Elms, Alan C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Psychological Association 26.05.2010
• Subjects: Collective Unconscious; Consciousness States; Dreaming; Jung (Carl); Personality
• DOI: 10.1037/a0019427
• ISSN: 1554-0138

Reviews the book, The red book: Liber novus by C. G. Jung (see record 2009-21681-000). According to Jung, active imagination required him to remove all the constraints of consciousness and the personal unconscious so that the collective unconscious could be experienced directly. Jung saw this process as a matter of self-experimentation. He regarded it as another aspect of his scientific exploration of the human personality, in which he had been engaged via various research techniques since his days as a medical student. But he felt his new data should be presented in a fashion worthy of their importance. Thus he created The red book, which physically resembled an illuminated medieval Bible or one of the rare alchemical treatises that Jung collected. Jung began the first draft of The red book in November 1913, soon after he decisively ended his seven-year close friendship and intellectual collaboration with Sigmund Freud. After scribbling his accounts of his visions each night into his Black books, Jung revised them (usually only slightly) soon afterward, then had them typed by a professional typist. In 1915 he began to transcribe them laboriously into the elegant Red book. The editor of this book, Sonu Shamdasani, draws from his previous writings on Jung, to characterize the intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts for the book. Shamdasani is perhaps too generous to Jung at times, bending over backward to characterize him as a true experimental scientist rather than as a scientist-turned-mystic. But Shamdasani clearly explains his reasons for doing so, leaving readers to make their own judgments about Jung’s intellectual and philosophical status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)