Red Book

Not this one.

This one.

It was not until 2009 that Jung's Red Book was published. Although he referred to it as the central work of his life, one he worked on for sixteen years --hand writing and illustrating it himself-- and which gave shape and meaning to everything else he did, no one knew what was in it except for a few illustrations. 

So it seems that everything anyone ever wrote about his work will need to be re-thought in light of it. Before RedBook and After RedBook.

Among those who think of him as a confused mystic, this book will only solidify their impression. Its 200 pages of consciously antiquarian text and pictures elaborate his near-psychotic encounters with the depth of his unconscious during his crisis years in the teens of the 20th century. They have the density and opacity of a primary religious revelation. 

We'll see how its influence unfolds, if, like Barth's Romans, it falls like a bombshell on the playground of the psychoanalysts.

Unsurprisingly, an orthodox theologian finds it a bomb rather than a bombshell...


[To add to my criminal use of foreign websites to watch movies for free, I found one that let me download the  $200 volume as a pdf onto my laptop for free...We'll see how much of it I get around to reading it.]