Jung's Red Book

It's difficult to gauge how important an event the publication of Carl Jung's Red Book is outside of the somewhat arcane world of Jungian analysts and scholars. Jung is certainly of interest to artists of all stripes, but his ideas about archetypes, living symbols and active imagination have mostly confirmed in a different register what artists already know; that is, he doesn't function for artists as a teacher so much as a fellow traveler. But for Jungians, the appearance of this until now secret and highly personal document, hidden for 48 years in a bank vault in Switzerland and accessible only to family and a few trusted friends is a sensational event of the first order. As a faithful account of Jung's experimental descent into his unconscious mind, initiated at a critical juncture in his life and career, when he broke with Freud and suffered a sort of crisis of faith, it affords an unprecedented angle on the genesis of several of his key concepts, being the prima materia, so to speak, of all his subsequent theoretical work. Jung scholarship will never be the same again. But time will tell just how revelatory this material proves to be. My guess is, it won't advance one iota humanity's understanding of its own psychic reality - it hasn't advanced mine - and it will prove to be a maze of illusions for Jungians who wish to find in it their own version of the philosopher's stone. Jung himself was reluctant to publish the book, though he shared it with friends, and I trust his wisdom in this, that the material itself is coded - indecipherable on account of its specificity - so that it can only serve as inspiration to the one whose experience it was. What Jung did with the material - writing books like the incredible Psychological Types, reportedly based on just 30 pages of the Red Book - is what we are meant to see and what can effectively illuminate our consciousness. If it were otherwise, Jung's entire body of work could credibly be said to be obscure or incomplete, which is patently not the case.

Editor and translator Sonu Shamdasani, whose tireless efforts are responsible for this publication, remarks in a very informative introduction that Jung understood his own temperament to be divided between the artistic and the scientific. If he allowed the scientific to dominate his career trajectory, his inclinations toward the artistic and even the numinous or occult were never abandoned, so much so that his doctoral thesis itself, submitted to the medical faculty of the University of Basel, was a dissertation on the subject of the so-called occult phenomena. It is clear that his tendency to explore such themes led to his break with the psychoanalytical establishment he was responsible in part for creating, but his journey into the underworld never really left that establishment behind, in fact, as The Red Book testifies over and over again, it was a journey undertaken with the specific objective of bringing all opposites together, an objective which hobbles the undertaking and thwarts its potential for true revelation. There are many places in this densely written 200+ page account where Jung accepts the need to be modest, to not-know ahead of time what it is that he seeks, but he can't keep it up, so the process snarls up again and again into a sort of epic struggle with his own prodigious ego, and it never really develops from there. For all its fantastical dreamscapes, its supernatural or subterranean figures bringing news from Heaven and Hell, its intense dialogues and gorgeously extended symbolic image-narratives, it remains crucified on the intersection of opposites which is Jung's personal fate and the object of his deepest desire. It is truly the work of a tormented ego, desiring to enlarge itself by incorporating its own negation, incapable finally of submitting to the promptings of something other than itself despite, or rather on account of, its yearning to reconcile duality. His ego is everywhere in evidence in what might more profitably have been an act of supplication. It is acknowledged as such and struggled with, but where it should be inverted, receptive, or non-existent it blows its trumpet all the same, announcing itself in vatic, inflated tones reminiscent of biblical prophecy, or detailing its erudition, with references to church fathers, Sophists, Norse gods, Gnostic texts, Psalms, Vedanta, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Babylonian mythology, Jewish mysticism; with Goethe, Plutarch, Voltaire, Schiller, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Wagner, Thomas a Kempis, Nietzsche, Dante and Homer, to name a few. If he had left his needs and his preconceptions at the door, he might have written the fully formed, revelatory masterpiece that he transparently wished to write; it is ironically this wish that ultimately stymies the enterprise. As a work of literature it fails miserably, as a scientific enterprise, it proves nothing, and as an attempt at prophecy, it is absurd - its value remains as a psychological document of great energy and sincerity, courageous and imaginative and bizarre.

The Red Book is never concluded, only abandoned in 1930 when Jung's interest in alchemy supplanted it, so the tortured series of steps or levels, as he later remarks, of his individuation process, never open onto anything resembling a unified field; there is only the somewhat miserable recognition that ambition must be forsaken, that 'life' and 'love' must be forever sundered, and that only a god, albeit one conceived in the self, may achieve the ecstasy that reconciliation is imagined to be. It is a feeble petering out of what at its height was precipitously weird and wonderful territory, teeming with serpents, devils, maidens, magicians, lonely deserts, towers, underground suns, twisted trees, ocean liners, libraries, doves, gods on mountain passes, eggs, caves, scarabs, giants, worms, dead children, etc. There are breathtaking scenes - of his soul as a girl who immobilizes the devil by sinking a fishing hook into its 'evil' eye, of his own body half-scorched, half-frozen between footholds of iron and ice, of the evolution of life from light and flood, of the sad wounded god folded into an egg for the purposes of incubation, of the self as a tower with the devil forged into its foundations - which taken alone are quite dazzling, but best of all are the passages in which he acknowledges the futility, even the danger inherent in the enterprise of knowing. At times these passages achieve a sort of transcendent wisdom forged in humility, in hot spots created by the denial of the ego, or in spaces afforded by ego's sudden diminishment. Such moments are imagined as the slaying of the hero or the wounding of the god, and they lead to quiet islands of great insight in an otherwise turbulent sea, moments which illustrate and fulfill the early statement where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold. Such are the musings on his encounter with the magus Philemon and the nature of magic itself - magic is the negative of what one can know ... the practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner ... and statements like these - thought alienates us from our essence - whoever lives invents his life for himself - to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder - your madness is your brain - salvation comes to you from the discarded - to be known but not understood - stud the narrative like stars, until at one point he abandons all pretension to knowledge:

with a painful slice I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretive loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meanings that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

But like some sort of addict he is compelled to know, and so he limps on ... on crutches of understanding in ever more self-replicating circles. Because he wished to emphasize the possibly prophetic nature of his encounter with the unknowable, he illustrated the manuscript in the style of medieval Christian parchments and wrote the whole in beautiful calligraphic text; the paintings which serve as illuminations are original and quite exquisite. My sense is that the paintings alone, or accompanied by some of the more enigmatic passages and aphoristic statements would have created a more powerful and effective mystical 'whole', a work of art in fact, but it was not Jung's intention to create such an object, possibly because he did not value art as highly as the liturgical wisdom texts he emulates. This is Jung's secret book, his Gnostic gospel in Lutheran style, with nods to Dante, Nietzsche, and Goethe, his private source of inspirational hallucinatory wisdom. For us, who were not meant to see it, it is a turgid, exotic, metastasizing narrative without end, a book dripping in esoteric wisdom and drunk on its own madly proliferating images. Fascinating, but heavily overdetermined and thus strangely beside, or beyond, the point.