The Red Book Carl Jung

No one before Jung went into the unconscious more consciously.

Jung's work fell into a natural dichotomy. On the one hand, his clinical practice was conducted in a relatively straightforward and public manner and yielded a remarkable success rate, leading to Jung being embraced as revolutionary physician. On the other hand, there was Jung's 'mystical' being, which involved the convergence of Jung's personality, which was undoubtedly empirical, with the archetype of The Old Wise Man.

For outsiders, the idea, which Jung put forward variously in his later works - of incarnating one's own myth, is totally foreign. The Red Book, so far as can be determined, is a record of the process of 'psychical objectification' of Jung’s personality. The reason it was not written up as notes is because the processes is 'real', not intellectual, and therefore it demanded the response of the whole man. No one, who has not had a brush with this level of the unconscious, would understand what Jung expressed in the Red Book, and though Jung realised, that in many cases, any level of awakened awareness of the unconscious was dangerous, nevertheless for those who could profit, with guidance, it was process worth undertaking.

The illumination derived from Jung confronting his 'universal pre existent psychical counterpart in the unconscious' - 'The Self', changed Jung irrevocably. For the personality to mine the unconscious as Jung did, not only changes the man, but also changes reality. To usurp the unconscious and to derive it of even a fraction of its power to control events and human destiny’s an immeasurable victory for consciousness. Jung’s fame made him more discreet, but he knew the value of this unique type of consciousness in an otherwise unconsciously determined universe.

Jung's natural assumption was that others would take up the challenge of the Unconscious, but the status of a living mythological being, elevated Jung to such a high peak of reverence and human development that he was unsurpassed. His detractors, searching out the dirt of his human existence, (which he never denied), devalue his work by pointing to his human fallibility and mystical nature, not realising that perfection of the human life is a mythological precept and therefore only relatively realisable through incarnation. With Jung this has become overwhelmingly the case. Where empirical judgements are being made about the man, they are inevitably applied illegitimately and unconsciously to the complete perfection of the central Father Archetype, which stands beyond The Old Wise Man that Jung personified.

This confusion, between the empirical and the mythological, is at the root of most religious dilemmas and what applies to Jung, a relatively contemporary figure, applies just as much to the biblical figure of Jesus – who it is reported, had a unique relation with the The Father (Archetype). It is only latterly that we are getting historical glimpses behind the curtain of religious dogma at the empirical qualities of such mythological beings and events as are represented in the Christian texts. Jung was quite aware of this process and said so in his book Answer To Job. This book was a revolution in thinking about divinity and his questioning of the Old Testament God, Yahweh, in relation to the persecution of Job, is completely redolent of the way he conducted himself in relation to the psychical objects detailed in his Red Book fantasies.

Answer To Job raised an unholy storm of indignation among the faithful in the predominantly Christian culture of Jung’s era. It also fulfilled a secret and terrifying childhood vision Jung had of God defecating on his local church. Jung saw that the perfection of divinity, (as represented by the bible) was far from conclusive to a more complete mind and that it stood as a barrier to the form of integrated self-realisation represented by the process he had undertaken and was prescribing in his new world of analytical psychology as Individuation.

The Red Book is as much a work of art as it is of science. It is a one special man's headlong plunge into an interior world of numinous power and meaning, yet because Jung occupies such a central point - through his psychical objectification as The Old Wise Man, it is a journey that is ultimately valid for all.

RC - 2009 rev, 3.5.2011