Liber Novus Research Articles

Therapy for the Dead: Working Clinically with Jung's Black Books and The Red Book.

With the 2020 publication of the facsimile edition of The Black Books, we have an opportunity to study the layers of C. G. Jung's creative writing process for the first time. In this paper, I explore Jung's practice of active imagination in relation to his fantasy dialogues with the dead during two specific episodes in 1914 and 1916. I discuss Jung's concept of the collective unconscious corresponding to the "mythic land of the dead" and I show how this idea develops in The Black Books and The Red Book, or Liber Novus, culminating in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. I describe my work with a patient, who, in an early session, said she felt like the "living dead". I recount how the patient's experience of her own internal world began to change as we were able to wonder about the inner world of the patient's late mother and, together, to imagine her mother's lament. I consider the use of imagination when working with the concept of "therapy for the dead" (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 164) in the context of intergenerational trauma.

C. G. Jung and God

Jung grappled with the experience of God over the course of his life. In later years, when asked whether he believed in God, he replied, “I know.” This essay traces Jung’s understanding of God as it developed during the years he labored on The Red Book: Liber Novus, and as further elucidated in his private contemporaneous journals of his experiences, The Black Books: 1913 to 1932. The visionary events recounted there are the primal source of Jung’s declarations about the nature of divinity audaciously pronounced in his controversial 1952 publication, Answer to Job.

The Visionary Art of C.G Jung

Abstract This article considers how visionary art expresses itself within paintings and pictorial configurations by using Neumann’s work to expand on Jung’s notion of the ‘visionary mode of creativity.’ The first part is a comparative study of Neumann’s ‘four stages of psychological development’ discussed in ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’ (1949) and his ‘four stages of art in relation to its epoch’ discussed in his essay ‘Art and Time’ (1959). This comparison aims to establish a selection of categories that considers the role of art on the micro-level (the individual) and the macro-level (society). Additionally, it is suggested that these four categories offer an interesting framework for identifying and understanding visionary artworks. Subsequently, the second part uses Neumann’s framework to examine a selection of paintings from ‘Liber Novus’ (2009).

DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS: JUNG’S ‘SEASON IN HELL’

This article explores the linked themes of the descent into hell and divine madness, as articulated in Jung’s self-explorations between 1913 and 1930 and as portrayed in his Liber Novus: The Red Book, situating these with the history of these notions. This in turn open the question of the relation between Jung’s visionary experiences and his subsequent conceptual elaborations in his exoteric scholarly works. KEY WORDS Liber Novus, The Red Book, hell, divine madness, visionary experiences, esotericism, Jung, Blake, Dante, Swedenborg.

Glacial Grieving: Melting the Ice Within to See the World Renewed

Later in his life, Carl Gustav Jung became increasingly interested in the alchemical process as a symbolic representation of the individuation journey. By focusing on the stages of the nigredo and the albedo, this paper expands upon the importance of these steps in the psychological process of individuation. Jung (1970a) wrote that individuation “gathers the world to oneself” rather than shutting one out from the world (p. 136). This is an aspect of the journey toward wholeness that is especially relevant in our current era of climate crisis. By exploring the nigredo and the albedo deeply, we can begin to see the many shades of blue that lie underneath. These blues, and the idea of feeling blue, offer a pathway to empathy and understanding through our shared grief. With a careful examination of The Red Book: Liber Novus (Jung, 2009), after a time of traumatic ambiguous loss, and amplified with the images of ice in our warming world, this paper takes a paradoxical journey. From the blues of the Arctic ice to the bright red of Liber Novus, this black and white path becomes illuminated with a variety of colors. This expanded, empathetic view of the complex image of ice brings with it the gift of the rubedo, a renewed hope born out of death, grief, and chaos.

PHILEMON, KA, AND CREATIVE FANTASY: THE FORMATION OF THE RECONCILING SYMBOL IN JUNG’S VISUAL WORK, 1919–1923

Thanks to the publication of The Red Book (2009) and The Art of C.G. Jung (2019), we now have a substantial corpus of the visual works that Jung created between 1913 and 1923, a period when he was deeply engaged with Liber Novus, its transcription and elaboration into The Red Book, whilst at the same time formulating the core concepts of analytical psychology. This article identifies several previously unrecognised representations of two of Jung’s most important personifications, the ‘dominant fathers’ Philemon and Ka. I then trace their roles in some of Jung’s visual works that include the image of the cross-quartered circle and sphere, his prime example of the reconciling symbol of the creation of the new god, and of individuation. After examining two paintings in detail, Amor Triumphat (1920-21) and Cat. 66 in The Art of C.G. Jung (c. 1921-23), I conclude with Jung’s designs for Emma Jung’s memorial at Bollingen (1956), and his family tomb at Küsnacht (1957).

What Is The Red Book for Analytical Psychology

In 2009, a remarkable and much belated addition to the oeuvre arrived at the field’s doorstep: Red Book . For more than seventy years, this medieval-like illuminated calligraphic manuscript lay first on the shelves of Jung’s private library and then in a bank vault. Evidently, Jung himself was at least somewhat ambivalent about its place in his over-all oeuvre , since he kept it to himself and a very few close associates in his lifetime, and when he passed away he left behind no instructions concerning its publication posthumously. Moreover, it is an unfinished work, a fragment. Liber Novus (Jung’s title for this work) comes into the field somewhat like a long concealed illigitmate child into an established and distinguished family. This mystery member of the family may turn out to be be quite exceptional and display remarkable gifts, but there is also some trepidation concerning potential embarrassment. With its public appearance, Red Book must now be considered as part and parcel of the field’s heritage, whether one likes it or not. What is Red Book for analytical psychology? Does it belong to the body of seminal works beside Jung’s other major writings, or is it to be ranked as the equivalent of a writer’s personal diary and sketchbook, akin to Leonardo’s Notebooks , which shows the early workings of a brilliant mind as the creator prepares for his more serious later contributions to a scientific or cultural enterprise? Conversely, one can also wonder if all of Jung’s later writings were nothing more than an attempt to explicate this monumental foundational work and make its ideas and insights, which are here expressed in colorful image and high-flown rhetorical style, digestible for modern readers and thinkers. Presentation video The Bible as a Dream: https://vimeo.com/294438022/217d9bac9a

ON THE SERVICE OF THE SOUL: C.G. JUNG’S LIBER NOVUS AND DANTE’S COMMEDIA

Approximately nine years have passed since the publication of Jung’s Liber Novus [New Book]. This event has dramatically changed the study of Jung’s life and work, setting forth an exceptional number of paths to explore within the history of Jung’s thought. Many of these have not been undertaken yet and call for fresh research. Jung’s inspiring understanding of Dante’s Commedia, embedded within Jung’s in-depth fascination for the Middle Ages in Liber Novus is certainly one of these. This paper represents a rst effort to delineate how Jung’s approach to Dante has been crucial to the elaboration of Liber Novus at historical and hermeneutical levels. KEY WORDS C.G.Jung, Liber Novus (The Red Book), complex and analytical psycholgy, Dante Alighieri, visionary works

"Crush the Head of the Serpent and It will Bite you in the Heel": A reconstruction of Jung's Interpretation of the Poisonous Serpents in Zarathustra Through Liber Novus

The psychological interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra given by C. G. Jung in a speci cally dedicated seminar in years 1934-1934 comes across as obscure, somewhat mysterious and philosophically distant from Nietzsche’s work. Such interpretation, however, remains consistent in Jung’s later works. One of the most striking aspects of Jung’s interpretation of Zarathustra concerns the animals: in most cases, Jung delivers long and detailed explanations, drawing on mythological, as well as alchemical material, to analyse some animal gures that do not play any relevant part in Nietzsche’s text. This is particularly remarkable in the case of the serpent hanging from the shepherd’s mouth in chapter ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’, closely related by Jung to the adder biting Zarathustra’s throat in chapter ‘Of the Adder’s Bite’. The same connection will come back later in 1952, in Symbols of Transformation. Interestingly, most of Jung’s later interpretation of Zarathustra can be re- contextualised and understood if compared with Jung’s own Liber Novus, serving as a proper lens to observe and analyse the evolution of Jung’s confrontation with Nietzsche. Reading Jung’s marginalia on his own copy of Zarathustra, it is clear that he interpreted the work as a sort of Nietzschean Liber Novus, so to speak—both being understood by Jung as ‘visionary’ works. This paper will explore Jung’s understanding of Zarathustra chapters ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’ and ‘Of the Adder’s Bite’ in the 30’s and 50’s, and will then reconstruct such understanding based on Liber Novus. KEYWORDS Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Liber Novus, The Red Book, Serpent, Heel, Visionary Works

Stepping into a Painting

Until The Red Book: Liber Novus was published in 2009, we knew of C. G. Jung's personal adventure with the psyche and its influences on his life, as he described them in his chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He called it the “prima materia for a lifetime's work” (1963, pp. 170–199). But without The Red Book, it would have been impossible to imagine how deep and torturous Jung's descent into the world of his inner images really was. The full extent of his interactions with the figures that manifested on this journey he would later call “active imagination.” My initial reading of The Red Book elicited feelings of awed respect for the density, complexity, and daring of the text and paintings. Closer exploration was followed by a sense of new freedom related to my own experiences with active imagination. It was especially Jung's admonitions and warnings to experience one's own inner world as unique and incomparable to any other that gave new breadth and meaning to my personal experiences with active imagination. This feeling of expansion became the inspiration for this article, in which I describe my own encounters with images of the unconscious and their influence on both my inner and outer lives.Figure 1. Incubation—Sleeping in the Temple, 2009 (acrylic painting on linen-covered panel, 10″ × 10″) by author.

Ontología del alma y facultades de conocimiento. Alma, cuerpo y conocimiento en la obra psicológica de Ramon Llull

In this article we present a comparison of the psychological and epistemological theories of Ramon Llull with philosophical doctrines of the 13th century. For this purpose, the Liber novus de anima rationali serves as the main reference because it is the only work by Ramon Llull which deals with the soul in an Aristotelian framework.

Saying goodbye to the hero: Jung, Liber Novus and conversion from addiction.

Two chapters in Liber Novus throw fresh light on Jung's epistemology of addiction. Taking these as a starting point, the nature of the challenges that patients confront in leaving addiction behind are explored. It is suggested that an archetypal process of separation is constellated at the point of quitting as the precursor to a life without the object of the addiction. A short account is given of Jung's part in the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous and the potential role of a 'conversion experience' as an initiation into psychological reorientation away from the negative individuation experienced by the hero. The case of a patient addicted to heroin illustrates the contribution of an analytic approach in an NHS setting, along with other workers in a rehabilitation centre. Certain challenges of working with addicted people are outlined, including arousal of the psychotherapist's rescue fantasies.

Creativity and Change in Psychoanalysis: Jungian Perspectives

(2015). Creativity and Change in Psychoanalysis: Jungian Perspectives. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 84, No. 1, pp. 175-207.

The red book: reflections on C.G. Jung's Liber Novus

This fine collection of essays by distinguished Jungian scholars, many of whom (not all) are analysts, is an indispensable companion to the publication of C.G. Jung's The Red Book, or Liber Novus i...

Reading the red book: an interpretive guide to C.G. Jung's Liber Novus

Reading the red book: an interpretive guide to C.G. Jung's Liber Novus

Clinical implications of The Red Book: Liber Novus

In this presentation I consider whether the importance of Spirit in Liber Novus may render the task of its clinical application peculiarly problematic. Freud's experimentation on himself is briefly compared with Jung's self-experimentation of which Liber Novus is the record. Taking up the theme of the vas from Gaillard's paper, I refer to Jung's two major contributions to the elaboration of the Freudian frame: the necessity for the analyst to have been analysed, and the positive value of countertransference. In an epilogue, I briefly discuss a dream related to the preparation of this report for publication, emphasizing the theme of the disturbing effects of Spirit as a key theme both in Liber Novus itself and in any attempt to assimilate it on the part of the contemporary analyst.

After Liber Novus1

This paper reflects on the conference question concerning the clinical and theoretical significance of Jung's Liber Novus, two years after its initial publication, and looks at how Jung himself reflected upon it and how it informed his turn to alchemy, with particular attention to the theme of opposites and their reconciliation in Liber Novus, later taken up in Mysterium Coniunctionis.

How to read The Red Book and why

The Red Book can be, and is, read in a variety of ways and used for different purposes. Here I propose to view it from the perspectives of three contexts: the personal and biographical one, a literary one and a cultural and religious one. Each of these viewpoints exposes different, but (in each case) important, features and meanings. Composing Liber Novus clearly had great significance for Jung's own personal individuation process. In studying this work, the reader must keep in mind that Jung had a great many predecessors in view and looking over his shoulder as he composed it. The text reveals that he was in dialogue with a vast number of cultural figures from the near and the far past. It is also a foundational text for Jung's later works in psychology. And it addresses large cultural and historical issues, looking back at traditions from the standpoint of modernity and forward toward what is to come collectively in the near and distant future. His creation was a work for himself, but also for the culture and for the ages. I try to understand what the title Liber Novus means and suggest that it represents an intention of attaining to a rank beyond being a 'new book' for only one man, Carl Gustav Jung, to being a work relevant to humanity as a totality.

THE RED BOOK

1 6 2 Y T H E R E D B O O K J A M E S T R I L L I N G Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and cultural theorist, was one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. For some people, his model of the human mind, including such concepts as archetypes, the animus/anima, and the collective unconscious, provides a basis for both individual psychotherapy and cultural interpretation on a grand scale. Others dismiss his work as fanciful. In such a polarized realm I would like to make my position clear from the start. I am not a Jungian. This is not a matter of psychoanalytic ideology – I am not a Freudian either – but of scholarly lineage. If similar literary, artistic or ritual motifs occur thousands of miles or thousands of years apart, most modern scholars are trained to see that as a beginning not an end, a question not an answer. Jung, in contrast, believed that certain symbols – not just the capacity for symbolic thought, but the symbols themselves – are somehow innate to human minds, forming a commonality that T h e R e d B o o k ( L i b e r N o v u s ) , by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburg, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani (Norton, 416 pages, $195) 1 6 3 R transcends all the specifics of artistic convention, language, religious belief, and historical circumstance. Similar forms in dissimilar contexts were, for him, neither more nor less than particularly striking instances of this commonality. Although I recognize and often envy the mingled sense of wonder and belonging that this approach can generate, I am firmly committed to the other camp. Jung is best understood as a thinker in the late-nineteenthcentury mold – a younger contemporary of Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (first published 1890). Like others of that time, Jung followed a universalizing impulse, seeking – and less typically, finding – a ‘‘grand unified theory’’ of the mind and its expressions. Science may eventually tell us whether he was right or wrong – if the answer matters by then: few people today care whether Frazer was right about the historical role of fertility worship. Meanwhile, Jung’s synchronic, mythopoeic vision of the mind continues to claim a small but strategic corner of twentiethcentury thought. In addition to a very extensive body of publications, Jung left a remarkable unpublished work. Half a century after his death, his descendants chose to publish it at last, in lavish facsimile. We have good reason to thank them. The Red Book (its ‘‘o≈cial’’ title was Liber Novus, or The New Book) is the record of a psychological and spiritual crisis – what he later called his ‘‘confrontation with the unconscious’’ – and shows in detail how a psychological pioneer handled the tumult of his own mind. It also showcases Jung’s talent as a visual artist. The crisis began when Jung was thirty-eight years old and a successful, innovative psychiatrist in Zurich. It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands. The vision lasted for two hours, it confused me and made meill.Iwasnotabletointerpretit.Twoweekspassedthenthe 1 6 4 T R I L L I N G Y vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke. ‘‘Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this.’’ I wrestled again for two hours with this vision, but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy. From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also...

The interiorizing movement of logical life: reflections on Wolfgang Giegerich

The following article is an account of my discovery of and subsequent immersion in Wolfgang Giegerich's work. A sampling of his voluminous writings on the soul is set out to illustrate how he attempts to penetrate thinkingly into psychological phenomena and his claim that this inevitably brings out their internal dialectic. The article summarizes his critiques of Jung, Hillman, and The Red Book: Liber Novus.