The Red Book - Carl Jung’s Gift to the World

from the year 1914 to 1930 carl jung embarked on a special spiritual journey he called it the confrontation with the unconscious and the result of this confrontation was the legendary red book the red book is essentially his personal journal but crafted in a very artistic and mystical way it includes parts of his diaries called the black books as well as illustrations calligraphy and parts of religious texts like the bible in latin language the creation of the red book was a significant endeavor for jung since it contains the nucleus of his later works it was here that he found inspiration for the conception of his principal theories of the archetypes the collective unconscious and the process of individuation despite being nominated as the central work in young's uvra it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009 in 2009 it was published complete with an english translation three appendices and over 1 500 editorial notes the editor is professor sonu samtasani who i believe did an excellent job interpreting and editing this deep and oftentimes peculiar work of art in 1958 jung said about his time working on the red book the following the years when i pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life everything else is to be derived from this everything later was merely the outer classification the scientific elaboration and the integration into life but the numinous beginning which contained everything was then it is quite interesting to explore the inner workings of great minds and logical questions arise for as to why jung decided to embark on such a journey for starters we need to understand that this was the beginning of the 20th century it was a very tumultuous time and the groundwork for self-exploration was quite fertile world war 1 had started the church was considered of little importance economic fatalism was prevailing and the modern man was in search of a soul psychology was at an embryonic stage and the top thinkers of the time had to experiment with different practices in order to understand the mechanics of our inner world as sam dassani writes in the beginning of the book psychologists sought to overcome the limitations of philosophical psychology and they began to explore the same terrain as artists and writers on all sides individuals were searching for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal it could also be that young realized at some point that the material world isn't all there is daily life and everyday experience are so tedious and superficial at times that living becomes quite unbearable that is probably the reason he decided to approach life from a more experimental way he surrendered to his dreams and fantasies and the red book is the manifestation of this surrender but before we get into the gist of the book let's try to answer an important question what is the unconscious jung has grappled with the unconscious for a long time for him the unconscious was a central mechanism in the individuation process as it is stated in wikipedia individuation is the process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness to be assimilated into the whole personality so there are two parts to the unconscious the personal and the collective the personal unconscious consists of memories and emotions that the individual has repressed forgotten or rejected this shape our behaviors and habits in ways that we are not aware of they emerge to consciousness mainly via the process of psychotherapy and allow the individual to realize ways in which their unconscious is orchestrating their lives the american psychological association describes the collective unconscious as follows the collective unconscious is the part of the unconscious that according to carl jung is common to all humankind and contains the inherited accumulation of primitive human experiences in the form of ideas and images called archetypes and manifested in myths as well as other cultural phenomena like religion and also in dreams it is the deepest and least accessible part of the unconscious mind think of it this way every person embodies patterns of behavior that are a consequence of collective imitation across time and generations and most of these patterns have their roots in myths religions and other cultural phenomena in the nature of the psyche young writes everything of which i know but of which i'm not at the moment thinking everything of which i was once conscious but have now forgotten everything perceived by my senses but not noted by my conscious mind and everything which involuntarily and without paying attention to it i feel think remember want and do all the future things that are taking shape in me and will some time come to consciousness all this is the content of the unconscious it makes sense that a person that holds the idea of the unconscious in such high esteem would devote such a large part of his life in investigating it and experimenting with it the red book is a very intense read the text is dense often poetic always strange it should be read slowly with an open mind and with a willingness to immerse oneself in the fantasies of another person a deep analysis of the book requires probably a whole movie for the purposes of this video i will focus on three parts that stood out for me and can help one become enamored with the bedrock of jungian thought the first chapters of the book feel like a node to the soul jung embarks on a sequence of fantasy adventures in an attempt to reconnect with a soul which he feels he has abandoned due to the materialistic use and value nature of his time the spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value i also thought this way and my humanity still thinks this way but that other spirit forces me nonetheless to speak beyond justification use and meaning filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times i long sought to hold that other spirit away from me i think that this is something all of us contemplate from time to time the hectic and result-oriented nature of our societies render us oblivious to the demands of our true self we focus too much on the place of the fabricated world around us and we eventually lose our soul until we start crawling back to here my soul where are you do you hear me i speak i call you are you there i have returned i'm here again i have taken the dust of all the lands from my feet and i have come to you i am with you after long years of long wondering i have come to you again should i tell you everything i have seen experienced and drunken or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world he whose desire turns away from other things reaches the place of the soul if he does not find the soul the horror of emptiness will overcome him and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and the blind desire for the hollow things of the world my friends it is wise to nourish the soul otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart jung is quite adamant with his approach for him the lack of connection with the soul engenders neurotic behaviors and propagates problematic connections in every stratum of the social edifice most of the world's ugliness originates from our separation with our psyche and as he says when we don't nourish the soul we breed dragons and devils in our hearts sonu samdasani writes in the beginning of the book the overall theme of the book is how young regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation this is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of god in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology the relationship between young and god is a turbulent one he wrote a lot about christianity and also eastern religions he mainly tried to understand and explain religion from a more psychological standpoint throughout the red book he encounters god and has thoughts about his relationship with god after a vision he has where he has to kill a figure riding a chariot made from the bones of the dead which is presumably god a spirit of the depths came to him and said the highest truth is one and the same with the absurd then he tries to analyze his thought and writes in that night my life was threatened since i had to kill my lord and god not in single combat since who among mortals could kill a god in a duel you can reach your god only as an assassin if you want to overcome him but this is the bitterest for mortal men our gods want to be overcome since they require renewal if men kill their princes they do so because they cannot kill their gods and because they do not know that they should kill their gods in themselves if the god grows old he becomes shadow nonsense and he goes down the greatest truth becomes the greatest lie the brightest day becomes the darkest night as day requires night night requires day so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning there is too much to unpack here but there are two main ideas that stand out absurdity and the death of god and jung tries to create a bridge between the two obviously the death of god refers to the desperately needed renewal of interpretation of religion but also in the death of god inside us as he says the god inside us must die so we can experience a spiritual renewal and awakening the god inside us must die because we need to kill our obsession with the ways of the superficial and focus more on the ways of the psyche the absurd is a liminal space between god and us he alludes to that when he says that the highest truth is one and the same with the absurd it sounds overwhelmingly unreasonable but for jung truth is to be found beyond reason he likes to play with duality and rethink our approach towards the divine i understood that the god whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty goodness seriousness elevation humanity or even in godliness once the god was there i understood that the new god would be in the relative if the god is absolute beauty and goodness how should he encompass the fullness of life which is beautiful and hateful good and evil laughable and serious human and inhuman how can man live in the womb of the god if the godhead himself attends only to the one half of him an interesting figure that appears in jung's fantasies is philemon our first encounter with him in the red book is as follows after a long search i found a small house in the country fronted by a large bed of tulips this is where philemon the magician lives with his wife bosses vilemon is one of those magicians who has not yet managed to ban his old age but who lives it with dignity and his wife can only do the same their interests seem to have become narrow even childish they water their bed of tulips and tell each other about the flowers that have newly appeared and their days fade into a pale wavering chiaroscuro which means light dark in italian lit up by the past only slightly frightened of the darkness of what is to come then he approaches philemon and starts a weird conversation with him about black art people tell me that you understand the black art i'm interested in that will you tell me about it what should i tell you about there is nothing to tell don't be ill-natured old man i want to learn you're certainly more learned than i what could i teach you the conversation goes back and forth in a similar manner jung asks philemon about magic and philemon gives him vague answers magic happens to be precisely everything that eludes comprehension but then how the devil is one to teach and learn magic magic is neither to be taught nor learned it's fool is that you want to learn magic but then magic is nothing but deception watch out you have started reasoning again it's difficult to exist without reason and that is exactly how difficult magic is philemon is a figure that also appears in the bible he is closely related to paul the apostle and his name means affectionate in greek not sure why jung decided to associate philemon with magic but it probably has to do with his interest in magic at the time he wrote this passage jung also writes it is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn one cannot understand magic one can only understand what accords with reason magic accords with unreason which one cannot understand the world accords not only with reason but also with unreason probably when jung speaks of magic he speaks of everything that we don't understand he alludes to the unconscious to chaos to serendipity maybe to synchronicity philemon is the person who possesses magic hence he also possesses superior insight he was youngsin zarathustra it was quite important i guess for jung to establish a fantastic connection with such figures that stemmed from mythopique imagination which was missing in the present rational age shamdasani writes the task of individuation lane establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures or contents of the collective unconscious and integrating them into consciousness hence recovering the value of the mythopique imagination which had been lost to the modern age and thereby reconciling the spirit of the time with the spirit of the depth as you can understand the red book is open to multiple interpretations it can be read as a novel it can be read as mythology it can be read as the words of a crazy man but that's its beauty and appeal anyone can express themselves on paper in an abstract and symbolic way but jung owns this process to such a degree that he has created the style that can be called jungian just like kafka's style is called kafkaesque again let's not forget that jung is just a curious man trying to make sense of the world by surrendering to his fantasies his personal unconscious in tandem with the collective unconscious are talking to him and he is transforming their words into images and narrative in his preface to the 1952 revision of transformations and symbols of the libido jung wrote about the red book i was driven to ask myself in all seriousness what is the myth you are living i found no answer to this question and had to admit that i was not living with a myth or even in a myth but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which i was beginning to regard with increasing distrust so in the most natural way i took it upon myself to get to know my myth and i regarded this as the task of tasks for so i told myself how could i when treating my patients makes you allowance for the personal factor for my personal equation which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person if i was unconscious of it and shamdasani adds the study of myth had revealed to jung his meetlessness he then undertook to get to know his myth his personal equation by reading the red book we become fellow travelers in a journey of self-exploration that prompts us to ask ourselves two quite thought-provoking questions who am i really and what is my myth hey guys hope you enjoyed today's video if you did make sure to like subscribe turn on notifications and comment below something cool please so that more people can discover it if you want to watch more videos from my channel check out this one and this one take care see you soon adrian out

Channel: Metamorphosis 77

Views: 255,447

Keywords: jung, redbook

Id: AGWsHgn8J_8

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022