The Red Book Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition.

摘要

Something happened to Jung, and when we read The Red Book, something happens to us. Jung describes this experience of his 40th year as the pivotal one of his life: It took "forty-five years to bring these things that I once experienced and wrote down into the vessel of my scientific work" (p. 85). Jung consented to the images, the different voices that arose within him, and engaged fully in the drama that unfolded: "I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, that which rules the depths of everything that is contemporary" (p. 117). Despite his revulsion and the slanging matches that often occurred between him and those he encountered within, Jung found that he lived far from the depths and had to go looking for his lost soul. His soul asks, "Who should live your own life if not yourself?.... The way leads to mutual love in community" (p. 125). Jung says, "It cost me a great deal to undergo [the fantasies and emotions that erupted].... I had to plummet down into them, as it were. I felt...violent resistance to them...and distinct fear" (1, p. 178).