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THE GENESIS OF THE RED BOOK
AND ITS PUBLICATION
Ulrich Hoerni
I first presented this paper at the invitation of The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in June 2010, when they kindly invited me to talk about the genesis of The Red Book and its publication. I was informed that attendees were ‘looking to this conference as a “way in” to The Red Book – a way of making it less intimidating and more accessible … – yet also that only a small number … would have actually read the entire book.’ Whereas many would ‘have read some parts of it, some might have basically only looked at the images, and a few [would] not have read anything but are curious.’ Perhaps the same holds true for readers of this book.
As I took part in the preparation of the edition on behalf of C. G. Jung’s heirs, I would like to present a summary of the developments and considerations that led to the publication of The Red Book. In retrospect, this is easy. We faced a great many unanswered questions when we started working. And I can’t claim that we have a complete overview of the book’s various aspects today. The Red Book is a unique work in many respects. Still, it did not simply fall out of the sky but emerged from a certain historical and intellectual context. It probably can’t be understood in and of itself. I will, therefore, also address contextual questions regarding its genesis, its effect, and its editing.
To begin, we must look to the year 1913, which was pivotal for Jung. The preliminary events are well known: From 1901–9, Jung worked as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli clinic; from 1906 onward, he successfully introduced psychoanalysis there and worked together with Freud, although not to treat patients, but to build the International Psychoanalytical Association, organize congresses, and edit yearbooks. From 1909 onward, he had his own private practice. He also gave lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Zürich. It looked as if he was going to have a successful academic career, but it turned out otherwise. Jung realized that he did not share all of Freud’s views. They seemed to him reductionist, rationalistic, and backward-looking, oriented to the social morality of the nineteenth century; at the same time, they seemed to lack religious and philosophical dimensions. Similar reservations applied to the materialistic and causal thinking of the orthodox sciences. Jung’s book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido led to a conflict between the two men. In January 1913, Freud ended the private relationship. In October 1913, Jung quit his collaboration on the yearbook. In April 1914, he resigned from his post as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and as a lecturer at the university. It is not inappropriate to talk of a setback in his career or even a midlife crisis.
For Jung, there now began – I quote – ‘a period of inner uncertainty […] It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation’ (Jung 1963: 170). He was increasingly haunted by impressive dreams and strong emotions. To find his bearings, he commenced the by now famous experiment that lasted until about 1930 and became known as his ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious.’ It was the development of a technique to ‘get to the bottom of [his] inner processes,’ ‘to translate the emotions into images,’ ‘to grasp the fantasies which were stirring … “underground”’ (178). He later called this method active imagination.He first recorded these fantasies in his Black Books. He then revised these texts at least three times, added reflections on them, and copied them in a calligraphic script, accompanied by his own paintings, into a book bound in red leather. In 1930, Jung ended his experiment and put The Red Book aside – unfinished. So much about the book’s genesis. Jung started to write about the experiment from early on, as is well documented today: The essay ‘The Transcendent Function’ outlines the technique of active imagination; Memories, Dreams, Reflections describes how he personally perceived it, and with The Red Book, we can now also see the results of his work.
But what is the actual content of The Red Book? It would be presumptuous if I tried, in this paper, to present you with any form of quintessence. Going through and understanding The Red Book must be your own task. I would, however, at least like to point out certain structures and patterns to facilitate access. The text starts with a surprising title, ‘The Way of What Is to Come,’ accompanied by a compilation of quotations from the Bible, beginning with Isaiah:
Isaiah said: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing…. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall be a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And a highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; […]
(Isaiah 35:1–8)1
After so much rejoicing, we are, obviously, not presented with a case history or chaotic and embarrassing therapeutic material, as has been suspected, but with the outlines of a way, an intention, a program, even a vision. First, Jung explains how the experiment came about. Although he has reached ‘honour, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness,’ he suffers from the loss of his soul (2009: 231). The first chapter is, therefore, entitled ‘Refinding the Soul,’ and once Jung has happily found her again, he starts a kind of journey with her. This is the overall motif of the work. Jung strolls through picturesque landscapes meeting strange characters, among them Satan himself, and has profound conversations with them. On these occasions, he is not the one who dispenses wisdom, but the one who asks questions. Chapters always begin with imagined scenes – images, dialogues, sensations, emotions. These scenes are then commented on, along the lines of ‘what can we learn from this?’ The stringing together of single episodes refers to a literary genre with a long tradition of which the Odyssey or Hans im Glück2 are representatives. Jung’s text ends with the words, ‘This is the way’ (330). One could ask whether The Red Book reaches a conclusion. Maybe the journey and its single episodes are the reward.
Jung’s conversations are, of course, not about everyday business, but literally about God and the world, life and death, heaven and hell; in other words, existential questions from an area in which psychology, philosophy, art, and religion merge, an area that will be the breeding ground of analytical psychology. For people acquainted with this, it may not be without appeal to see, so to speak, Jung’s ideas in their embryonic state, such as the typology, the shadow and its acceptance, the self, the understanding of the symbol, the process of individuation, and many other things. The acting characters represent – of course – archetypes. The dialogues and comments are riddled with explicit and implicit allusions to philosophical, mythological, and religious literature. Prime examples are the New Testament and Nietzsche’s works. The melodious names of the characters – Elijah, Salomé, Izdubar, Philemon, Ammonius, Telesphoros, and others – do not arise from Jung’s imagination but from literature. The text of The Red Book is thus a multilayered, comprehensive composition that places great demands on the reader.
The paintings are a different case: they immediately impress with their beauty and charisma. Yet the paintings and text do not form a homogenous entity. There isn’t a corresponding text passage for each painting. One also notices that different types of paintings can be distinguished. A first type, richly illuminated initials, are literally intertwined with the text. A second, fairly rare type are paintings that actually illustrate the text. A third type tell, as independent chapters, separate stories in the form of an illustration with a short text. A fourth and frequent type stands alone with no reference to the text. This is particularly the case with a series of mandalas.
What was the experiment’s further development? Jung shared his inner experiences with some close associates. In his 1925 seminars on analytical psychology, he described his confrontation with the unconscious. But after 1930 he let the Red Book rest for decades. Meanwhile, the insights he had gained through it directly informed his subsequent writings. With his senses sharpened by his own development, he now began to study similar psychic processes. His experiences found particular expression in his seminars about inner images. From 1930 to 1934, he held the so-called German Seminars, the Kundalini Yoga Seminar, and the famous Visions Seminars, and from 1938 to 1941, he presented an entire series of lectures on this subject, including active imagination, eastern and western meditation, and alchemy.
Although Jung actively considered publishing The Red Book, he never took the necessary steps. In 1916, he privately published the Seven Sermons to the Dead, a short work that arose from the same context. Even the 1916 essay, ‘The Transcendent Function,’ in which he described the technique of active imagination, was only published in 1958. He mentioned the reasons why he did not publish The Red Book: it was unfinished; his growing interest in alchemy as a research topic had distracted him from his work on it; and he called the detailed working out of his fantasies in The Red Book a necessary but annoying ‘aestheticizing elaboration.’ As late as 1957, Jung declared that the Black Books and The Red Book were autobiographical records that he did not want published in his Collected Works since they were not of a scholarly character. As a concession, he allowed Aniela Jaffé to quote excerpts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In 1959, he – surprisingly – tried to complete the text of The Red Book with the help of the old draft and to finish an incomplete painting. He also started on an epilogue, but both the calligraphic text and epilogue break off in midsentence.
In 1961, Jung died. For his descendants, the inheritance of Jung’s literary rights brought an obligation and challenge: to see through the publication of the German edition of his Collected Works. In his will, Jung had expressed the wish that The Red Book and the Black Books should remain with his family, without, however, giving more detailed instructions. Because The Red Book was not meant to be published in the Collected Works, the heirs concluded that this was Jung’s final wish concerning the work and that it was an entirely private matter. They did not consider further publications. In 1984, the newly appointed executive committee had five photographic duplicates made. For the first time, Jung’s descendants now had the opportunity to take a close look at it. When, after 1990, the editing of the German Collected Works was drawing to a conclusion, the executive committee decided to start looking through all the accessible unpublished material with an eye to additional publications. It turned out that there was an entire corpus of drafts and variants pertaining to The Red Book. Yet whether and how this substantial material could be published remained an open question. At first glance, style and content appeared to have little in common with Jung’s other works. Much was unclear, and by the mid-1990s, there was no one left who could provide firsthand information on these points.
However, since Jung’s time, the history of psychology had been gaining in importance and could now offer a new approach. In connection with the edition of the Kundalini Yoga Seminar, I had come in contact with Sonu Shamdasani. In extensive talks, we discussed the possibility of further Jung publications, both in general terms as well as with regard to The Red Book. The book had emerged in a specific context with which a reader at the turn of the twenty-first century is no longer familiar. But a historian of psychology would be able to present it as a historical document. With the help of primary sources, he could embed it in the cultural context of its genesis, situate it within the history of science, and relate it to Jung’s life and works. In 1999, Sonu Shamdasani compiled these guiding principles. On the basis of his proposal, the Society of Heirs decided in the spring of 2000 – not without discussion – to release The Red Book for publication and to hand over the task of editing it to Sonu Shamdasani.
It was an interesting and unusual task. Apart from The Red Book, we were not only confronted with archival material pertaining to it, but also with many open questions about which we would have liked to have asked the author himself. Editing The Red Book, therefore, meant more than simply preparing a text for publication; it required a great amount of research. To begin with, several hundred manuscript pages had to be transcribed and the transcription needed to be checked again. My daughter and I took part in this job. Sonu Shamdasani compared the different text variants line by line to shed light on Jung’s way of composing his text. In the ETH and the family archives, countless letters from that period were scanned for relevant information. Of great importance was the inspection of Jung’s library at Küsnacht with regard to works that could have served as sources of information or inspiration. It turned out not only that such works existed, but also that the library, with its holdings on psychology, mythology, religions, cults, ethnology, history, archaeology, and mu...
