The Red Book Author: Amazon Prime | Language: English | ISBN:
0393065677 | Format: PDF
The Red Book Description
The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. When Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the heart of it was The Red Book, a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality.
While Jung considered The Red Book to be his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Now, in a complete facsimile and translation, it is available to scholars and the general public. It is an astonishing example of calligraphy and art on a par with The Book of Kells and the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. This publication of The Red Book is a watershed that will cast new light on the making of modern psychology.
212 color illustrations.
- Series: The Red Book (Book 1)
- Hardcover: 404 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 19, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393065677
- ISBN-13: 978-0393065671
- Product Dimensions: 18 x 12.3 x 2.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
In 1913, a 40 year old world renowned psychologist suffers recurring dreams and visions of world catastrophe. His expertise as a psychiatrist working with incurable psychotics forces him to conclude that he is on a course to madness. His training as a scientist compels him to meticulously document what he imagines will be his unavoidable decline into insanity. With the outbreak of World War I, he experiences relief in the realization that the images that have haunted him over the prior ten months pictured not his own undoing, but that of the world. As the outer conflict unfolds, he continues to record the process unfolding within his own psyche, which is reflective of the events in the larger collective. He continues the process until near the War's end, and then spends more than a decade devotedly elaborating, amplifying and illustrating the material that burst upon him during that time in order to render it comprehensible.
The Red Book is not "personal" as we use that word now. It is "personal" in the sense that it details one individual's very unique experience of coming into relationship with what Jung termed the Self, and in prior times was referred to as God, but it is at the same time very impersonal, and actually universal, in cataloguing the drama inherent in any person's formation of that relationship. The book is at home with The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Goethe's Faust, and, as much as anything, The Red Book is Jung's response to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and to Nietzsche's proposition that for modern man, God is dead. The response is that God is neither dead nor to be found in outer religious, national or political containers, but is to be discovered and struggled with in the living of each individual life.
During over two decades reading Jung, this is the book I dreamed of some day seeing. Yes, it is incredible.
But instead of adding to the many praises of the Red Book, let me comment on the editorial work that accompanies Jung's text.
Sonu Shamdasani's Introduction is undoubtedly the best available biography of Jung, though focused in context on the critical central years of Jung's life. Shamdasani is a remarkable scholar, and he has spent over 13 years with the primary documents -- material never before made available to a scholar, documents including Jung's seven Black Book journals, the various draft manuscripts of the Red Book, Jung's own dream books and letters from the period, the amazing contemporary diary of Cary F. Baynes, and innumerable other previously unpublished (and largely unknown) primary sources. After Shamdasani's work, all previous biographical evaluations of this period are irrelevant. No researcher previously had access to the basic and extensive source material upon which a biography must be founded, and thus much of what was written in past decades was either pure speculation or blatant perfidy.
BUT, you ask, why is it not in stock for shipment??
Because the publisher, Norton, was uncertain if this huge and expensive book would sell. The first printing was for only 5,000 copies! To the publisher's surprise, these sold out in pre-publication orders two months before the official release date of Oct 7, 2009. This is not an easy book to print, or reprint. Printing is done in Italy on over-sized museum quality papers, with superb binding. Unlike the average hard-cover book, ordering up another ten thousand copies of a book like this is not a simple matter.
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