# The Red Book - Liber Novus



## Trope (Oct 18, 2008)

The following excerpts are from nytimes.com.



> This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
> 
> And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
> 
> ...





> Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
> 
> Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
> 
> ...





> Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
> 
> And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.












Discuss.


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## Kevinaswell (May 6, 2009)

Meh.

I'll care when I see it and I decide it's relevant to anything at all beyond the relevancy of cave drawings.


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## thehigher (Apr 20, 2009)

What are your opinions on it trope?


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## Trope (Oct 18, 2008)

What's an opinion?

I think it's kind of exciting. Something like this coming out after the better part of a century. Whether its contents prove to be fascinating remains to be seen, but this is one of the few times I wouldn't mind going out of my way to be the guy standing at the front of the line once it does. 

Amazon.com: The Red Book (9780393065671): C. G. Jung, Sonu Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, John Peck: Books


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## Deagalman (Jul 3, 2009)

Kevinaswell said:


> Meh.
> 
> I'll care when I see it and I decide it's relevant to anything at all beyond the relevancy of cave drawings.


 
How can you not appreciate this kind of thing?


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## thehigher (Apr 20, 2009)

Trope said:


> What's an opinion?
> 
> I think it's kind of exciting. Something like this coming out after the better part of a century. Whether its contents prove to be fascinating remains to be seen, but this is one of the few times I wouldn't mind going out of my way to be the guy standing at the front of the line once it does.
> 
> Amazon.com: The Red Book (9780393065671): C. G. Jung, Sonu Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, John Peck: Books


I wanna come!


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## Kevinaswell (May 6, 2009)

Deagalman said:


> How can you not appreciate this kind of thing?


I appreciate it.

I just don't foresee any way whatsoever that it could benefit or improve anything in my head. Which will be determined for sure when I see it.

And if it doesn't do that, all it's about to really get is "Huh. Well....sweet he put all that time and focus into it." which is definitely worthy of my appreciation and it'll get it, but it's nothing at all that will get me too excited. I get this same feeling from living anyways. 

Plus I'm a tad bit skeptical he was able to induce hallucinations as he described. Without drugs. If he was tripping on shrooms or something, I'd be all hell yea that's kinda funny/sweet and interesting he did that. But himself? Iunno.... especially when all I have to trust his credibility about the matter is HIMSELF. Reminds me of the Bible. 

But self-induced hallucinations are NOT that easy....especially to remain conscious during enough to make a BOOK. Even if we pretended he was using lucid dream techniques (which he didn't specify), the act of creating a book would certainly hinder him from remaining in that state of mind. 

Also, other self-induced hallucination techniques require extreme concentration as well, relying on the emptiness of darkness to aid in inducing hallucinations as well as the previous existence of mental data sets of real-world objects/people/situations/etc. Sure he says he spent six years doing it, and I'm sure that it worked. 

So I'm left wondering like...what...did he sit and trip out and THEN go to his book and record it? Because I really doubt it was real-time. And if it wasn't real-time, then what is the relevancy of him even doing this? Personal exploration into a world that doesn't apply to anything? What new idea is he trying to portray from this? That humans aren't completely rational and are capable of this type of thing? Cuz like duh Jung >.<

Even if he did successfully induce these things, the only two options are that he'd hallucinate specific things he thought of, or he just let his mind go free and paid attention to what it did by itself. In THIS case, anything he saw would have been completely random, and I don't have much patience for some guys random self-induced trip thoughts....

Like I'm not hating on it. I think it's sweet and it'll be fun to look at. I just am not too personally interested in any of the messages of Jung's self-induced tripping out ass feels is necessary to portray >.< At least, on a personal level. It's got the "well that'll be fun to look at." level down pretty well.

EDIT: I just kinda believe that the unconscious isn't at all humanly conceivable, and if it IS, then all it is is a meaningless translation.


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## Trope (Oct 18, 2008)

thehigher said:


> I wanna come!


Hop in! I've got snacks for the road.


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## knght990 (Jul 28, 2009)

*Liber Novus*

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1

Move this thread if it is placed incorrectly.


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## Trope (Oct 18, 2008)

knght990 said:


> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1
> 
> Move this thread if it is placed incorrectly.


Consider it done. I had to think about where it belonged for a while too (my version of the thread was originally posted in current events ), but in the end, it's a discussion about a book.


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## knght990 (Jul 28, 2009)

thx

When will B&N carry it?


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## Trope (Oct 18, 2008)

I just did a quick search on B&N's site. They currently have it listed as available for pre-order (save 5% if you do) and should be on shelves as of the 7th. 

The Red Book, C. G. Jung, Book - Barnes & Noble


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## knght990 (Jul 28, 2009)

sweet, ill save up, though ill order it from amazon


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