Red Book: A Reader's Edition

Hardcover

$59.99

Red Book: A Reader's Edition

$59.99

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Jung's Secret Book

The Red Book is Carl Jung's private record of his "confrontation with the unconscious," the period between 1913 and 1930 when he deliberately induced visions, held dialogues with inner figures, and worked out the psychological system that would define the rest of his career. He wrote and illustrated the manuscript in calligraphic script with hand-painted images, creating something between a medieval illuminated manuscript and a personal gospel. He never published it. His family kept it locked in a bank vault for decades after his death.

What You Find Inside

The text records Jung's encounters with figures from his unconscious: Elijah, Salome, Philemon, the Red One, and others. These are not literary characters. Jung treated them as autonomous entities within his psyche, and the dialogues have the quality of genuine confrontation. He argues with them, learns from them, is frightened by them. The theoretical concepts that emerged from this period, the anima, the shadow, individuation, active imagination, appear here in their raw, experiential form, before Jung translated them into scientific language.

The Reader's Edition

The full facsimile edition of The Red Book is an oversized art object. This Reader's Edition, published by W.W. Norton, gives you the complete text in a standard hardcover format with Sonu Shamdasani's extensive introduction and notes. Shamdasani spent years preparing the manuscript for publication and his scholarly apparatus is essential for understanding what Jung was doing and why.