Jung’s Red Book

The red book was a notebook with large pages and a red cover in which C. G Jung wrote about his own path of individuation.

In fact, it was titled Liber Novus, in Latin Livro Novo, but as it had a red cover, it became known in the history of Analytical Psychology as the Red Book.

This book is one of the books I will study in my PhD. It is difficult to define it in a few words. According to Jung, this had been: “my most difficult experiment”. Dive within yourself.

At times Jung felt the need to draw figures, mandalas, Egyptian inscriptions… See below some drawings. Each one is on a separate sheet. I put them together to make it easier.

The process of Jungian self-analysis may, at first, seem crazy. The central idea here is that the Unconscious has characters that manifest themselves independently of the will of the ego, the will of the I. These characters appear in dreams, literature, religion… but also in the analysis process – with a psychologist or psychoanalyst – or in the process of self-analysis, as Jung sought to do.

The content of the book, as well as the images, is very rich. We can find there, in germ, the whole theory of Jungian Psychology that would be developed in the following decades. Everything is there: the idea of symbol, of individuation, of Self (or Selbst, in German).

However, as it was Jung’s personal experiment, as it concerned his heart, he did not publish this book in his lifetime. Having been written between 1912 and 1928, it was only published in German and English in 2008 and in Portuguese in 2010.