The Red Book, page 8
There is an undated fragment of a letter draft to an unidentified person in which Cary Baynes expresses her view of the significance of Liber Novus, and the necessity of its publication:
I am absolutely thunderstruck, for example, as I read the Red Book, and see all that is told there for the Right Way for us of today, to find how Toni has kept it out of her system. She wouldn’t have an unconscious spot in her psyche had she digested even as much of the Red Book as I have read & that I should think was not a third or a fourth. And another difficult thing to understand is why she has no interest in seeing him publish it. There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely, so does it re-envisage and clarify the things that are today, staggering everyone who is trying to find the clue to life . . . he has put into it all the vigor and color of his speech, all the directness and simplicity that come when as at Cornwall the fire burns in him.186
Of course it may be that as he says, if he published it as it is, he would forever be hors du combat in the world of rational science, but then there must be some way around that, some way of protecting himself against stupidity, in order that the people who would want the book need not go without for the time it will take the majority to get ready for it. I always knew he must be able to write the fire that he can speak—and here it is. His published books are doctored up for the world at large, or rather they are written out of his head & this out of his heart.187
These discussions vividly portray the depth of Jung’s deliberations concerning the publication of Liber Novus, his sense of its centrality in comprehending the genesis of his work, and his fear that the work would be misunderstood. The impression that the style of the work would make on an unsuspecting public strongly concerned Jung. He later recalled to Aniela Jaffé that the work still needed a suitable form in which it could be brought into the world because it sounded like prophecy, which was not to his taste.188
There appears to have been some discussion concerning these issues in Jung’s circle. On May 29, 1924, Cary Baynes noted a discussion with Peter Baynes in which he argued that Liber Novus could be understood only by someone who had known Jung. By contrast, she thought that the book
was the record of the passage of the universe through the soul of a man, and just as a person stands by the sea and listens to that very strange and awful music and cannot explain why his heart aches, or why a cry of exaltation wants to leap from his throat, so I thought it would be with the Red Book, and that a man would be perforce lifted out of himself by the majesty of it, and swung to heights he had never been before.189
There are further signs that Jung circulated copies of Liber Novus to confidantes, and that the material was discussed together with the possibilities of its publication. One such colleague was Wolfgang Stockmayer. Jung met Stockmayer in 1907. In his unpublished obituary, Jung nominated him as the first German to be interested in his work. He recalled that Stockmayer was a true friend. They traveled together in Italy and Switzerland, and there was seldom a year in which they did not meet. Jung commented:
He distinguished himself through his great interest and equally great understanding for pathological psychic processes. I also found with him a sympathetic reception for my broader viewpoint, which became of importance for my later comparative psychological works.190
Stockmayer accompanied Jung in “the valuable penetration of our psychology” into classical Chinese philosophy, the mystical speculations of India and Tantric yoga.191
On December 22, 1924, Stockmayer wrote to Jung:
I often long for the Red Book, and I would like to have a transcript of what is available; I failed to do so when I had it, as things go. I recently fantasized about a kind of journal of “Documents” in a loose form for materials from the “forge of the unconscious,” with words and colors.192
It appears that Jung sent some material to him. On April 30, 1925, Stockmayer wrote to Jung:
In the meantime we have gone through “Scrutinies,” and it is the same impression as with the great wandering.193 A selected collective milieu for such from the Red Book is certainly worth trying out, although your commentary would be quite desired. Since a certain adjacent center of yours lies here, ample access to sources is of great significance, consciously and unconsciously. And I obviously fantasize about “facsimiles,” which you will understand: you need not fear extraversion magic from me. Painting also has great appeal.194
Jung’s manuscript “Commentaries” (see Appendix B) was possibly connected with these discussions.
Thus figures in Jung’s circle held differing views concerning the significance of Liber Novus and whether it should be published, which may have had bearings on Jung’s eventual decisions. Cary Baynes did not complete the transcription, getting as far as the first twenty-seven pages of Scrutinies. For the next few years, her time was taken up with the translation of Jung’s essays into English, followed by the translation of the I Ching.
At some stage, which I estimate to be in the mid-twenties, Jung went back to the Draft and edited it again, deleting and adding material on approximately 250 pages. His revisions served to modernize the language and terminology.195 He also revised some of the material that he had already transcribed into the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus, as well as some material that was left out. It is hard to see why he undertook this unless he was seriously considering publishing it.
In 1925, Jung presented his seminars on analytical psychology to the Psychological Club. Here, he discussed some of the important fantasies in Liber Novus. He described how they unfolded and indicated how they formed the basis of the ideas in Psychological Types and the key to understanding its genesis. The seminar was transcribed and edited by Cary Baynes. That same year, Peter Baynes prepared an English translation of the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, which was privately published.196 Jung gave copies to some of his English-speaking students. In a letter that is presumably a reply to one from Henry Murray thanking him for a copy, Jung wrote:
I am deeply convinced, that those ideas that came to me, are really quite wonderful things. I can easily say that (without blushing), because I know, how resistant and how foolishly obstinate I was, when they first visited me and what a trouble it was, until I could read this symbolic language, so much superior to my dull conscious mind.197
It is possible that Jung may have considered the publication of the Sermones as a trial for the publication of Liber Novus. Barbara Hannah claims that he regretted publishing it and that “he felt strongly that it should only have been written in the Red Book.”198
At some point, Jung wrote a manuscript entitled “Commentaries,” which provided a commentary on chapters 9, 10, and 11 of Liber Primus (see Appendix B). He had discussed some of these fantasies in his 1925 seminar, and he goes into more detail here. From the style and conceptions, I would estimate that this text was written in the mid-twenties. He may have written—or intended to write—further “commentaries” for other chapters, but these have not come to light. This manuscript indicates the amount of work he put into understanding each and every detail of his fantasies.
Jung gave a number of people copies of Liber Novus: Cary Baynes, Peter Baynes, Aniela Jaffé, Wolfgang Stockmayer, and Toni Wolff. Copies may also have been given to others. In 1937, a fire destroyed Peter Baynes’s house, and damaged his copy of Liber Novus. A few years later, he wrote to Jung asking if by chance he had another copy, and offered to translate it.199 Jung replied: “I will try whether I can procure another copy of the Red Book. Please don’t worry about translations. I am sure there are 2 or 3 translations already. But I don’t know of what and by whom.”200 This supposition was presumably based on the number of copies of the work in circulation.
Jung let the following individuals read and/or look at Liber Novus: Richard Hull, Tina Keller, James Kirsch, Ximena Roelli de Angulo (as a child), and Kurt Wolff. Aniela Jaffé read the Black Books, and Tina Keller was also allowed to read sections of the Black Books. Jung most likely showed the book to other close associates, such as Emil Medtner, Franz Riklin Sr., Erika Schlegel, Hans Trüb, and Marie-Louise von Franz. It appears that he allowed those people to read Liber Novus whom he fully trusted and whom he felt had a full grasp of his ideas. Quite a number of his students did not fit into this category.
The Transformation of Psychotherapy
Liber Novus is of critical significance for grasping the emergence of Jung’s new model of psychotherapy. In 1912, in Transformation and Symbols of the Libido, he considered the presence of mythological fantasies—such as are present in Liber Novus—to be the signs of a loosening of the phylogenetic layers of the unconscious, and indicative of schizophrenia. Through his self-experimentation, he radically revised this position: what he now considered critical was not the presence of any particular content, but the attitude of the individual toward it and, in particular, whether an individual could accommodate such material in their worldview. This explains why he commented in his afterword to Liber Novus that to the superficial observer, the work would seem like madness, and could have become so, if he had failed to contain and comprehend the experiences.201 In Liber Secundus, chapter 15, he presents a critique of contemporary psychiatry, highlighting its incapacity to differentiate religious experience or divine madness from psychopathology. If the content of visions or fantasies had no diagnostic value, he held that it was nevertheless critical to view them carefully.202
Out of his experiences, he developed new conceptions of the aims and methods of psychotherapy. Since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, modern psychotherapy had been primarily concerned with the treatment of functional nervous disorders, or neuroses, as they came to be known. From the time of the First World War onward, Jung reformulated the practice of psychotherapy. No longer solely preoccupied with the treatment of psychopathology, it became a practice to enable the higher development of the individual through fostering the individuation process. This was to have far-reaching consequences not only for the development of analytical psychology but also for psychotherapy as a whole.
To demonstrate the validity of the conceptions that he derived in Liber Novus, Jung attempted to show that the processes depicted within it were not unique and that the conceptions which he developed in it were applicable to others. To study the productions of his patients, he built up an extensive collection of their paintings. So that his patients were not separated from their images, he would generally ask them to make copies for him.203
During this period, he continued to instruct his patients as to how to induce visions in a waking state. In 1926, Christiana Morgan came to Jung for analysis. She had been drawn to his ideas on reading Psychological Types, and turned to him for assistance with her problems with relationships and her depressions. In a session in 1926, Morgan noted Jung’s advice to her on how to produce visions:
Well, you see these are too vague for me to be able to say much about them. They are only the beginning. You only use the retina of the eye at first in order to objectify. Then instead of keeping on trying to force the image out you just want to look in. Now when you see these images you want to hold them and see where they take you—how they change. And you want to try to get into the picture yourself—to become one of the actors. When I first began to do this I saw landscapes. Then I learned how to put myself into the landscape, and the figures would talk to me and I would answer them . . . People said he has an artistic temperament. But it was only that my unconscious was swaying me. Now I learn to act its drama as well as the drama of the outer life & so nothing can hurt me now. I have written 1000 pages of material from the unconscious (Told the vision of a giant who turned into an egg).204
He described his own experiments in detail to his patients, and instructed them to follow suit. His role was one of supervising them in experimenting with their own stream of images. Morgan noted Jung saying:
Now I feel as though I ought to say something to you about these phantasies . . . The phantasies now seem to be rather thin and full of repetitions of the same motives. There isn’t enough fire and heat in them. They ought to be more burning . . . You must be in them more, that is you must be your own conscious critical self in them—imposing your own judgments and criticisms . . . I can explain what I mean by telling you of my own experience. I was writing in my book and suddenly saw a man standing watch over my shoulder. One of the gold dots from my book flew up and hit him in the eye. He asked me if I would take it out. I said no—not unless he told me who he was. He said he wouldn’t. You see I knew that. If I had done what he asked then he would have sunk into the unconscious and I would have missed the point of it ie.: why he had appeared from the unconscious at all. finally he told me that he would tell me the meaning of certain hieroglyphs which I had had a few days previous. This he did and I took the thing out of his eye and he vanished.205
Jung went so far as to suggest that his patients prepare their own Red Books. Morgan recalled him saying:
I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. If you do that with these eyes for instance they will cease to draw you. You should never try to make the visions come again. Think of it in your imagination and try to paint it. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.206
In a letter to J. A. Gilbert in 1929, he commented on his procedure:
I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their “mythology.”207
Philemon’s Sanctuary
In the 1920s, Jung’s interest increasingly shifted from the transcription of Liber Novus and the elaboration of his mythology in the Black Books to working on his tower in Bollingen. In 1920, he purchased some land on the upper shores of Lake Zürich in Bollingen. Prior to this, he and his family sometimes spent holidays camping around Lake Zürich. He felt the need to represent his innermost thoughts in stone and to build a completely primitive dwelling: “Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed.”208 He had to make a confession in stone. The tower was a “representation of individuation.” Over the years, he painted murals and made carvings on the walls. The tower may be regarded as a three-dimensional continuation of Liber Novus: its “Liber Quartus.” At the end of Liber Secundus, Jung wrote: “I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages—within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of—others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out.”209 Significantly, the tower was deliberately built as a structure from the Middle Ages, with no modern amenities. The tower was an ongoing, evolving work. He carved this inscription on its wall: “Philemonis sacrum—Fausti poenitentia” (Philemon’s Shrine—Faust’s Repentance). (One of the murals in the tower is a portrait of Philemon.) On April 6, 1929, Jung wrote to Richard Wilhelm: “Why are there no worldly cloisters for men, who should live outside the times!”210
On January 9, 1923, Jung’s mother died. On December 23/24, December, 1923, he had the following dream:
I am on military service. Marching with a battalion. In a wood by Ossingen I come across excavations at a crossroads: 1 meter high stone figure of a frog or a toad with a head. Behind this sits a boy with a toad’s head. Then the bust of a man with an anchor hammered into the region of his heart, Roman. A second bust from around 1640, the same motif. Then mummified corpses. finally there comes a barouche in the style of the seventeenth century. In it sits someone who is dead, but still alive. She turns her head, when I address her as “Miss”; I am aware that “Miss” is a title of nobility.211
A few years later, he grasped the significance of this dream. He noted on December 4, 1926:
Only now do I see for that the dream of 23/24 December 1923 means the death of the anima (“She does not know that she is dead” ). This coincides with the death of my mother . . . Since the death of my mother, the A. [Anima] has fallen silent. Meaningful!212
A few years later, he had a few further dialogues with his soul, but his confrontation with the anima had effectively reached a closure at this point. On January 2, 1927, he had a dream set in Liverpool:
Several young Swiss and I are down by the docks in Liverpool. It is a dark rainy night, with smoke and clouds. We walk up to the upper part of town, which lies on a plateau. We come to a small circular lake in a centrally located garden. In the middle of this there is an island. The men speak of a Swiss who lives here in such a sooty, dark dirty city. But I see that on the island stands a magnolia tree covered with red flowers illuminated by an eternal sun, and think, “Now I know, why this Swiss fellow lives here. He apparently also knows why.” I see a city map: [Plate].213
Jung then painted a mandala based upon this map.214 He attached great significance to this dream, commenting later:
This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the grayish-yellowish raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque, just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all . . . I saw that here the goal had been reached. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center. Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.215
