The Red Book, page 9
Jung added that he himself was the one Swiss. The “I” was not the self, but from there one could see the divine miracle. The small light resembled the great light. Henceforth, he stopped painting mandalas. The dream had expressed the unconscious developmental process, which was not linear, and he found it completely satisfying. He felt utterly alone at that time, preoccupied with something great that others didn’t understand. In the dream, only he saw the tree. While they stood in the darkness, the tree appeared radiantly. Had he not had such a vision, his life would have lost meaning.216
The realization was that the self is the goal of individuation and that the process of individuation was not linear, but consisted in a circumambulation of the self. This realization gave him strength, for otherwise the experience would have driven him or those around him crazy.217 He felt that the mandala drawings showed him the self “in its saving function” and that this was his salvation. The task now was one of consolidating these insights into his life and science.
In his 1926 revision of The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, he highlighted the significance of the midlife transition. He argued that the first half of life could be characterized as the natural phase, in which the prime aim was establishing oneself in the world, gaining an income, and raising a family. The second half of life could be characterized as the cultural phase, which involved a revaluation of earlier values. The goal in this period was one of conserving previous values together with the recognition of their opposites. This meant that individuals had to develop the undeveloped and neglected aspects of their personality.218 The individuation process was now conceived as the general pattern of human development. He argued that there was a lack of guidance for this transition in contemporary society, and he saw his psychology as filling this lacuna. Outside of analytical psychology, Jung’s formulations have had an impact on the field of adult developmental psychology. Clearly, his crisis experience formed the template for this conception of the requirements of the two halves of life. Liber Novus depicts Jung’s reappraisal of his previous values, and his attempt to develop the neglected aspects of his personality. Thus it formed the basis of his understanding of how the midlife transition could be successfully navigated.
In 1928 he published a small book, The Relations between the I and the Unconscious, which was an expansion of his 1916 paper “The structure of the unconscious.” Here, he expanded upon the “interior drama” of the transformation process, adding a section dealing in detail with the process of individuation. He noted that after one had dealt with the fantasies from the personal sphere, one met with fantasies from the impersonal sphere. These were not simply arbitrary, but converged upon a goal. Hence these later fantasies could be described as processes of initiation, which provided their nearest analogy. For this process to take place, active participation was required: “When the conscious mind participates actively and experiences each stage of the process . . . then the next image always starts off on the higher level that has been won, and purposiveness develops.”219
After the assimilation of the personal unconscious, the differentiation of the persona, and the overcoming of the state of godlikeness, the next stage that followed was the integration of the anima for men and of the animus for women. Jung argued that just as it was essential for a man to distinguish between what he was and how he appeared to others, it was equally essential to become conscious of “his invisible relations to the unconscious” and hence to differentiate himself from the anima. He noted that when the anima was unconscious, it was projected. For a child, the first bearer of the soul-image was the mother, and thereafter, the women who aroused a man’s feelings. One needed to objectify the anima and to pose questions to her, by the method of inner dialogue or active imagination. Everyone, he claimed, had this ability to hold dialogues with him- or herself. Active imagination would thus be one form of inner dialogue, a type of dramatized thinking. It was critical to disidentify from the thoughts that arose, and to overcome the assumption that one had produced them oneself.220 What was most essential was not interpreting or understanding the fantasies, but experiencing them. This represented a shift from his emphasis on creative formulation and understanding in his paper on the transcendent function. He argued that one should treat the fantasies completely literally while one was engaged in them, but symbolically when one interpreted them.221 This was a direct description of Jung’s procedure in the Black Books. The task of such discussions was to objectify the effects of the anima and to become conscious of the contents that underlay these, thereby integrating these into consciousness. When one had become familiar with the unconscious processes reflected in the anima, the anima then became a function of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, as opposed to an autonomous complex. Again, this process of the integration of the anima was the subject of Liber Novus and the Black Books. (It also highlights the fact that the fantasies in Liber Novus should be read symbolically and not literally. To take statements from them out of context and to cite them literally would represent a serious misunderstanding.) Jung noted that this process had three effects:
The first effect is that the range of consciousness is increased by the inclusion of a great number and variety of unconscious contents. The second is a gradual diminution of the dominating influence of the unconscious. The third is an alteration in the personality.222
After one had achieved the integration of the anima, one was confronted with another figure, namely the “mana personality.” Jung argued that when the anima lost her “mana” or power, the man who assimilated it must have acquired this, and so became a “mana personality,” a being of superior will and wisdom. However, this figure was “a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the powerful man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine man, and saint, the lord of men and spirits, the friend of Gods.”223 Thus in integrating the anima, and attaining her power, one inevitably identified with the figure of the magician, and one faced the task of differentiating oneself from this. He added that for women, the corresponding figure was that of the Great Mother. If one gave up the claim to victory over the anima, possession by the figure of the magician ceased, and one realized that the mana truly belonged to the “mid-point of the personality,” namely, the self. The assimilation of the contents of the mana personality led to the self. Jung’s description of the encounter with the mana personality, both the identification and subsequent disidentification with it, corresponds to his encounter with Philemon in Liber Novus. Of the self, Jung wrote: “It might as well be called ‘God in us.’ The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted to this point, and all our highest and deepest purposes seem to be striving toward it.”224 Jung’s description of the self conveys the significance of his realization following his Liverpool dream:
The self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inner and outer . . . the self is also the goal of life, because it is the most complete expression of that fateful combination we call individuality . . . With the experiencing of the self as something irrational, as an indefinable being to which the I is neither opposed nor subjected, but in a relation of dependence, and around which it revolves, very much as the earth revolves about the sun—then the goal of individuation has been reached.225
The Confrontation with the World
Why did Jung stop working on Liber Novus? In his afterword, written in 1959, he wrote:
My acquaintance with alchemy in 1930 took me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when [Richard] Wilhelm sent me the text of the “Golden flower,” an alchemical treatise. There the contents of this book found their way into actuality and I could no longer continue working on it.226
There is one more completed painting in Liber Novus. In 1928, Jung painted a mandala of a golden castle (Page 163, facsimile edition). After painting it, it struck him that the mandala had something Chinese about it. Shortly afterward, Richard Wilhelm sent him the text of The Secret of the Golden Flower, asking him to write a commentary on it. Jung was struck by it and the timing:
The text gave me an undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. This was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with someone and something.227
The significance of this confirmation is indicated in the lines that he wrote beneath the painting of the Yellow Castle.228 Jung was struck by the correspondences between the imagery and conceptions of this text and his own paintings and fantasies. On May 25, 1929, he wrote to Wilhelm: “Fate appears to have given us the role of two bridge pillars which carry the bridge between East and West.”229 Only later did he realize that the alchemical nature of the text was important.230 He worked on his commentary during 1929. On September 10, 1929, he wrote to Wilhelm: “I am thrilled by this text, which stands so close to our unconscious.”231
Jung’s commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower was a turning point. It was his first public discussion of the significance of the mandala. For the first time, Jung anonymously presented three of his own paintings from Liber Novus as examples of European mandalas, and commented on them.232 To Wilhelm, he wrote on October 28, 1929, concerning the mandalas in the volume: “the images amplify one another precisely through their diversity. They give an excellent image of the effort of the unconscious European spirit to grasp Eastern eschatology.”233 This connection between the “European unconscious spirit” and Eastern eschatology became one of the major themes in Jung’s work in the 1930s, which he explored through further collaborations with the Indologists Wilhelm Hauer and Heinrich Zimmer.234 At the same time, the form of the work was crucial: rather than revealing the full details of his own experiment, or those of his patients, Jung used the parallels with the Chinese text as an indirect way of speaking about it, much as he had begun to do in chapter 5 of Psychological Types. This allegorical method now became his preferred form. Rather than write directly of his experiences, he commented on analogous developments in esoteric practices, and most of all in medieval alchemy.
Shortly afterward, Jung abruptly left off working on Liber Novus. The last full-page image was left unfinished, and he stopped transcribing the text. He later recalled that when he reached this central point, or Tao, his confrontation with the world commenced, and he began to give many lectures.235 Thus the “confrontation with the unconscious” drew to a close, and the “confrontation with the world” began. Jung added that he saw these activities as a form of compensation for the years of inner preoccupation.236
The Comparative Study of the Individuation Process
Jung had been familiar with alchemical texts from around 1910. In 1912, Théodore Flournoy had presented a psychological interpretation of alchemy in his lectures at the University of Geneva and, in 1914, Herbert Silberer published an extensive work on the subject.237 Jung’s approach to alchemy followed the work of Flournoy and Silberer, in regarding alchemy from a psychological perspective. His understanding of it was based on two main theses: first, that in meditating on the texts and materials in their laboratories, the alchemists were actually practicing a form of active imagination. Second, that the symbolism in the alchemical texts corresponded to that of the individuation process with which Jung and his patients had been engaged.
In the 1930s, Jung’s activity shifted from working on his fantasies in the Black Books to his alchemy copy books. In these, he presented an encyclopedic collection of excerpts from alchemical literature and related works, which he indexed according to key words and subjects. These copy books formed the basis of his writings on the psychology of alchemy.
After 1930, Jung put Liber Novus to one side. While he had stopped working directly on it, it still remained at the center of his activity. In his therapeutic work, he continued to attempt to foster similar developments in his patients, and to establish which aspects of his own experience were singular, and which had some generality and applicability to others. In his symbolic researches, Jung was interested in parallels to the imagery and conceptions of Liber Novus. The question that he pursued was the following: was something akin to the individuation process to be found in all cultures? If so, what were the common and differential elements? In this perspective, Jung’s work after 1930 could be considered as an extended amplification of the contents of Liber Novus, and an attempt to translate its contents into a form acceptable to the contemporary outlook. Some of the statements made in Liber Novus closely correspond to positions that Jung would later articulate in his published works, and represent their first formulations.238 On the other hand, much did not directly find its way into the Collected Works, or was presented in a schematic form, or through allegory and indirect allusion. Thus Liber Novus enables a hitherto unsuspected clarification of the most difficult aspects of Jung’s Collected Works. One is simply not in a position to comprehend the genesis of Jung’s late work, nor to fully understand what he was attempting to achieve, without studying Liber Novus. At the same time, the Collected Works can in part be considered an indirect commentary on Liber Novus. Each mutually explicates the other.
Jung saw his “confrontation with the unconscious” as the source of his later work. He recalled that all his work and everything that he subsequently achieved came from these imaginings. He had expressed things as well as he was able, in clumsy, handicapped language. He often felt as if “gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon [him]. One thunderstorm followed another.” He was amazed it hadn’t broken him as it had done others, such as Schreber.239
When asked by Kurt Wolff in 1957 on the relation between his scholarly works and his biographical notes of dreams and fantasies, Jung replied:
That was the primal stuff that compelled me to work on it, and my work is a more or less successful attempt to incorporate this incandescent matter into the worldview of my time. The first imaginings and dreams were like fiery, molten basalt, from which the stone crystallized, upon which I could work.240
He added that “it has cost me 45 years so to speak, to bring the things that I once experienced and wrote down into the vessel of my scientific work.”241
In Jung’s own terms, Liber Novus could be considered to contain, among other things, an account of stages of his process of individuation. In subsequent works, he tried to point out the general schematic common elements to which he could find parallels in his patients and in comparative research. The later works thus present a skeletal outline, a basic sketch, but left out the main body of detail. In retrospect, he described the Red Book as an attempt to formulate things in terms of revelation. He had hope that this would free him, but found that it didn’t. He then realized that he had to return to the human side and to science. He had to draw conclusions from the insights. The elaboration of the material in the Red Book was vital, but he also had to understand the ethical obligations. In doing so, he had paid with his life and his science.242
In 1930, he commenced a series of seminars on the fantasy visions of Christiana Morgan at the Psychological Club in Zürich, which can in part be regarded as an indirect commentary on Liber Novus. To demonstrate the empirical validity of the conceptions that he derived in the latter, he had to show that processes depicted within it were not unique.
With his seminars on Kundalini Yoga in 1932, Jung commenced a comparative study of esoteric practices, focusing on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, Patanjali’s Yoga sutras, Buddhist meditational practices, and medieval alchemy, which he presented in an extensive series of lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).243 The critical insight that enabled these linkages and comparisons was Jung’s realization that these practices were all based on different forms of active imagination—and that they all had as their goal the transformation of the personality—which Jung understood as the process of individuation. Thus Jung’s ETH lectures provide a comparative history of active imagination, the practice that formed the basis of Liber Novus.
In 1934, he published his first extended case description of the individuation process, which was that of Kristine Mann, who had painted an extensive series of mandalas. He referred to his own undertaking:
I have naturally used this method on myself too and can affirm that one can paint very complicated pictures without having the least idea of their real meaning. While painting them, the picture seems to develop out of itself and often in opposition to one’s conscious intentions.244
He noted that the present work filled a gap in his description of his therapeutic methods, as he had written little about active imagination. He had used this method since 1916, but only sketched it in The Relations of the I to the Unconscious in 1928, and first mentioned the mandala in 1929, in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower:
For at least thirteen years I kept quiet about the results of these methods in order to avoid any suggestion. I wanted to assure myself that these things—mandalas especially—really are produced spontaneously and were not suggested to the patient by my own fantasy.245
Through his historical studies, he convinced himself that mandalas had been produced in all times and places. He also noted that they were produced by patients of psychotherapists who were not his students. This also indicates one consideration that may have led him not to publish Liber Novus: to convince himself, and his critics, that the developments of his patients and especially their mandala images were not simply due to suggestion. He held that the mandala represented one of the best examples of the universality of an archetype. In 1936, he also noted that he himself had used the method of active imagination over a long period of time, and observed many symbols that he had been able to verify only years later in texts that had been unknown to him.246 However, from an evidential standpoint, given the breadth of his learning, Jung’s own material would not have been a particularly convincing example of his thesis that images from the collective unconscious spontaneously emerged without prior acquaintance.
