Anticipation of Jung's Red Book

All of us have had a glimpse of the red fire spurting from the kitchen floor in an image from Jung's Red Book.

I will say this as a person who is in the midst of analysis, who himself is not analyzed to the point of becoming an analyst himself, but one who has made the attempt, the gesture at becoming an analyst (therefore initiate, therefore in authority to comment on the Red Book).

We have all wanted to know what these images mean. We have all wanted a deeper sense of the context of these images, and to know if there are more of these images that we have not seen. This is the sum total of the astonishing interest in Jung's Red Book, a dialog and commentary with the unconscious in florid red ink.

Beyond this it is difficult to say. There are those who will have biographical interest in Jung, but will prefer to remain on the safe, clean white side of the biographer's proof-sheets. There are those for whom the blood of this red opened pommegranite will invite more struggle and suffering into the midst of our lives: that the biography of Jung means something.

Everyone knows that he was not very faithful. Everybody knows that there was something of a meter on his bed that read the lullabies of more than one lady. All this could be nothing more than the litany of human neurosis and fallibility. What could be astonishing in this? What could be astonishing would be to have some way in which the soul speaks, candidly and truly of this situation. That the soul articulates some article of embroidered tapestry, or at least a fragment, a shred of gilded thread and cloth.

"What could be astonishing" writes Heidegger, "is that we still do not know what is called, and what calls thinking." For those who arrive empty handed, devoid of tools, will find themselves astonished. This is a deeper, all encompassing, religious sense of astonishment. It may not be appropriate to the nature of the "Red Book," which must be glimpsed at humbly, and itself an acknowledgement that it is just a humble tablet from one man's life, not the newest Gospel.

Yet we read our dreams, we Jungians, we read our dreams as if they were the Gospels of our lives. Here in the Red Book a man stands forth and offers testimony of his life, in beautiful colors and letters. It is enough to say that the testimony of his life will read into the Gospel of his dreams for him. Insofar as we have built the Gospels of our own dreams on the Gospel of Jung, we will be affected by this, no matter what our intellectual defenses might offer in terms of "academic interest."

Jung himself writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis that the essence of having a secret is not that some element has offered itself as some great mystery. The mysteries are already known by all, but only in a manner that is unconscious. The mystery is known consciously by those who regard it as having some secret, sacred resonance with the part of themselves that is itself secret and sacred. Those who have "mysteries" are announcing and making conscious these elements of themselves, and enduring the paradoxa pertaining thereto. Such too would be the case with Jung's biographical data, which has been kept at a shadowy distance from the community of Jungians. Certainly he is no L. Ron Hubbard, sailing the high seas of tax evasion, a man without a specific country. Jung is Swiss. He belongs to the Swiss homeland, which is notoriously neutral. It is a home of chocolate, golden watches, and Calvinist thought. What Jung always had was a stretch of Swiss lakeside. He kept himself near to the water that was related to the land, but not to the water that seemed unbounded, international. I have not yet heard Jung's thought analyzed from the perspective of his Swiss ethnicity, at least not yet sufficiently so. I am not Swiss enough. nor do I have Swiss friends, to permit myself to do so.

What I have written here, will in all likelihood fail to capture any of the deeper esssence of Jung's work. I can say that the Red Book was, as they say, a document of Jung's encounter with the unconscious, which is to say it must be a relic of the time when he separated from Freud, when his standing with the rest of the world was terribly in question.

I can write that in many instances my own life seems to be the same. I am a man who has dreamed of belonging to the Jung Institute as an analyst for most of his adult life. I am not aware of anything that would permit me to do so at this time. This makes me sad and it makes me mad. But it does open me to the Unconscious. It opens me to my own unknown, so I have continually to sit and make peace with it: and therein is the sadness of water: "Utterly worn out, Utterly clear," writes Ted Hughes (concluding my first article on play). I anticipate there will be a significant amount of Jung's relationship with "not knowing" going on in this Red Book, and analysts hence will continue to analyze the shape of Jung's "not knowing," and weighing it, at least in their own private, intimate, and probably undocumented moments, against the weight of their own.

In a recent reading of Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the analyst reading mentioned the work of Sam Francis as a sudden exclamation of color in the Swiss psyche. A sudden explosion of color in the psyche, shown at a gallery not far from Jung's home. Jung's work in the Red Book contains a much more contained version of this color-explosion, nonetheless promises a structural understanding of this explosion of color that is available to be digested by the scientific communities. Structures exist so long for the unconscious, before the energy of the libido must burst through, "rend the books lest they should rend your hearts" (Attributed to Dorn). But Jung's structure is something special. He took it quite far, and offered, evidently in this instance of the Red Book, as much of his heart as he could. So there is color, and we must enjoy the color as deeply as possible, and there is form, and we must intimately engage the barbs of form and context as deeply as possible.