Jung’s “Red Book” of his Dream Journey into Madness

Begin forwarded message:
note: students of Tao Dream Practice may find this interesting, with a list of dream sites at the end. Analytical Psychology is a bit tame by Taoist standards – the “dream body” is just a Western term for the Taoist Energy Body, which is not limited to the dream world but consciously cultivated in the waking world.
Since I just taught a dream practice workshop in UK, this publication is interesting timing.
– Michael

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THE HOLY GRAIL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
By Sara Corbett
New York Times
September 20, 2009

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather,
which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in
Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold
letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are
made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of
otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If
you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval
tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It
goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking
for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place
entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that
everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what
has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product
of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town
in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to
read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who
was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite
wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to
cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a
well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both
fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is
thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book
has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own
legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston
and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport
gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of
Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy
Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change
was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a
safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then
being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded
suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the
sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and
whisked away.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood
bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as
possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book —
skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a
species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss
psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by
definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals
itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund
Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior
life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that
has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud,
who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed
the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then
be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the
psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could
be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded
himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural
icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion
of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous
respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the
widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of
Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective
unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger
domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream
psychology.

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the
experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances,
of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was
a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal
with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung
listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held
clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he
pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study
mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from
the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic
narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he
started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as
requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a
province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical
doctors and empirical scientists.

Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of
his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the
time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the
deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began
to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and
ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big,
elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to
teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a
life-altering crisis.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other
scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been
characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the
underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a
transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the
upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38,
got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions
and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he
worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis”
or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with
the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described
his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks
falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling
to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a
nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head.
But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried
instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For
about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out
what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with
patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a
spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of
his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active
imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me
‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams,
Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He
found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of
potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both
lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black
journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a
regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an
unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric
progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious,
shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with
elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate,
academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did
not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that
matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a
kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to
chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take
some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person
might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational,
the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided
the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they
emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory.
In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he
later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one
terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with
desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I
almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung
as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on
and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but
he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering
whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically
oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the
significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All
my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from
those initial fantasies and dreams.”

Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the
Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific
instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the
third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to
leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it
was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then
it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.

Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without
hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they
asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named
Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs
a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children
were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a
vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious
man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his
foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could
not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be
published.”

And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted —
will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as
the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely
it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.

STEPHEN MARTIN IS a compact, bearded man of 57. He has a buoyant, irreverent
wit and what feels like a fully intact sense of wonder. If you happen to
have a conversation with him anytime before, say, 10 a.m., he will ask his
first question — “How did you sleep?” — and likely follow it with a second
one — “Did you dream?” Because for Martin, as it is for all Jungian
analysts, dreaming offers a barometric reading of the psyche. At his house
in a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, Martin keeps five thick books filled with
notations on and interpretations of all the dreams he had while studying to
be an analyst 30 years ago in Zurich, under the tutelage of a Swiss analyst
then in her 70s named Liliane Frey-Rohn. These days, Martin stores his
dreams on his computer, but his dream life is — as he says everybody’s
dream life should be — as involving as ever.

Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding
Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes
patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin
is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected
works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at
least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed
him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a
nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”

The first time I met him, at the train station in Ardmore, Pa., Martin shook
my hand and thoughtfully took my suitcase. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you
to see the holy hankie.” We then walked several blocks to the office where
Martin sees clients. The room was cozy and cavelike, with a thick rug and
walls painted a deep, handsome shade of blue. There was a Mission-style sofa
and two upholstered chairs and an espresso machine in one corner.

Several mounted vintage posters of Zurich hung on the walls, along with
framed photographs of Carl Jung, looking wise and white-haired, and Liliane
Frey-Rohn, a round-faced woman smiling maternally from behind a pair of
severe glasses.

Martin tenderly lifted several first-edition books by Jung from a shelf,
opening them so I could see how they had been inscribed to Frey-Rohn, who
later bequeathed them to Martin. Finally, we found ourselves standing in
front of a square frame hung on the room’s far wall, another gift from his
former analyst and the centerpiece of Martin’s Jung arcana. Inside the frame
was a delicate linen square, its crispness worn away by age — a folded
handkerchief with the letters “CGJ” embroidered neatly in one corner in
gray. Martin pointed. “There you have it,” he said with exaggerated pomp,
“the holy hankie, the sacred nasal shroud of C. G. Jung.”

In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the
Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of
Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project. He has
spent the last several years aggressively, sometimes evangelistically,
raising money in the Jungian community to support his foundation. The
foundation, in turn, helped pay for the translating of the book and the
addition of a scholarly apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network
of footnotes — written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani,
who serves as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three
years persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to
allow him access to it.

Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung’s
old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s Psychological Club or
unpublished letters, for example — both Martin and Shamdasani, who started
the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung
family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works.
Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about
working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding
by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”

What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who
work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully
and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback
by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians —
who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject
themselves into the family’s business. There are Americans knocking
unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling
the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence
farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni,
one of Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters
through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various
permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are
inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book
— which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis
for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly
embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized
the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he
said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we
all feel like we own it.” Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to
recognize the tension. “Thank God I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have
said, “and not a Jungian.”

“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the
greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story
of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about
it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made
it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would
“reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself
personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not.
Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused
a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he
said finally. “That’s all there is.”

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required
more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long,
rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in
the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying
to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.

Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and
an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not
particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms
— a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College
London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book
by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is
a “thinking type.” He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years
and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his
knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era,
a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were
more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war.
He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by
hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems
guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental
attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward
company among both Jungians and Jungs.

The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries
is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to
extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James
Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and
biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told
an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel
in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already
picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie
Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and
Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was
allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.

Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief
literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial
vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of
books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the
award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with
Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a
state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed.
Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of
people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in
London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”

Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and
eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune
moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had
recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two
controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named
Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed
prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas
were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.

While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more
vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right
bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without
illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a
bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly
daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for
Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an
uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The
fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things —
one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably
soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long
considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of
Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by
quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s
blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become
public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a
report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”

For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his
case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture.
Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the
family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original
book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication,
though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran
short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s
research.

Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade,
Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz —
these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very
recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this
summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding
his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.

The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include
references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian
deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts,
Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament,
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical
formulation of gold. And that’s just naming a few. The central premise of
the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with
scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and
over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other
inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a
field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors
delivered by dreams.

“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that
Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares
a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the
thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and
anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung
to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry
Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in
which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper
and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some
beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “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. . . . 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.”

ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its
church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless
schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and
rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges
that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake
Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch
hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Bahnhofstrasse in their
power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact
that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling
and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.

But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion
to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice in and
around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held in small
offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few hundred
analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two Jungian
institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that, in addition
to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place to hide money,
Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.

Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere they
go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain quiet
purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind of
Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars,
cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the
psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the
institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from places
like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other Jungian
institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma programs,
learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little bit like
learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer, the place
alone conveys a talismanic grace.

Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was taken
from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near the opera
house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate English
translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes will be
included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of visiting
Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to attend to
Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked around the
older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich made Martin
nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and here that he
developed the almost equally important relationship with his analyst,
Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office two or three times
weekly for several years.

Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training,
which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in
folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others.
It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.” He is fond of
pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn was herself
analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their bloodlines. That
morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he spotted another American
analyst, someone he knew in school and who has since settled in Switzerland.
“Oh, there’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his way toward the man. “Bob
trained with Liliane,” he explained to me, “and that makes us kind of like
brothers.”

Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or
drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who is patently
good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for personal and
archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences, analysts often
encourage clients to experiment on their own with active imagination, to
summon a waking dreamscape and to interact with whatever, or whoever,
surfaces there. Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and
many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its
purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and
recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of
self-discovery and wholeness — a maturation process Jung himself referred
to as “individuation.” Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct
appeal to people in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,”
Martin explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of
analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to someone who’s
lost it.”

Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was
already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and
black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly
surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat.
There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company
called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with
what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.

Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with
his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani,
working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into the
world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now
standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to
Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they
continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his
lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and
between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge
and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that Shamdasani’s
discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised him, that even today
he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung ever intended for the Red
Book to be published. “He left it an open question,” he said. “One might
think he would have taken some of his children aside and said, ‘This is what
it is and what I want done with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni
seemed to wear heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with
the Red Book in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a
toothbrush, since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the
night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,” he would
explain.

And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book,
splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate
mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and
crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that
seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the
page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically.
Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and
whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and
uploading the images into a computer.

The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse,
its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was
Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe,
especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but
then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art
director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some
of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say.
He only looked up and smiled.

ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung, who
lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228 Seestrasse in
the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot, 1908 baroque-style
home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely with his wife,
Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the road and the lake. Two
rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a narrow passage to the
entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake, a set of manicured gardens
and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly patch of bamboo.

Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way of
dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his famous
grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s five children (all
but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but five are still living), he
is one of the youngest and also known as the most accommodating to curious
outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and
politely serve cookies and dispense little anecdotes about Jung to those
courteous enough to make an advance appointment. “People want to talk to me
and sometimes even touch me,” Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a
little sheepish. “But it is not at all because of me, of course. It is
because of my grandfather.” He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the
trees are often perplexed when they encounter strangers — usually
foreigners — snapping pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is
not thought to be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”

Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong
outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with his
followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth — one of the
best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization stemmed in part
from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked, for example, for
publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined the psychological
phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his well-documented abrasiveness
toward people he found uninteresting. Or maybe it was connected to the fact
that he broke with the established ranks of his profession. (During the
troubled period when he began writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his
position at Burghölzli, never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something
to do with the unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he
conducted with a shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff,
one of Jung’s former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as
Jung’s close professional collaborator and a frequent, if not fully welcome,
fixture at the Jung family dinner table.

“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the family, it was
not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes gone and found his
grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged through it, just for fun.
Knowing its author personally, he said, “It was not strange to me at all.”

For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death, having
left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience eager to get
its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told me when I visited him
again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his grandfather died, recalled
family debates over whether or not to allow some of Jung’s private letters
to be published. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas
party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children would disappear into a room and have
heated discussions about what to do with what he had left behind while his
grandchildren played in another room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we
thought they were silly to argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a
light laugh. “But later when our parents died, we found ourselves having
those same arguments.”

Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was omnipresent,”
Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s daughter Gret, would tell me
when I met him later. He described his own childhood with a mix of
bitterness and sympathy directed at the older generations. “It was, ‘Jung
said this,’ and ‘Jung did that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did
something, he was always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He
was with us. He is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and
also the president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He
deals with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same.
Jung was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he said.
“Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to be a real
person again.”

ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A
big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular
dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff
or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with
its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and
I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head
sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher
because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue,
but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke
up.

At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a
Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on the
board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea and
muesli.

“How are you?” Martin said.

“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked

“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.

“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”

“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an
Indian god of wisdom.”

“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”

They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the
kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is
more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”

Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex
quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The
process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately
evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts,
and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and
wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who
lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School
of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me
about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication
— worried specifically that it was a private document and would be
apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my
crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an
elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign
there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that
eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s
horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”

It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that
week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking
amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of
the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed
that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin
was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while
he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book,
passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a
computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The
god of travelers at a crossroads?)

Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our
various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized
his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had
done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table.
But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the
book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”

“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed
the book was on fire.”

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert,
scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited
hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru,
Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on
kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is
when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the
book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it,
even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths,
you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of
your nature.”

The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his
family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is
bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity,
synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often
poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today,
its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is
possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more
or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue,
acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the
superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very
fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would
someday find the right audience.

Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans
and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and
lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing.
Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about
the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just
months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees
daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history,
the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s
published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he
told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.”
What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was
there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story
here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner
life.’ ”

After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will
move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s
descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin
Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book
would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were
potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles
of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the
question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”

Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New York. He is
already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung — this thanks to a
dream he had recently about an “inexpressively sublime” dawn breaking over
the Swiss Alps — even as others are not so certain.

In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is
still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a
fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really
crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway,
sleep well.”

………….

RELATED LINKS:

JEREMY TAYLOR

LAST NIGHT I HAD THE STRANGEST DREAM
JEREMY TAYLOR ON DREAMS AS A TOOL FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
By Karen Karvonen
The Sun
March 30, 2006 Issue
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/11604

WHERE PEOPLE FLY AND WATER RUNS UPHILL:
USING DREAMS TO TAP THE WISDOM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

JEREMY TAYLOR WEBSITE

Remembering Jeremy Taylor

………….

MARC IAN BARASCH

EXCERPTS FROM “HEALING DREAMS:
EXPLORING THE DREAMS THAT CAN TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE”
By Marc Ian Barasch
Riverhead Books, 2000
http://www.nhne.com/misc/healingdreams.html

HEALING DREAMS WEBSITE:
http://www.healingdreams.com

MORE EXCERPTS FROM “HEALING DREAMS”:
http://www.healingdreams.com/book.htm#excerpts

“HEALING DREAMS” VIA AMAZON.COM:

………….

OUTSTANDING DREAM WEBSITES & RESOURCES:

DREAM STUDIES (Ryan Hurd)
http://dreamstudies.org/

DREAM YOGA (Joseph Dillard)
http://www.dreamyoga.com/

THE ALCHEMY OF DREAMING (Wes Wyatt)
http://web.mac.com/wesleywyatt/iWeb/Alchemy%20/Alchemy.html

DREAMGATE
http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/resources

DREAMTREE
http://www.Dreamtree.com

DREAM NETWORK: A JOURNAL EXPLORING DREAMS AND MYTHOLOGY
http://www.dreamnetwork.net

ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF DREAMS

Welcome to IASD, the world’s premier dream organization.

LUCIDITY INSTITUTE
http://www.lucidity.com

LUCID DREAMING RESOURCES:

Lucid Dreaming Resources

http://dreamstudies.org/category/lucid-dreaming/

…………

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