The Red Book-hardcover

Description

The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.

"The years...when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life.  Everything else is to be derived from this.  It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore.  My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.  That was the stuff and material for more than only one life.  Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.  But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then."

These are the words of C.G. Jung in 1957, referring to the decades he worked on The Red Book from 1914 to 1930.  Although its existence has been known for more than eighty years, The Red Book was never published or made available to the wide audience of Jung's students and followers.  Nothing less than the central book of Jung's oeuvre, it is published now in a full facsimile edition with a contextual essay and notes by the noted Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani.

Interspersed among more than two hundred lovely illuminated pages are paintings by Jung whose influences range from Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East to the native art of the new world.  The Red Book, much like the handcrafted "Book of Hours" from the Middle Ages, is unique.  Both in terms of its place in Jung's development and as a work of art, it is a landmark.