Liber Novus itself can be understood on one hand as depicting Jung’s individuation process, and on the other hand as his elaboration of this concept as a general psychological schema. At the beginning of the book, Jung refinds his soul and then embarks on a sequence of fantasy adventures, which form a consecutive narrative. He realized that until t

It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to th

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is

The chapters follow a particular format: they begin with the exposition of dramatic visual fantasies. In them Jung encounters a series of figures in various settings and enters into conversation with them. He is confronted with unexpected happenings and shocking statements. He then attempts to understand what had transpired, and to formulate the si

The differentiation of the personal and impersonal unconscious provided a theoretical understanding of Jung’s mythological fantasies: it suggests that he did not view them as stemming from his personal unconscious but from the inherited collective psyche. If so, his fantasies stemmed from a layer of the psyche that was a collective human inheritanc

I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows.6728/29

it is very important that we experience the contents of the unconscious before we form any opinions about it.

If you go to thinking,224 take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.

There is only one way and that is your way.