Liber Novus (The Red Book) by C. G. Jung
“To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness."
from The Red Book (Jung) by Carl Gustav Jung
Liber Novus (The Red Book) by C. G. Jung
In 1916, he presented a lecture to the association for analytical psychology entitled “The structure of the unconscious,” which was first published in a French translation in Flournoy’s Archives de Psychologie.148 Here, he differentiated two layers of the unconscious. The first, the personal unconscious, consisted in elements acquired during one’s
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“…the collective psyche was inherited.”
There is only one way and that is your way.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
At the outset of Liber Novus, Jung experiences a crisis of language. The spirit of the depths, who immediately challenges Jung’s use of language along with the spirit of the time, informs Jung that on the terrain of his soul his achieved language will no longer serve. His own powers of knowing and speaking can no longer account for why he utters
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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
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collective psyche
If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with iron, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
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.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
the making of Liber Novus was by no means a peculiar and idiosyncratic activity, nor the product of a psychosis. Rather, it indicates the close intersections between psychological and artistic experimentation with which many individuals were engaged at this time.