Sublime

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

permitting a continuing dialogue with the unconscious and the larger whole of life

Liber Novus thus presents a series of active imaginations together with Jung’s attempt to understand their significance. This work of understanding encompasses a number of interlinked threads: an attempt to understand himself and to integrate and develop the various components of his personality; an attempt to understand the structure of the human

Jung concludes, “are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain knowledge.”

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams. —C. G. Jung

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

“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”134 Such a statement should give everyone who encounters it pause.

Essentially, the theory can be stated as a psychological law: whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, it is an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious.