Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation

From the Editor — Kathryn Madden

The years immediately following his break with Freud in 1913 — the years when he pursued his “inner images” — said Jung were “the most important time of [his] life.” Reflecting later upon this intensely creative period, Jung even went so far as to assert that, from then on, his “entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded [him] like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break [him].” Critics differ as to whether, during these years, Jung experienced a creative depression, a psychotic break, or a spiritual odyssey into the unconscious. What is undeniable is that with the publication of The Red Book, we now have an immediate record of those important years of “inner images,” and that our understanding of Jung as empirical scientist can now be supplemented by Jung as artist and mystic. And yet, it was as a result of this intense inner exploration, this “creative illness,” that Jung’s major theories of the psyche, of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and of individuation, were developed.

 

The Mark Of One Who Has Seen Chaos: A Review of C. G. Jung’s Red Book—Nathan Schwartz-Salant

Keywords: chaos, feminine, fusion, incarnation, narcissism, Philemon, self

The Red Book is analyzed as a process in which Jung’s narcissistic fusion with the self is eventually transformed into an ego-self relation. The process is extremely arduous and dangerous. At times madness engulfs him. But when he manages to experience this disorder as part of a sequence, alternating with order, the disorder becomes transformative, eventually leading him to confront his narcissism. The Red Book represents the importance of disorder in ways absent from the Collected Works, where disorder has a minimal, operational significance. The Red Book is also seen in its relation to the Collected Works.

The Red Book as a Work of Conscience: Notes from a Seminar Given for the 35th Annual Jungian Conference, C. G. Jung Club of Orange County, April 10, 2010 — John Beebe

Keywords: Jung, Red Book, Siegfried, World War I, trickster, integrity, puer, anima

Writing down his visions and dreams from 1913–1915, reflecting on them for more than a decade after, and recording the growth of his consciousness that resulted served many functions for C. G. Jung. The process was certainly an assertion of intuition in the evolution of his standpoint as both psychologist and person. It was also, however, the expression of his feeling that World War I meant nothing less than that European consciousness had gone astray and that it was the duty of each European to rectify the situation in his or her own way. Jung’s way was to search for the soul that he felt he had left behind in the pursuit of heroic individual achievement as a psychological pioneer. What emerged was The Red Book, a striking instance of inner work in the service of conscience. This daylong presentation will explore the way Jung worked on his integrity in its pages.

“God Climbs Down to Mortality”: Jung in His Red Book — Ann Belford Ulanov

Keywords:evil, God, soul

Jung experiences God climbing down to mortality, to be found not in the absolute but the relative, the in between that includes the Below as well as the Above. Jung himself climbs down to the dragon level of living. Explorations of the book’s major themes circulate around Jung’s experience of soul, evil, shocking fantasies, entrenched opposites, Hell, lostness, reconciliation, the inextricable connection of inner state and outer event, masculine and feminine, astonishing images and the paintings that fixed them for our study. Attention is also given to guidelines that Jung displays for the readers’ encounters with their own imagery and conflicts.

Ancestors and Spirits of the Dead — Robin van Löben Sels

Keywords: ancestors, spirits fo the dead, Haiti, community of life, collective consciousness, AIDS, intersection of spirit, Grail Legend, holy ground

When Jung left the “Spirit of the Times” to enter the “Spirit of the Depths,” he met Ancestors and Spirits of the Dead and resumed a dialogue with his soul. I suggest that here and now we can find an “intersection of the Spirit” (perhaps where feeling tips into Valuing) which we can experience in our “times” wherein collective consciousness is transformed by a necessary enlargement of Being that includes our Ancestors, Spirits of the Dead, ourselves, and the world we now have. Jung speaks of becoming “refined;” I speak of finding holy ground and feeling “changed,” as “another world” (other than the one we have) becomes no longer necessary.