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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Carl Jung and the Red Book.



There are these items returned by a Google News search = Jung Red Book. Actual publication of the facsimile edition will be in October.

Please follow the links for it is a beautifully illustrated work of a man with a cult following, and hence also with detractors.

Coincident with the item being published, Rubin Museum of Art will have it on display. This link.

NY Times has a ten page report of the anguish and doubts within the Jung heirs on whether to maintain the privacy of the work, or to allow it to be published despite the possibility of Jung critics being even more scornful and despite feelings of some in that set that the Red Book was a private work of agony that the man himself intended to always keep private, as a therapeutic thing helping him wrestle with his own unconscious. This link for the text. This link for images of a few pages.

IF that link gets you a registration filter page, the initial Google News link above should bypass that allowing unimpeded access.

Google, being Google, when returning news hits has the lead sponsored item, linking here, which indicates Amazon willingly will sell you the item and you can sign up for an email notice of when it will be publicly available through their distribution channel.

Whatever Angst the Jung family had over the item's privacy, commerce has hold now. In a way, the charm of a book withheld for decades from public and scholarly review, by family, has been lost and traded for the chance to see this thing. It is interesting to me, and pivotal to Jungians, and their lust for revelation will be fulfilled.

Being largely ignorant of Jung, an additional item for me was the Wikipedia page, where one sentence struck me, in context:

Jung returned to the United States the next year for a brief visit, and again for a six-week lecture series at Fordham University in 1912. He made a more extensive trip westward in the winter of 1924-5, financed and organized by Fowler McCormick and George Porter. Of particular value to Jung was a visit with chieftain Mountain Lake at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico.


Another noteworthy Swiss, Paul Klee, was reputed to say that he never had a complete sense of color until being in North Africa. It must be the quality of light there and New Mexico.