Description
The Red Book is an exquisite red leather-bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss psychologist and physician Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author’s imaginative experiences between 1913 and 1916 and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914–1915 and 1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre (Jung 2009, p. 221), it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.
While the work has in past years been descriptively called “the Red Book,” Jung did emboss a formal title on the folio’s spine: he titled the work Liber Novus (the “New Book”). His manuscript is now increasingly cited as Liber Novus, and under this title implicitly includes draft material intended for but never transcribed into the red leather folio proper.
Composition and Publication
Liber Novuscontains a literary and artistic recension of what has been called Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious,”...
Bibliography
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Shamdasani, S. (2005). Jung stripped bare by his biographers, even. London: Karnac.
Shamdasani, S. (2010). Address at the Library of Congress: C. G. Jung and the red book. Washington, DC: Library of Congress transcript.
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Owens, L.S., Hoeller, S.A. (2014). Jung, Carl Gustav, and the Red Book: Liber Novus. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9071
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9071
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