| Abstract: | Until The Red Book: Liber Novus wasFigure 1 published in 2009, we knew of C. G. Jung's personal adventure with the psyche and its influences on his life, as he described them in his chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He called it the “prima materia for a lifetime's work” (1963, pp. 170–199). But without The Red Book, it would have been impossible to imagine how deep and torturous Jung's descent into the world of his inner images really was. The full extent of his interactions with the figures that manifested on this journey he would later call “active imagination.” My initial reading of The Red Book elicited feelings of awed respect for the density, complexity, and daring of the text and paintings. Closer exploration was followed by a sense of new freedom related to my own experiences with active imagination. It was especially Jung's admonitions and warnings to experience one's own inner world as unique and incomparable to any other that gave new breadth and meaning to my personal experiences with active imagination. This feeling of expansion became the inspiration for this article, in which I describe my own encounters with images of the unconscious and their influence on both my inner and outer lives. |
