Red Book

The years I followed these inner dreams were the most important periods of my life. Everything else started from there. (...) My whole life was spent trying to understand this current, which was like a mysterious waterfall erupting from the unconscious, sometimes powerful enough to destroy me. (...) After that, there was only classification, scientific evaluation and application to life. (...)
-CG Jung-

The above lines, uttered by CG Jung in 1957, five years before his death, describe the years between 1914 and 1930 when he worked on the Red Book. Although its name has been known by Jung's followers for over eighty years, the work was not made available to the reader until it was published in 2009.

The publication of the book had a great impact in the world of psychology. It was an opportunity to read from Jung's own pen how his basic theory, consisting of concepts such as archetype, collective unconscious, persona, anima and animus, emerged. Jung’s experience describes how he personally experienced the “individualization process,” which transformed psychotherapy from being merely a treatment for illnesses into a means of high-level personality development.

The Red Book, which created one of the true visionaries of modern history, can only be described as “beyond categories.” Exploring what it means to be human, this book goes beyond the history of psychoanalysis and places CG Jung among revolutionary thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Orwell, and, of course, Sigmund Freud.
-Sara Corbett, New York Times-

Overlapping with what is expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Goethe’s Faust, The Red Book is an answer to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Contrary to what Nietzsche claimed, “God is not dead. Rather than being sought in religious, national, and political structures outside of man, he must be discovered and ‘struggled’ with within the lives of individual individuals.”
-B. Hill, amazon.com reader review -