Woven Text Collage from

The Red Book by C.G. Jung  

         In 1913, Carl Jung began what he called his “descent into the unconscious,” a form of guided daydreaming that led him to experiences that became the inspiration for much of his later work. He kept a record in a red leather-bound book, in exquisite calligraphy with full-page illustrations of archetypal figures. The text is pristine, without corrections except for an occasional single letter here and there. It resembles a Medieval manuscript. After keeping it in a vault for decades, the Jung family finally gave permission for it to be published.

The Red Book --Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 19, 2009) 404 pages. $150.

For this woven piece, I cut strips of text from the Red Book, interlaced them into various patterns, and mounted them on canvas painted with Cadmium dark red acrylic. 

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For my MOCA entry the year before I entered the square woven text, I posted various ideas relating to the Red Book on a wooden board covered with water color paper.

One of the pieces was a handmade booklet bound with thread with images and text. 

Jung’s Advice

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.” 

Jung’s Motivations for the Red Book

What caused Carl Jung to dare his remarkable experiment? Was it because active imagination was the next step in his exploration of the Self, a choice? Or was it, as some say, the expression of an unavoidable breakdown?

Rivers of blood covered Europe in one of Jung’s visions. Was this a precognitive vision of the World War that was soon to break out in Europe?

Jung fantasized a dangerous, erotic blind young woman he called Salome who traveled with a wise man, Philomon. Was Jung working through his own complicated love life? He had just ended a passionate affair with a young Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein, who, when rejected, ratted him out to Freud and then became Freud’s patient and ultimately an analyst herself. And he had replaced her with Toni Woolf, a new patient and lover. His wife Emma was the mainstay of his household, the mother of his children (and the source of most of his money). 

Or was it, and this is the most likely theory, his break with Sigmund Freud that caused him to take on his own demons?

Sigmund Freud

When Jung met Freud, the two men talked for thirteen hours, beginning a friendship that affected each deeply. Freud felt he had found a philosophical heir and someone to carry out the work of psychoanalysis -- and Jung found a father figure and mentor. But they parted ways. Jung’s spirituality seemed unscientific to Freud, and to Jung Freud’s insistence on the centrality of childhood sexuality in his theory seemed overstated. And they disagreed vehemently on Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

At the 1911 Third Annual Meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Congress at Weimar, the picture of the attendees showed the towering Jung (he was 6’4”) crouching to be shorter than Freud (5’7”), who was  standing on a box. By 1913, they sat at different tables at the annual conference. Freud spoke privately of “the brutal Jung and his henchmen”. 

After the conference, Jung began his “confrontation with the unconscious,” which he described as being “menaced by a psychosis,” akin to schizophrenia. He later compared the experience to taking mescaline. Using active imagination, he experienced fantasies that he felt were similar to states of mind experienced by creative artists--  and lunatics. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he said he kept a revolver by his bedside in case he chose to end it all.

In his fantasies he travels to the land of the dead, grapples with a serpent, falls in love with his sister, and dabbles with cannibalism. 

Publication of the Red Book

When Jung had filled six black notebooks with the chronicle of his “descent into the unconscious,” he commissioned a folio-sized book 12 x 15.5 inches made of cream-colored parchment paper with a red leather cover. He began to copy the text from the black notebooks in exquisite calligraphic script modeled after manuscripts from the Middle Ages. He added to the text paintings of the imagery that accompanied his fantasies. He worked on the Red Book for six years and then dabbled with it for another ten years. 

When he died in 1961, the book remained in his cupboard until 1984 when the family transferred it to a bank vault. It was kept secret for fear of tarnishing Jung’s reputation.

Jung’s heirs finally agreed to a small printing of 6,000 copies of a scanned facsimile of the Red Book, translated and with comments by historian Sonu Sondashani. They feared at the original price, $200 a copy, the book would not sell but they were wrong; it sold out immediately and has since gone through numerous larger print runs. The cover is bright red cloth and the book jacket is a darker shiny red. Like the original, it weighs about ten pounds.

Word and image: Jung’s calligraphy makes the word into art, even more for those who don’t read German.  

Friedrich Nietzsche & Lou Salome

Jung’s fascination with Nietzsche-- his writing and his life -- finds its way into the Red Book with his mention of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The influence Nietzsche had on Jung (and Freud as well) is complicated. Sondashani suggests Nietzsche’s Zarathustra parodied Luther’s German and that Jung was copying that style. Yet parody seems wrong: Jung was not making light of Nietzsche’s pontification. (Yet one could: Lou Salome and her friends reviewed Zarathustra: “Its pathos and unctuousness struck us somewhat funny.“ Walter Kaufmann wished Zarathustra had less histrionics and melodrama.

Which leads to this question: could Jung possibly have been unaware that in naming (or being told the name of) his erotic, dangerous fantasy “Salome,” he was thinking of Nietzsche’s young companion of 1882, Lou Salome, with whom Nietzsche had such a violent break in December of that year? Nietzsche scholars have not known what to make of Lou, calling her everything from a Muse or a Goddess, to a “cannibalistic virgin”. 

A mature Lou, being a close friend of Freud and soon to be an analyst herself, attended the Weimar conference in 1911. She brought with her the complex association of having been Nietzsche’s confidant in 1882, yet she would not speak of him. There were fifty-five attendees. Did Jung walk on the lawns with Lou Salome, sit next to her at dinner? Try to pry information about Nietzsche from her?

So was it a coincidence that Jung’s fantasy woman was named “Salome”?

We know what Dr. Jung had to say about coincidences.

Red Book as a Collage

Hello.  If you are reading this, you have found your way into a small, hand-made booklet attached to a collage made from pages and parts of the Red Book and you have probably formed an opinion about my project. If you’re a Jungian, you may find the transformation of the text exotic or, more likely, you may accuse me of vandalism. If you are a Freudian, you may cheer at seeing Jung shredded. You may be tempted to check the Red Book out of the library (yes, the local library system has copies) or you may order a copy for yourself, to read, or to grace your coffee table, though probably not to shred.

If you are less intrigued by the calligraphy and painting than the story, W.W. Norton has published a smaller Reader’s Edition, English language text only.

And you may be tempted to begin your own dangerous, exhilarating descent into the unconscious.

Jung --in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (taken from one of the Black Notebooks):

"When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, “What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished. It never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, “Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.” I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. Obviously what I was doing wasn’t science. What then could it be but art?