The Red Book

Carl Jung's Red Book was an attempt to understand himself, the human soul, the human mind, and its connection to life and death via the workings of his own active imagination and writing.   According to Shamadasan, "The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.  This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the the form of a psychological and theological cosmos"  It is Jung's attempt at individualization.

I love this idea and this is where I think many modern therapists fail.  We guide patients through mental illness and discrete crises but we fail to help them gain a sense of the themselves in an increasingly complex world. We fail to guide them in the process of individualization that brings meaning to their life and helps them achieve what Maslow called "Self Actualization."  It fails to help people know themselves and their role in the spiritual and physical world.  Jung had a unique understanding that there are images and longings that connect all of us to something universal.  Jung called these images archetypes.  Every culture and people has a story about a hero that is taken from his noble lineage to grow up poor.  What is noble in him remains despite his hardship because his nobility is born to him.  This is a universal theme that speaks to what it means to be human.  We are all drawn to the Supermen and The King Aurthur's.  We all love Cinderella stories.  Every culture has one.  We still retell these stories.  The idea that inner strength can overcome circumstance is Universal.  We are all connected but separate and understanding this is what Jung called individualization.

If Carl Jung's Red Book was an attempt at individualization, this blog, my Red Book, is an attempt at individualization, but also an attempt to narrate the process in the context of what Jung called the collective unconscious.  The collective unconscious is the part of the mind that is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind.   This is the universal in all of us. I will start with art, much like Jung did. as a tool to explore my active imagination.  Active imagination is a process used to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious mind.  Although I am not a firm believer in an unconscious mind in the same way Jung perceived it, I believe we all struggle with issues we would rather not discuss.  These are issues we suppress and put in "the vault".   It is these issues that are brought to light when you work with the active imagination.

So my next blog post will be my first dive into my own activate imagination in the form of art.  I will attempt to interpret the images in my painting and explain the process.