“THE HOLY GRAIL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS”: psychic considerations re: the publication of The Red Book
As our current darkness deepens, many dominant perspectives are brought to bear on the very real issues facing us—political, economic, environmental, monetary, climate and so on. We recognize that the signature of the chaos we are living today comprises loss of meaning and fragmentation across scale. Yet the one perspective that confers meaning and wholeness on Life is no longer a contender in the competing market place of narratives i.e., the soul perspective or psychic reality.[1] How different the Presidential election might have been if we had access to the candidates’ dreams and the dominant cultural practices included taking real action based on what their dreams presented. But of course this transformation in our culture is not going to happen soon. We no longer consult the psyche in such matters as electing a President. I could ask the provocative question whether the psyche is consulted in any matter that requires decision in the real world today. Those brave individuals who do act in the real world on the basis of their dreams, so often find today that the bottom drops out of their economic, family, and social lives. They become marginalized rather quickly.
The psychic perspective of the real world and its modern phenomena challenges all other perspectives because, as diverse as the other perspectives and their cultural practices are, they all share in common a focus on the surface of life only. The psychic perspective confers depth—not positivized or measurable depth such as Astronomy or Microphysics, but depth of meaning!
To demonstrate just how difficult it is to consult the psyche in relation to making decisions in the real world today, even in communities dedicated to the life of psyche and its attendant cultural practices such as dream work, I am drawn to writing this essay after reading an account of how the process of moving towards publication of The Red Book came about in 2007, when a group of Jungians gathered to facilitate the scanning of Jung’s original manuscript for reproduction via computers. All the participants (Shamdasani, Marvin, and Jung’s grandson being among them) dreamed during that psychoactive week of scanning and told their dreams to one another, in accord with Jungian practice. Yet, in all their interpretations no one bothered to ask if their dreams had anything to do with their very real actions of publishing the The Red Book. They seemed unconcerned with the question of the psychic perspective on publishing The Red Book. What, if anything, does the psyche have to say about it? What does psyche desire or want in this regard?
It is easy to imagine that they were consumed with eagerness (their desire!) to publish the book, after thirty years resistance by the Jung family, but did anyone ask if the psyche’s desire was implicated in the family’s resistance? It appears not. No one asked the family, I’ll wager, if anyone had any dreams over the years of blocking publication to offer guidance about the matter of publication. In a similar neglectful (of psyche) fashion, no one considered the dreams received during the scanning week in terms of the psychic or depth perspective of the question of publication. Publication of The Red Book from start to finish was a willful matter on the part of all involved. There appears to have been no question, no hesitation, no pausing to ask if psyche had anything to say or had any desire that might compete with their own desires.
Yet the psyche was speaking during that fateful week, speaking in its language of dream and symbol, hint and suggestion. What was psyche’s desire? Let’s listen in …
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In 2007, Sarah Corbett undertook a journey to Kusnacht for a momentous occasion. Jung’s Red Book had been transported from a vault where it had lain for 23 years to a room where it was to be scanned page by page for purposes of publication [2]
In her account of the backstory to her journey, Corbett describes the enormous tensions between the Jung family’s need for privacy and the public’s insistent demands for access to documents of historic importance. Whether to publish The Red Book became the center of often-acrimonious disputes between the family and an demanding public. Finally the family acquiesced and now I want you to imagine the scene Corbett paints for us:
Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.
Corbett was present with Sonu Shamdasani, Stephen Martin, Nancy Furlotti, Ulrich Hoerni, along with others cited above.[3] Corbett captures the mood in the room:
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. … Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it.
There can be no doubt that, now that The Red Book had been finally released into their hands, there was only one course of action—to publish it—and they set about to do just that wholeheartedly and unreservedly. The only one who seemed to have any reservations about the publication was Ulrich Hoerni, Jung’s grandson, who had been entrusted by the family to transport the book to the scanner. He slept by the side of the book for much of the duration of the scanning, which lasted a week.
Corbett reports several dreams during this time among the various participants, her dreams included. She dreamed for example:
This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.
She goes on to describe some dreams of the others:
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)
Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”
“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.” …
The interpretations offered by various analysts at the time, according to Corbett’s account, included these exchanges:
“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.
“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”
“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”
“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”
They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”
Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication—worried specifically that it was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”
Even though Corbett briefly and intuitively associated the intense dreaming with the week of scanning The Red Book, none of the analysts took up that obvious connection.[4] We can see that all the interpretations move from the specifics of the dreams to generalized themes or as they like to say, archetypal considerations, lifting completely off the context of the publication of The Red Book, in which they had been immersed for a week. No interpreter associated the dreams with the most obvious psychoactive event linking them all—the publication of The Red Book, even though the dreamers all seemed unsettled or disturbed by their dreams, quite fittingly, I believe.
Corbett found her dream grotesque, embarrassing; Furlotti seemed unsettled by talk of death in her dream; the technician who dreamed of a ghostly face on a computer screen had a tormented night; Hoerni had to reassure himself that The Red Book was unharmed after his alarming dream. It would be hard to imagine that Martin’s dream of being patted on the back by an invisible hand would be anything but unnerving, and Shamdasani’s dream of seeing Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum (when he was in outer life mostly sleeping in the scanner room, guarding The Red Book) could at least raise some questions about their venture, from the perspective of psyche.
We can easily imagine that, for this group, there was a unified unquestioned conviction that The Red Book should to be published. Once the resistance of the Jung family had been relaxed enough to at least give the necessary permission to publish, then it was a “green light”. Nothing could get in the way of publication, especially not some disturbing, even menacing dreams. The unfamiliar and unsettling dream content was quickly assimilated to well-known categories of Jungian thought and all the unfamiliar details, the unnerving mood, the strange apparitions, the presence of “death”, were quickly dismissed so that, one could surmise, the ambitious project of publication could now go ahead unhindered after thirty years of unreasonable obstruction by the Jung family. None of the interpreters, we can be sure, entered the depth of the dreams sufficiently for the dreams to make their claims, to impress their message on the human beings, to influence the outcome. Instead we could say that the dreams’ messages suffered a kind of death through external interpretations, i.e. the imposition of safe theories on the dream content. No one seemed interested whether psyche had anything to say about the coming publication of The Red Book!
On an impulse, I decided to take a look at The Red Book, page 37—the page that was open when the little group entered the scanning room for the first time.[5] What could be revealed if this apparently random event is now included as part of the dreaming that week?
Jung painted his version of the great bull-god Izdubar, before whom Jung is a kneeling supplicant. They have an extraordinary dialogue by which the living god is depotentiated by the man Jung who speaks as a mouthpiece for science.[6] This knowledge is poison to the bull-god who is lamed by it. Izdubar then sacrificially destroys his weapon of power, the ax. How does science poison the mighty living god? Jung tells us. He persuades the god that He is not a living reality but a fantasy, or he is real but only as a real fantasy.[7] In other words The Red Book is telling us that the living psyche is depotentiated by external interpretations and judgments (scientific methodology)! I could go on with this remarkable dialogue but we have enough here already for our discussion of the dreams and their relationship to the imminent publication of The Red Book.[8]
If we consider these images that Corbett reports—during the entire week in which the little group gathered to prepare The Red Book for publication—as a sustained dream, without regard for the inner/outer division then we can immediately suggest that, if the psyche is concerned with the publication of The Red Book, as the little group certainly is, then its perspective is addressing the issue of publication in terms of “the living and the dead”!
Corbett’s dream speaks the grotesque spectacle of a once-living, majestic elephant reduced to a suburban barbeque meal, with cocktails; Furlotti’s dream speaks of death; Shamdasani’s dream speaks of Hoerni sleeping in a museum, once the shrine of the muses, but now the house of dead images; the technician’s frightening dream speaks of a ghostly figure on a screen; Marvin’s dream experience reveals an invisible hand patting him (the hand of the “dead”?); and Hoerni’s dream shows an image of the living Red Book, pictured as being “on fire”; p.37 of The Red Book speaks of the process by which the reality of the living psyche is lamed or depotentiated by the scientific perspective and its externalizing rhetoric.[9]
Finally, if we also include in this week-long “dream” the shared dream-like experience of the participants when they first encountered The Red Book already opened up, ready to be scanned, we read:
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles … The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it.
What does this extended “dream” tell us about the imminent publication of The Red Book if this “dream” is a voice of the psyche? What is the psyche’s perspective on the publication of The Red Book—a perspective that no one there seemed to consider in their enthusiasm to make the book available to an eager and consuming public, after thirty years of being thwarted?[10]
The group initially was filled with awe when in the presence of the “book”. The living Red Book and the material book on the table were one, indistinguishable in their experience. This is a state of consciousness as which our ancestors presumably lived—one that that opens up an enchanted world of the living other as reflected in the appearances. Things “glow” and can at times speak to us, as long this state of consciousness prevails. But, alas for us moderns, such states of consciousness must fade and we return to our modern subject-object consciousness—the prevailing structure of consciousness that gives rise to things as external objects, having no life of their own, i.e. mere things. It seems to be me, therefore, that the “dream” of the entire week, as the psyche’s perspective of the publication, was aimed at initiating the group of participants out of their magical thinking and into modern reality structured as a disjunction between the living Red Book as conveyed to Jung’s grandson, the dream book “on fire”, i.e., the psychically real book filled with spiritual life, and the reproduced material book which no longer bears the life of the psyche. The living psyche dies when it is made an object of modern, externalizing consciousness. To put it bluntly, the message from psyche via the participants’ dreams and experiences at the scanning sessions seems to be: you may publish and reproduce The Red Book a million times but you will only have a dead thing (the dead elephant, the “pocketed” Izdubar, etc.). That which was alive for Jung at the time of his writing The Red Book cannot survive an assault of the scientific attitude that externalizes living imagery by making judgments, even as Jung was taught in his encounter with Izdubar.[11]
One implication of this initiation by psyche into its modern configuration (disjunctive inner/outer, etc.) is that, in opening any reproduction of The Red Book, there is small hope of finding the living psyche within its pages. Instead the modern mind will find a “dead letter.” We will find only a dead residue of what was, for Jung, a living reality, a reality that he lived for many years. However, as Jung’s grandson’s dream tells us, the Red Book now lives as a psychic reality!
For Shamdasani the publication of The Red Book is an astounding achievement for Jungian studies:
As far as he [Shamdasani] is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.”
There can be no doubt about Shamdasani’s assertions here, except where he claims that the published book will become, “the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences.” I would have to amend this to “the gateway into an historical or biographical study of Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences.” Shamdasani would surely be content with this approach to Jung’s inner experiences. His interests are a historian’s interests. The true gateway to the “most inner of inner experiences”, i.e. inwardness per se, not just “Jung’s inwardness” is the psychic Red Book. Opening that book’s pages is to enter the living psyche and be initiated by it, as Jung was when he wrote what was happening to him. But just as Hoerni’s dream “Red Book” is also his “Red Book”, we each must find our individual way to our living Red Book, our individual way to the objective psyche.
The psyche’s insistence in the distinction, even disjunction, between the living Red Book (a psychic reality as presented in Jung’s grandson’s dream—living, fiery language and image) and the dead “animal” of all reproductions must also be serving the unknown future in some way since all dreams are of the unknown future.[12] I think it holds this secret:
We moderns are taught from birth today that there is no psyche, no invisible “support” to the things of the world. Phenomena can be known in their entirety by scientific means of measurement. The only inner that is accepted is our private interior, a very impoverished, contracted version of the inwardness that our ancestors knew—an inwardness that stretched to the stars.[13] If we are not to lose sight of the living psyche altogether as the only “organ” that can confer meaning and wholeness in a world increasingly meaningless and fragmented, then we have the almost impossible task of finding a way to the life and reality of psyche in its modern self-conscious status, disentangled phenomenologically from earthly appearances—an “invisible” but very real reality.[14] Jung found his way to the reality of the psychic during his experiences, as recorded in The Red Book. He was initiated by the psyche into its reality and he spent the rest of his life trying to get this reality across to others e.g. by inventing his form of psychology which, at its depths, is supposed to be an initiation into “invisible” psychic reality, or into the realities of the Self, as Jungian rhetoric would say.
This initiation cannot be won only by studying dead reproductions of Jung’s achievements.[15] We must each seek our own initiation into the reality of psyche and only the psyche in its present configuration of an “invisible” living Self, can initiate us. Jung was sensitive to this issue and tells a story that illustrates it very well:
There was once a queer old man who lived in a cave, where he had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He was reputed to be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped to learn the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not thinking of any such thing. He was only seeking to know what it was that he did not know, but which, he felt certain, was always happening. After meditating for a very long time on that which is beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from his predicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kinds of diagrams on the walls of his cave, in order to find out what that which he did not know might look like. After many attempts he hit on the circle. “That’s right,” he felt, “and now for a quadrangle inside it!”—which made it better still. His disciples were curious; but all they could make out was that the old man was up to something, and they would have given anything to know what he was doing. But when they asked him: “What are you doing there?” he made no reply. Then they discovered the diagrams on the wall and said: “That’s it!”—and they all imitated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole process upside down, without noticing it: they anticipated the result in the hope of making the process repeat itself which had led to that result. This is how it happened then and how it still happens today. [16]
POST SCRIPT
On 23rd October, 2009, I was present at a seminar held in the C. G. Jung Institute at Zurich for the inauguration of the publication of The Red Book, with guest of honour Sonu Shamdasani. Interestingly, we encountered a small glitch at the outset when the projector failed to project any red colour onto the screen. The problem was overcome quickly and we moved on. Once again no attention was given to this “mistake” in terms of a psychic perspective. We simply carried on with our eager intentions.
Later, Shamdasani told us that what happens next depends on us now the work of editing and publishing is done, and he told us that he is still amazed as there were “too many reasons for it not to be”. Perhaps in this statement lies a clue about the projector’s failure at the beginning of the seminar, as well as the various anomalous happenings during the week of scanning. Among the “many reasons”, did Shamdasani or anyone consider “psychic reasons,” as suggested by the anomalies? There is no evidence that he or anyone else involved with the publication did consider this perspective at all.
So it up to us now, at least those of us devoted to the life of psyche, to learn from the extraordinary occasion of the publication of The Red Book. One lesson I learn is this: When I am confronted with a real life decision, one that has real consequences to my life or to others, will I simply act according to my interests or desires, i.e. what I think is right? Or, can I muster the courage to open up to psyche’s desires, enough to be influenced by psyche and to make a responsible decision, taking psyche into account?
Only the latter course can ensure the incarnation of psyche in the real world of appearances once again. And only an “incarnation” of psyche in the real world can once again confer meaning and wholeness. Without it, “we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. . . .” [17]
[1] Small communities of course are valiantly upholding the soul perspective in their practices and activities.
[2] Sarah Corbett. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious @ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html
[3] Shamdasani is the editor of The Red Book and co-founder of the Philemon Foundation with Stephen Martin.
[4] “Was the scanning of the book a death?”
[5] P 37 is translated into English on p. 277 ff.
[6] “Depotentiated”—from “Oh, Izdubar, most powerful, spare my life and forgive me for lying like a work in your path” to “I return to the garden and with no difficulty squeeze Izdubar into the size of an egg and put him in my pocket.” Pp 278-283.
[7] P. 281 ff. Jung depotentiates the living image by a judgment, “you are nothing but a fantasy,” etc. i.e. the scientific mind.
[8] I go into depth about this complex phenomenology of The Red Book in my essay, The Hidden Legacy of The Red Book: https://www.academia.edu/12876153/Hidden_Legacy_of_the_Red_Book
[9] Hoerni apparently did not consider that he was being shown The Red Book as a psychic reality, burning with the spiritual fire of living language—and this is Jung’s grandson! But I am too harsh. Encountering the living psyche is not for everyone.
[10] Corbett and Furlotti’s dreams emphasize this consumptive aspect quite well.
[11] Externalizing imagery by making the image a ‘positive’ object of consciousness as the various dream interpretations did and as Jung did to Izdubar: “You are not real but a fantasy …”. The image only stays alive if we enter its reality, as Jung did at first in his encounter with the god.
[12] The unknown future first “appears” within psychic reality as hints, suggestions, unfamiliar details, unusual twists, etc. prior to manifesting as real-world phenomena.
[13] The group in the scanning room briefly glimpsed this “inwardness” of things as they gazed at the book on the table.
[14] A negative reality in the way that music is, when played.
[15] The participants could have been initiated if they had understood their experiences during the week they spent in the scanning room, as I describe above.
[16] CW 9I: par. 233.
[17] Barfield, O. Saving the Appearances. London: Faber and Faber, p.146.
