Understanding Jung and Jungian Psychology through “Liber Novus”

The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this.  It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded  me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.  That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.  C. G. Jung, 1957.

With the publication of The Red Book, students of Jung have a window into the genesis of Jung’s psychology in a way that none of his published works has revealed.

The Red Book is the nuclear reactor for all Jung’s works. His more well-known concepts, such as the archetypal forms of anima, animus, and shadow, as well as the concept of the collective unconscious, have their roots in this volume. Not only can one see the development of Jung’s theory of individuation in this book, but his own personal process of individuation is shown in literary and symbolic form.

The Red Book provides an unparalleled view of how Jung fused his fantasies with his scholarship to form a science of psychology. In this five-hour seminar, Dr. Shamdasani will trace the steps from Jung’s experimentation with his fantasies and his elaborations and reflections on them, through his attempt to forge general principles, to his confirmation of those principles in his work with his patients, and ultimately, in comparative historical research.   Participants will gain a new understanding of Jung and how his attention to his unconscious process has meaning in our lives today.