Carl Jung's 'Red Book' gets first public display

NEW YORK — The Red Book, an intricate 16-year record of Carl Jung's journey into his unconscious that has never been seen publicly, is going on display in an exhibit at a New York museum that coincides with publication of the volume, rendered in the Swiss psychoanalyst's elaborate calligraphy and richly hued paintings.

The tome's existence had always been known, but scholars and the public have never seen it. After Jung's death in 1961, it was left in his Zurich home until it was moved to a bank safe-deposit box in the late 1980s.

Jung's descendants resisted historians' requests over the years to have the Red Book published. But after two partial typed draft manuscripts surfaced, they allowed a London historian of psychology, Sonu Shamdasani, to translate the work from the original.

The Red Book — equal parts book of science and work of art — is an exquisite illuminated manuscript comparable to the artistry of the Book of Kells. It is written on heavy-gauge paper in Jung's calligraphy and filled with his dreamlike and painstaking tempera paintings of mythological figures and symbolic graphic forms.

Jung was 39 when he began making entries in the book in 1914, a period he called his "confrontation with the unconscious."

The publication of a facsimile of the German-language manuscript and English translation by W.W. Norton & Company is priced at $195.

"The book represents what he would later call the process of individuation," a method of knowing oneself as fully as possible, Shamdasani said, referring to Jung's most important psychological theory.

It's believed Jung wanted the book published but was afraid he would be perceived as mad.

"He was afraid of his scientific reputation," said Martin Brauen, chief curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. Its exhibition, "The Red Book of C.G. Jung, Creation of a New Cosmology," is open from Wednesday to Jan. 25, 2010. Jung's book is the centerpiece of the exhibit.