Art as Commitment: Jung's Red Book

An artistic path to self-knowledge and healing

The first page of Carl Jung’s Liber Novus. Notice the pencil lines that guided his calligraphy!

Last week, I bought a giant, beautiful used book: Jung’s The Red Book. It might be the fanciest book I’ve ever bought, and I couldn’t be more excited.

The original Red Book was a personal notebook for Jung and is filled with gorgeous paintings and illuminated manuscript style notes that Jung meticulously created and annotated based on an earlier series of notebooks which we now call “The Black Books.”

I learned about The Red Book reading this post in Jillian Hess’s substack called Noted where she explores the notebooks of famous artists, writers, scientists, and others. As someone obsessed with the creative process and with looking at artist’s sketchbooks (click here to read my post about Frida Kahlo’s sketchbook), I was intent on getting this book.

Page 97 of Carl Jung’s Liber Novus. (More pencil lines!)

Back Story

In 1913, Jung started having terrible visions and thought he was going crazy. To heal himself, he began keeping in-depth diaries—his “black books”—to explore his psyche, his dreams, and archetypes, and to test his own psychological methods on himself. In short, he became his own patient.

In these books, his drawings were as important to him as his writing. He drew mandala images every day and analyzed his dreams at night.

And it’s in his black notebooks where he developed his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious—both hugely influential in Western culture to this day.

After reviewing the internal pilgrimage that he both experienced and recorded in his black books, Jung decided to gather the repeating themes from that spiritual journey into one single book where he could revise and augment his ideas and insights, a process that also involved developing the earlier drawings into full-fledged paintings.

And that became The Red Book. Or as he called it: Liber Novus (new book.)

Page 59 in Carl Jung’s Liber Novus.

Why this Book is Magic

As an artist, this book is magic to me for several reasons:

1. It’s a breathtaking example of self-commitment. He put an insane amount of effort into transforming his work from the earlier notebooks into a special tome that for the most part was kept private. This fascinates me both as an artist and as someone living in the era of the overshare and celebrity. He made this art for himself, his own healing, and the development of his craft as a psychologist.

2. He developed a deeply personal visual language and symbolism and used it to carve himself a path to healing and self-knowledge. He used the art-making process itself to access the unknown and make it accessible to himself, and then he translated that experience into a clinical process to help others.

3. I believe that this careful process of translating/transcribing from one set of books to another using laboriously slow art processes was an integral part of his internalizing his own perceptions, discoveries and point of view about mental health, the psyche, and the human spirit.
   This ongoing act of artistic DOING helped cement and clarify his thinking, his beliefs, and his offer to the world. And THAT, my friend, is one powerful, inspiring reason to keep a sketchbook or personal notebook.

4. I love how he let himself explore various visual options as he worked. For instance, he changed the style of his calligraphy many times and he altered his page layout many times. Each is beautiful in its own way, and he felt no need to please anyone but himself. The book was actually never finished and it ends abruptly mid-sentence.

5. Living in a culture where someone with clearly too much money and not much soul just spent 6.2 million dollars on an “artwork” that’s a banana duct-taped to a wall, it’s a refreshing example of art doing it’s ancient job of connecting a person to magic and the divine.

6. The Red Book and his black books were not just records of a journey, they were a journey. The drawings, for instance, were a discovery process, a healing process in and of themselves. This is not art about something, it’s art BEING something.

7. It’s a gorgeous example of deciding to make your life’s work, your mental health, and your spiritual path important and treating them that way. Your particular life—it matters!

8. And finally, I also love that this book was magic for him because, in his view, it was his ultimate work.

   

The Red Book Video

Although Jung considered this book to be a seminal treatise that he mused about publishing from time to time, he never finished it and he never made any real effort to publish it. Because of that (and the ambiguous way he wrote about the book in his will), his descendants considered The Red Book to be a private notebook and not part of his public oeuvre. It was only published in 2009 after much debate and discussion, and as far as I know, you can’t buy this book new anymore.

Because this is not a book you can find easily, I decided to take a video of mine so you can see many of the pages. If I were my reader, I’d want to see the artwork on these pages, so the video is almost 7 minutes long. Feel free to watch as little or as much as you want or are in the mood for!

(To see more detail, click on the arrows symbol in the top left corner.)

I’ll be curious to know if this is as interesting for you as it is for me. Or any other thought you have about sketchbooks, notebooks, Carl Jung, mandalas…