The Red Book: Liber Novus

Introduction

• As Jung saw it, part of us lives in the present and the other part is connected to the centuries.
• "I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love."
• "If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us."
• In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, Jung contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical, while the latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased.
• One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother.
• One without a myth "is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society."
• "...a conviction that the unconscious did not consist of inert material only, but that there was something living down there."
• He argued that there were two basic movements of the libido: extraversion, in which the subject's interest was oriented toward the outer world, and introversion, in which the subject's interest was directed inward. Following from this he posited two types of people, characterized by a predominance of one of these tendencies.
• His scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness.
• The constructive standpoint asked, "how, out of this present psyche, a bridge can be built into its own future."
• Whereas Zarathrustra proclaimed the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul. There are also indications that Jung read Dante's Commedia at this time, which also informs the structure of the work. Liber Novus depicts Jung's descent into Hell. But whereas Dante could utilize an established cosmology, Liber Novus is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology. The role of Philemon in Jung's work has analogies to that of Zarathrustra in Nietzsche's work and Virgil in Dante's.
• "It is the devil who says: Disdain all reason and science, mankind's highest powers. That is never appropriate even though we are forced to acknowledge [the existence of] the irrational."
• The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.
• He realized that until then, he had served the spirit of the time, characterized by use and value. In addition to this, there existed a spirit of the depths, which led to the things of the soul. The spirit of the times corresponds to personality 1 and the spirit of the depths corresponds to personality 2. Thus, this period could be seen as a return to the values of personality 2.
• The task of individuation lay in establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures - or contents of the collective unconsciousness - and integrating them into consciousness, hence recovering the value of the mythopoeic imagination which had been lost to the modern age, and thereby reconciling the spirit of the time with the spirit of the depth.
• Adaptation to the "inner" led to the demand for individuation, which was contrary to adaptation to others.
• The individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. These new values enabled one to make reparation to the collective. Individuation was for the few. Those who were insufficiently creative should rather reestablish collective conformity with a society. The individual had not only to create new values, but also socially recognizable ones, as society had a "right to expect realizable values."
• Society demanded imitation.
• "The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness." One commenced by concentrating on a particular mood, and attempting to become as conscious as possible of all fantasies and associations that came up in connection with it. The aim was to allow fantasy free play, without departing from the initial affect in a free associative process. This led to a concrete or symbolic expression of the mood, which had the result of bringing the affect nearer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable.
• The outbreak of war had made apparent the deep subliminal connections between individual fantasies and world events - and hence between the psychology of the individual and that of the nation.
• Jung argued that the era of reason and skepticism inaugurated by the French Revolution had repressed religion and irrationalism. This in turn had serious consequences, leading to the outbreak of irrationalism represented by the world war. It was thus a historical necessity to acknowledge the irrational as a psychological factor. The acceptance of the irrational forms one of the central themes of Liber Novus.
• "Our age is seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good."
• All of us stand between two worlds: that world of external perception and the world of the perception of the unconscious.
• Symbols, Jung maintained, stemmed from the unconscious, and the creation of symbols was the most important function of the unconscious.
• The soul gave rise to images that were assumed to be worthless from the rational perspective. There were four ways of using them:
  • Artistic
  • Philosophical speculation
  • Quasi-religious
  • Licentiousness
  • [and a fifth] Psychology, if Jung can clearly distinguish it from the other uses (particularly art)