The most striking feature of Carl Jung’s Red Book is the visual brilliance of the work. The meticulously crafted calligraphic entries are accompanied by miniature and full page paintings that in part illustrate the text and in part represent an independent line of development in the work. While Jung wrote extensively about symbols and symbolic process in his scientific works, in The Red Book he brings visual representation to his own inner symbolic process.
This seminar focuses on the images Jung created in The Red Book. Special consideration is given to the rise of the transcendent function in Jung’s own psychic life through the visual articulation of his active imagination experiences. Paul Brutsche, an internationally recognized authority on the Jungian method of picture interpretation, surveys the paintings in The Red Book and comments on their development. Murray Stein speaks on Jung’s map-making as represented in the great mandala known as Systema Mundi Totius.