“Creative Passion”: Dante and Love in C. G. Jung’s Red Book

This talk draws on the many significant parallels between Dante’s and Jung’s visionary experiences in order to explore the centrality of love as the guiding force in processes of self-transformation in which we are involved not only as therapists and clients, but first and foremost as human beings. When it comes to Jung and Eros, a number of popular myths and misconceptions arise. One of these being the general assumption that Jung, in comparison to Freud, downplayed the importance of Eros. The publication of the Red Book (2009) and the Black Books (2020) reveals that a very different story awaits to be told. In the protocols of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung noted that the core of the Red Book experiment revolved around the force of “creative passion”. In a highly critical phase of this journey, Toni Wolff, Jung’s soul-mate and lover at the time of his explorations, annotated at the top of Black Book 4 a reference to the “primal love” which is mentioned in Dante’s inscription to the gate of Hell. Starting from here, we will explore how the motif of Eros and love impregnates the pages of Jung's life-changing experiment, by connecting Jung's powerful encounter with Dante's Commedia to our own journey into darkness and quest for love and luminosity.