To live our life fully, including what we have not lived means facing the dead. The dead are what we should have lived and have not, and irreparable losses we have suffered. To live these, because “my life wants itself whole” (339), also means to approach the border between personal and impersonal psyche, to create personal meaning in the impersonal events that happen to us, and to yield personal strivings to the “Well-Being between us and others and in society” (234). Madness and creativity mingle.
Jung worked on The Red Book during his turbulent midlife years and discovered much life he had not lived. In our midlife years we too discover we have not lived life to the full. We may have knowledge of the head, but we know we do not have enough knowledge of the heart.