Dr. Ann Belford Ulanov | The Red Book and Our Unlived Life
December 9, 2025 at 08:54AM
Topics: Active Imagination, CG Jung, Midlife, Religion & Spirituality.
The Red Book and Our Unlived Life
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.
Early in The Red Book Jung tells us, “You live your life fully if you also live what you have not yet lived.” This is “”knowledge of the heart you can attain…only by living your life to the full.” Surviving turbulent times will require us to explore what living fully includes in this life and in the beyond. What difference does it make? Surprising implications may emerge as we discover the role our problems play in finding our path, in living on the border of impersonal and personal psychic life, in living in relation to the gap chaos introduces that can spur creativity as well as madness.
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