Begin At The Beginning: A Pilot Project To Read Jung’s Red Book: Liber Novus – Part 13

This series offers a close and substantial reading of The Red Book: Liber Novus across four two-hour seminars. In each session, participants read the text aloud, situate it within its historical context, and consider relevant intertexts. The seminar addresses the meaning of the text, its personal impact on readers, and its implications for clinical practice. As The Red Book presents much of Jung's material in visual form, the seminar examines these images in detail and reflects on their significance. Participants are encouraged to use break times and the close of each session for informal conversation with the instructor and with one another. Light refreshments will be provided.

This session covers Liber Secundus, Chapter 13, "The Sacrificial Murder." In this chapter, Jung radically revises the Christian notion of sacrifice made out of love, proposing instead that the transformation required of the individual—and the renewal of the God-image itself—depends on accepting one's own capacity for evil in a new way. The seminar will examine how this reformulation moves beyond the conventional conundrum of "evil and the God of love."

Learning Objectives

• Describe the historical significance of Jung's Red Book: Liber Novus in the development and practice of analytical psychology.
• Describe the historical significance of Jung's Black Books in relation to Liber Novus.
• Describe the term active imagination and explain its clinical use in analysis.
• Give an example of how Jung used active imagination in his confrontation with the unconscious.
• Describe how Jung's theory of the archetypes arose from the experiences recorded in Liber Novus, and give a clinical example.
• Describe how Jung's theory of the collective unconscious arose from the experiences recorded in Liber Novus, and give a clinical example.
• Describe what Jung meant by "the objective psyche," and give a clinical example.
• Compare Jung's account of initiatory experience in Liber Novus with clinical analytic training and the practice of analysis.