This talk will outline Jung’s idiosyncratic presentation of love in the Black Books and explore its clinical relevance and theoretical implications.
The publication of Jung’s Black Books in October 2020 was a unique milestone in the history of analytical psychology. The Black Books are the foundation of all subsequent concepts, techniques, and theoretical formulations of analytical psychology, and provide the source material of Jung’s Red Book, published in 2009. Across 981 pages, Jung records a series of active imaginations and visionary events that he experienced across 19 years, from November 1913 to December 1932.
One of the remarkable themes emerging from these notebooks is the idea of love as the central experience of being human, but also as the foundational element of psychic change. Jung chose not to explicitly pursue this theme in his collected works, and he also decided not to reproduce any of this material in the Red Book so it is unique to the Black Books and reflects a deeply intimate aspect of the analytic process and of Jung’s own transformation.
Love is presented here not as a concept that should be understood, but as an organ of perception. This has, I will argue, profound significance both for the later development of the concept of individuation but also for the inner workings of the analytic relationship.
