Jung, Dante and the Making of the Red Book: The Fire Seminars

C.G. Jung considered the Red Book (Liber Novus) the most “difficult” and “important” experiment of his life and the nucleus of the psychological system which later became known as “analytical psychology”.

The posthumous publication of the Red Book (2009) set forth a revolution in Jung studies, by attracting a growing wave of interest in Jung at popular and academic levels and sparking new ways of understanding Jungian psychology, in contemporary theory and practice.

Throughout the over 16 years timespan it took Jung to compose the Red Book, he became deeply involved with the reading of Dante’s Commedia, which inspired him at existential, hermeneutical and psychological levels. He found in Dante’s transformative journey a blueprint for his own radical experience of self-transformation and the prototype for his conceptualisation of a “science of visions”. He regularly annotated entries from the Commedia into his own “book of visions” and offered interpretations of Dante’s experiences in many of his scientific works. Jung’s enduring confrontation with Dante is the subject of Priviero’s Of Fire and Form: Jung, Dante and the Making of the Red Book (with a Preface by S. Shamdasani) and the inspiration for the present seminar: a thematic immersion into the symbols and existential states which constitute a journey of self-regeneration.

The seminar is open to anyone who has a professional or personal interest in exploring the making of Jung’s Red Book and its relation to the key principles of analytical psychology. It will provide participants with (1) an introduction to the Red Book, through a combination of close reading and academic contextualisation; (2) a fresh way of understanding the basic tenets of Jungian psychology, in light of the Red Book; (3) a space to train and practice the exercise of critical thinking and informed group discussion.

See full programme