On Love, Dante, And Jung’s Red Book

In 1913 when C. G. Jung began to grapple with his life-changing journey of self-transformation, he copied in his personal Black Books a few lines from Dante’s Commedia which enigmatically referred to the powerful purifying action of the “flame of love”. A little later, Toni Wolff annotated at the top of Black Book 4 a reference to the “Primal Love” which is mentioned in Dante’s inscription to the gate of Hell. Starting from here, in a properly Dantesque fashion, the motif of eros and love impregnates the pages of Jung’s “most difficult experiment”, The Red Book, upon a continuous intersection of personal and symbolical events. This seminar interrogates Jung’s phenomenology of love at the crossroad of eros and psyche and positions it as a crucial key to access The Red Book,while unfolding a fundamental thread of the psychological system which developed on its basis.