For the better part of a century, Carl Jung and (later) his estate kept the manuscript of his unfinished Red Book ”or Liber Novus , as he originally entitled it”hidden safely away from public scrutiny. Jungs most ardent admirers, making their hopeful pilgrimages to Zurich, were denied so much as a glimpse into its pages, no matter how plangent their entreaties. For a time, the book was even locked away in a Swiss bank vault. The result, inevitably, was that it became something of a legend among Jungians: a secret visionary tome, written in the masters own hand, containing the mystic key to all his thought. Jung himself, after all, had once spoken of the book as the numinous origin from which all the work of his later years had flowed. Clearly, many came to believe, the family was jealous of its treasure.



In reality, Jungs son Franz probably kept The Red Book hidden only because he regarded it as an embarrassment, or at least as so eccentric a performance that its release could only harm his fathers already precarious reputation. His refusal to grant the curious access to the text was reportedly marked by a sternly protective peremptoriness. But after Franzs death in 1996, the Jung estate slowly relented. In 2009, the book at last appeared, in a large, lavish, very expensive English critical edition that included a complete, full-scale, and high-definition photographic reproduction of the original manuscript.



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