C. G. Jung

A portable edition of the famous Red Book text and essay. The Red Book, published to wide acclaim in 2009, contains the nucleus of C. G. Jung’s later works. It was here that he developed his principal theories of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation that would transform psychotherapy from treatment of the sick into a means for the higher development of the personality. As Sara Corbett wrote in the New York Times, “The creation of one of modern history’s true visionaries, The Red Book is a singular work, outside of categorization. As an inquiry into what it means to be human, it transcends the history of psychoanalysis and underscores Jung’s place among revolutionary thinkers like Marx, Orwell and, of course, Freud.” The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition features Sonu Shamdasani’s introductory essay and the full translation of Jung’s vital work in one volume.

A Reader's Edition

The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.

Dreams pave the way for your life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself.

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero. 

Salome loved the prophet, and this sanctified her. The prophet loved God, and this sanctified him. But Salome did not love God, and this profaned her. But the prophet did not love Salome, and this profaned him. And thus they were each other’s poison and death. May the thinking person accept his pleasure, and the feeling person accept his own thought. Such leads one along the way.

Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.

I unsuspectingly absorb what I reject. What I accept enters that part of my soul whichI do not know; I accept what I do to myself, but I reject what is done to me. 

The Red Book: A Reader's Edition quotes

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