Jung's Red Book

Influential psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875-1961) wrote a manuscript between 1914 and 1930, that he dubbed Liber Novus ("New Book").

It was most likely never meant to see the light of day, but is an extraordinarily illustrated tome and insight into one of the most influential people of the 20th century. It was finally published in 2009 and colloquially-renamed The Red Book, due to the original's red leather binding.

"The Red Book by Carl Jung", { feuilleton }.

Sara Corbett charted the book's progress to publication in "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious" for The New York Times. Here's a snippet:

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.