Das Rote Buch

As a mysterious red book, it entered the literature surrounding C. G. Jung. No one was allowed to see it, as its author had decreed that it should not be published. This wish was respected. However, nearly fifty years after Jung's death, the time has come to make this impressive work accessible to the public. For many years, the great Swiss depth psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) recorded his dreams, visions, and fantasies in a diary: large-format, artistically crafted, and vividly colored – C. G. Jung's handwritten and painted unique legacy.

The Red Book is a volume bound in red linen (approximately 30 x 40 x 10.5 cm), in which C. G. Jung documented a long experiment with himself, which later became known as an exploration of the unconscious. The content consists partly of texts, i.e., imaginations (waking fantasies) and reflections on them, and partly of images painted by Jung. The texts were revised multiple times and finally transcribed calligraphically into the actual book, in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript. The Red Book is an unfinished work.

Although Jung himself may have considered the step, he neither published the Red Book separately nor included it in his collected works. The main reason was likely that it had a biographical rather than a scientific character. Regarding the work "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" by C. G. Jung, he only permitted the editor Aniela Jaffé to use excerpts from the Red Book. Jung's heirs explicitly or implicitly respected these wishes. After the publication of the collected works was completed, an increasingly psychological-historical perspective allowed for its release.