From the Philemon Foundation:

Jung termed the period between 1912 and 1918 his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. It was through this that he developed his principle psychological theories of the archetypes, the collective unconscious and the process of individuation, and transformed psychotherapy from a practice predominately concerned with the treatment of the sick into a means for the higher development of the personality.

This led to the development of analytical psychology as a theoretical discipline and as a form of psychotherapy. At the centre of this was an unpublished book entitled Liber Novus, also called The Red Book, upon which he worked for sixteen years.

Its genesis may be briefly stated. In the winter of 1913, Jung deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and carefully noted what ensued. He later called this process active imagination. He wrote down these fantasies in the Black Books. These are not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation.

The dialogues that form these active imaginations can be regarded as a form of thinking in a dramatic form. When the First World War broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft manuscript of Liber Novus, which consisted in a transcription of the main fantasies from the Black Books, together with a layer of interpretive commentaries and lyrical elaboration.

Here, Jung attempted to derive general psychological principles from the fantasies, as well as to understand to what extent the events portrayed in the fantasies presented, in a symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world.

The material went through a number of drafts and was then recopied by Jung in an ornate gothic script into a large red leather folio volume, to which he added historiated initials, ornamental borders and a substantial number of paintings. The work was modelled after the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology. Liber Novus presents the prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process, which he held to be the universal form of individual psychological development.

This publication opens the possibility of a new era in the understanding of Jung’s work. It provides a unique window into how he recovered his soul and, in so doing, constituted one of the influential psychologies of the twentieth century.

Released on October 7, 2009 by W. W. Norton & Company, the Red Book is a landmark publication. This scholarly and historical edition provides the general reader with extensive notes and an introduction outlining the intellectual and historical contexts of the work. The folio-size volume, a full facsimile edition, includes 205 pages of text illuminated with Jung’s exquisite calligraphy and stunning artwork: 53 pages are full images, 71 pages contain both text and images, and 81 pages are pure calligraphic text.