Books by Sonu Shamdasani
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Shamdasani and The Red Book and Liber Novus
In Liber Novus, Jung articulated his understanding of the historical transformations of Christianity, and the historicity f symbolic formations.
He took up this theme in his writings on the psychology of alchemy and on the psychology of Christian dogmas, and most of all in Answer to Job.
As we have seen, it was Jung’s view that his prewar visions were prophetic that led to the composition of Liber Novus. In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such “meaningful coincidences,” which he called synchronicity.
He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen.
This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914.
It is important to note that the relation of Liber Novus to Jung’s scholarly writings did not follow a straight point-by-point translation and elaboration.
As early as 1916, Jung sought to convey some of the results of his experiments in a scholarly language, while continuing with the elaboration of his fantasies.
One would do best to regard Liber Novus and the Black Books as representing a private opus that ran parallel to and alongside his public scholarly opus; whilst the latter was nourished by and drew from the former, they remained distinct.
After ceasing to work on Liber Novus, he continued to elaborate his private opus-his own mythology-in his work on the tower, and in his stone carvings and paintings.
Here, Liber Novus functioned as a generating center, and a number of his paintings and carvings relate to it.
In psychotherapy, Jung sought to enable his patients to recover a sense of meaning in life through facilitating and supervising their own self-experimentation and symbol creation.
At the same time, he attempted to elaborate a general scientific psychology. ― Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 220
The hero wants to open up everything he can.
But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent.
Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life.
For how else shall it develop into ability?
We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it.
But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life.
Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss.
Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability. The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal.
This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands.
If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse.
Our foundations will be caught up in excitement since our highest tension, which concerns what lies outside us, will stir them up.
We will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us.
The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs.
Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists.
No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down. ― Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 240
Liber Novus thus presents a series of active imaginations together with Jung’s attempt to understand their significance.
This work of understanding encompasses a number of interlinked threads: an attempt to understand himself and to integrate and develop the various components of his personality; an attempt to understand the structure of the human personality in general; an attempt to understand the relation of the individual to present-day society and to the community of the dead; an attempt to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity; and an attempt to grasp the future religious development of the West.
Jung discusses many other themes in the work, including the nature of self-knowledge; the nature of the soul; the relations of thinking and feeling and the psychological types; the relation of inner and outer masculinity and femininity; the uniting of opposites; solitude; the value of scholarship and learning; the status of science; the significance of symbols and how they are to be understood; the meaning of the war; madness, divine madness, and psychiatry; how the Imitation of Christ is to be understood today; the death of God; the historical significance of Nietzsche; and the relation of magic and reason.
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.
Liber Novus itself can be understood on one hand as depicting Jung’s individuation process, and on the other hand as his elaboration of this concept as a general psychological schema.
At the beginning of the book, Jung refinds his soul and then embarks on a sequence of fantasy adventures, which form a consecutive narrative.
He realized that until then, he had served the spirit of the time, characterized by use and value.
In addition to this, there existed a spirit of the depths, which led to the things of the soul. In terms of Jung’s later biographical memoir, the spirit of the times corresponds to personality NO. 1, and the spirit of the depths corresponds to personality NO. 2.
Thus this period could be seen as a return to the values of personality NO. 2 .
The chapters follow a particular format: they begin with the exposition of dramatic visual fantasies.
In them Jung encounters a series of figures in various settings and enters into conversation with them.
He is confronted with unexpected happenings and shocking statements.
He then attempts to understand what had transpired, and to formulate the significance of these events and statements into general psychological conceptions and maxims.
Jung held that the significance of these fantasies was due to the fact that they stemmed from the mythopoeic imagination which was missing in the present rational age.
The task of individuation lay in establishing a dialogue with the fantasy figures – or contents of the collective unconscious and integrating them into consciousness, hence recovering thevalue of the mythopoeic imagination which had been lost to the modern age, and thereby reconciling the spirit of the time with the spirit of the depth.
This task was to form a leitmotif of his subsequent scholarly work. ― Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 207-208
Once these fantasies had been produced and embodied, two approaches were possible: creative formulation and understanding.
Each needed the other, and both were necessary to produce the transcendent function, which arose out of the union of conscious and unconscious contents.
For some people, Jung noted, it was simple to note the “other” voice in writing and to answer it from the standpoint of the I: “It is exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between two human beings . .. ”
This dialogue led to the creation of the transcendent function, which resulted in a widening of consciousness.
This depiction of inner dialogues and the means of evoking fantasies in a waking state represents Jung’s own undertaking in the Black Books.
The interplay of creative formulation and understanding corresponds to Jung’s work in Liber Novus. Jung did not publish this paper.
He later remarked that he never finished his work on the transcendent function because he did it only half-heartedly.
In 1917, Jung published a short book with a long title: The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes: An Overview of the Modern Theory and Method of Analytical Psychology.
In his preface, dated December 1916, he proclaimed the psychological processes that accompanied the war had brought the problem of the chaotic unconscious to the forefront of attention.
However, the psychology of the individual corresponded to the psychology of the nation, and only the transformation of the attitude of the individual could bring about cultural renewal.
This articulated the intimate interconnection between individual and collective events that was at the center of Liber Novus .
For Jung, the conjunction between his precognitive visions and the outbreak of war had made apparent the deep subliminal connections between individual fantasies and world events- and hence between the psychology of the individual and that of the nation.
What was now required was to work out this connection in more detail. Jung noted that after one had analyzed and integrated the contents of the personal unconscious, one came up against mythological fantasies that stemmed from the phylogenetic layer of the unconscious.
The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes provided an exposition of the collective, suprapersonal, absolute unconscious- these terms being used interchangeably Jung argued that one needed to separate oneself from the unconscious by presenting it visibly as something separate from one.
It was vital to differentiate the I from the non- I, namely, the collective psyche or absolute unconscious.
To do this, “man must necessarily stand upon firm feet in his I -function; that is, he must fulfil his duty toward life completely, so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of society.”
Jung had been endeavoring to accomplish these tasks during this period. Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 209
“If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. The human soul, living forever within you.”
The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird.”
The textual changes that Jung makes among the soul, the serpent and the bird from the Black Books in this chapter and in Scrutinies can be seen to be the recognition and differentiation of the threefold nature of the soul. Jung’s notion of the unity and multiplicity of the soul resembles Eckhart’s.
In Sermon 52, Eckhart wrote: “the soul with her higher powers touches eternity, which is God, while her lower powers being in touch with time make her subject to change and biased towards bodily things, which degrade her”.
In Sermon 85, he wrote:
“Three things prevent the soul from uniting with God. The first is that she is too scattered, and that she is not unitary: for when the soul is inclined toward creatures, she is not unitary. The second is when she is involved with temporal things. The third is when she is turned toward the body, for then she cannot unite with God”.
― Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 240
If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing.
The human soul, living forever within you.
The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird.
The textual changes that Jung makes among the soul, the serpent and the bird from the Black Books in this chapter and in Scrutinies can be seen to be the recognition and differentiation of the threefold nature of the soul.
Jung’s notion of the unity and multiplicity of the soul resembles Eckhart’s.
In Sermon 52, Eckhart wrote: “the soul with her higher powers touches eternity, which is God, while her lower powers being in touch with time make her subject to change and biased towards bodily things, which degrade her”.
In Sermon 85, he wrote:
“Three things prevent the soul from uniting with God. The first is that she is too scattered, and that she is not unitary: for when the soul is inclined toward creatures, she is not unitary. The second is when she is involved with temporal things. The third is when she is turned toward the body, for then she cannot unite with God”. ― Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book: Liber Novus
When Nietzsche said: ‘God is dead,’ he expressed a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe”.
To Nietzsche’s statement, Jung noted:
“However it would be more correct to say: ‘He has discarded our image, and where will we find him again? ― Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book: Liber Novus
The singularity of the term “psychology” should not mislead one into thinking that such a discipline was ever successfully founded.
Or that there is an essence to “psychology” that could encompass the various definitions, methodologies, practices, world-views, and institutions that have used this designation. ― Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, Page 8