Sonu Shamdasani: C.G. Jung Dreams – Foreword
FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION
READING JUNG AFTER THE RED BOOK
With the publication of Liber Novus—Jung’s Red Book1—a new chapter
opens in the reading of Jung’s works.
For the first time, one is in a position to grasp the constitution of Jung’s work from 1914 onward, and to trace the intimate connections between his self-experimentation and his attempts to determine the typical features of this process through his work with his patients and translate his insights into a language acceptable to a medical and scientific public.
Thus, reading Liber Novus brings with it the task of rereading Jung’s Collected Works—much of which appears in a wholly new light.
In the winter of 1913, Jung embarked on a process of selfexperimentation.
He 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 type of thinking in a dramatic form.
When World War I broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft of Liber Novus, which consisted of 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.
Jung recopied the manuscript in an ornate Gothic script into a large red
leather folio volume, which he illustrated with his own paintings. The
overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the
contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved by
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.
Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he
attempted to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise
The Secret of the Golden Flower, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelism between the imagery of the text and some of his own mandalas, Jung finally decided to set aside his work on Liber Novus and not publish it.
Instead he devoted himself to the cross-cultural study of the individuation process, focusing on medieval alchemy in particular, using parallels with his own material as a means to present the process in an indirect and allegorical form.
Until now, this has presented formidable challenges for readers outside of Jung’s inner circle.
We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.
In the twentieth century, Jung has been principally associated with the
dream. The first two papers in this volume depict Jung’s early approach to
the dream during his psychiatric and psychoanalytic career.
Here he endeavors to show how a new rational hermeneutics may explain the obscure symbolism of dreams. In 1912, Jung had some powerful dreams
that he didn’t understand. In the first, he found himself in a southern town
where he encountered at midday an Austrian customs guard whom someone
described as the one who could not die.
He then saw a twelfth-century knight with a Maltese cross who appeared at the same time each day. Freud had been unable to interpret the dream. In the second dream, Jung dreamed that he was with his children in an open, columned hall, around a table whose top was a dark green stone. A gull or a dove flew onto the table and then turned into a girl of eight, who played with his children.
The girl then turned back into the bird and told Jung that she could only become human in the first hour of the night, when the male dove was busy with the twelve dead. These dreams led Jung to go back over his childhood dreams, and to pay renewed attention to his dreams and fantasies
The following year Jung had a dream in which he killed the Germanic hero Siegfried. On awaking, Jung thought that he would have to kill himself if he couldn’t solve the riddle of the dream, which he eventually managed to do. Jung’s explorations led him to a new respect for the significance of
dreams and the ambiguity of their language:
I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech f my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.
Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you
understanding their language. One would like to learn this language,
but who can teach and learn it?
In the three following papers, Jung attempted to portray his new understanding of dreams and how their study could be of therapeutic
benefit.
This volume ends with Jung’s epochal study of the reemergence of
alchemical motifs in the dreams of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist
Wolfgang Pauli, and of how dreams portrayed Pauli’s process of
individuation, which bore analogies to Jung’s own, as portrayed in Liber
Novus. ~Sonu Shamdasani, C.G. Jung Dreams, Page 8-10
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