Lance S. Owens, History and the Transformation of Jung
With publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus in 2009 and the subsequent publication of Jung’s Black Book journals in 2020, understanding of Jung in his historical context has entered a generational period of transformation.
I review here both the past understanding of Jung, and the potential effects of the forthcoming publication of a new and complete 26-volume edition of Jung’s writings.
My comments are followed by an interview with Dr. Sonu Shamdasani, who has worked for decades on this historical project and is general editor of the new critical edition of Jung’s complete works.
Jung is being historically transformed.
It began in 2009 with publication of documents he penned over a century ago, the once-sequestered records of his transformative journey.
Jung stated that all of his later work flowed forth from his imaginative and visionary experiences between 1913 and the 1920s, events he contemporaneously recorded in his “Black Book” journals, and then partially transposed and amplified in The Red Book: Liber Novus (Jung, 2009).
Now we meet Jung anew, records in hand.
Jung declared the centrality of this period of his life to Aniela Jaffé in comments she recorded from their conversation on October 12, 1957:
The years … when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life.
Everything else is to be derived from this.
It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore.
My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.
… Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.
But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then. (Jung, 2009, p. vii)
But exactly what it was that happened—what he experienced, what he saw and heard and recorded in his ledgers of the journey—remained Jung’s mystery throughout his life and for five decades after his death.
Jung kept an extensive and detailed record.
There were six sequentially dated journals, collectively known as the “Black Books” (Jung, 2020), which he began on November 12, 1913, and continued through 1932.
These journals might be best described as his contemporaneous ledger of a voyage into imaginative and visionary reality.
At the beginning, in December 1913, he called the coming odyssey “my most difficult experiments” (Jung, 2020, 16[v.1]).
By late 1914, as the magnitude of his experience penetrated him, he met the need for a more formal and elaborate record of the visions.
With great artistic craft—employing antique calligraphic text and stunning artwork—Jung labored onward for 16 years translating the early and primary record of his experience from the journals into an elegant folio-sized leatherbound volume: this is The Red Book (Jung, 2009).
In golden letters on the book spine, Jung titled it Liber Novus (The New Book).
Throughout his life, The Red Book: Liber Novus remained veiled.
Only a handful of his closest students and colleagues were allowed to read it all; after his death in 1961 his family refused requests for access to the volume or to the journals.
In later decades, the records were closed away in a Swiss bank vault.
Nearly a century after the record began, both The Red Book and his journals—the primary accounts of Jung’s transformative experience—were finally opened to study.
These records have transformed, and continue to transform, comprehension of C. G. Jung.
Integrating this trove into his life work will be a generational task.
PAST PATHS
To understand the historical transformation that is taking place in Jung Studies, one must consider the past.
Publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus and the Black Book journals marked a caesura in understanding Jung.
Looking back, where did things stand before their publication?
When I began my study of Jung around 1987, the two most common primary sources on Jung were his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961/1989), and the 18 volumes of his writings, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
Of course I read them.
These sources have been repeatedly quoted in every book, essay, thesis, and dissertation about Jung I have encountered over many decades.
I quoted them.
Let’s reconsider these two sources anew in current perspective.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections was published in 1963 and became a best-seller.
Over five decades, it remained a canonical work in understanding Jung.
About a million copies of the English edition alone have been sold.
It is the one book almost everyone interested in Jung eventually reads.
It may be the most quoted single work attributed to Jung.
But readers seldom understood that Aniela Jaffé constructed most of the book’s content and then struggled with editorial impositions prior to publication—including the publisher’s marketing demand that C. G. Jung be credited as author.
Jaffé did a great service to Jung in her effort on the memoir.
She captured his voice as she knew it.
Nonetheless, Jung penned only the first and last parts of the book.
During work on her biography of Jung in 1957, Jaffé conducted multiple interviews with Jung.
He was then about 82 years old.
Their conversations were wide-ranging: Jung talked about whatever came to mind on the day.
Jaffé transcribed his words.
Only edited fragments of those interviews are found in MDR.
Jaffé’s 186-page typescript copy of the conversations, known as the “Memories Protocols” (Jung, 1995), has been publicly available in the Library of Congress archive since 1993.
But the full typescript was known only to scholars who went looking.
Until recently, complex copyright issues had blocked its publication.¹
A central chapter in Memories, Dreams, Reflections is titled “Confrontation with the Unconscious” (Jung, 1961/1989, pp. 170–199).
That account has fascinated many readers.
Jaffé apparently constructed most of that crucial section from notes of Jung’s 1925 seminar—the only public account Jung gave about his extraordinary experiences in the prior decade.²
Jung also apparently offered Jaffé permission to quote the text of his Red Book in the memoir.
She decided not to include any of that material.
The only writing included from the period he worked on The Red Book: Liber Novus is the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), composed and privately printed by Jung in 1916 (Jung, 1967).
That document appeared as an appendix in later English editions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Until publication of The Red Book in 2009, few readers understood the provenance and centrality of the Septem Sermones within Jung’s imaginative journey.
CONSTRUCTING THE COLLECTED WORKS
The Collected Works, as translated and presented in the English edition, have been the standard source on Jung’s writings for well over half a century.
And it was often assumed that this collection was both authoritative and complete.
But it was not complete, and it suffered many editorial limitations.
The elegant translations accomplished by R. F. C. Hull for the collection occasionally failed at conveying what Jung actually wrote.
Hull sometimes reformed a passage to his taste.
Translation is an art—but the art apart, accurate translation is an issue in understanding a major writer like C. G. Jung.
Editorial introductions to the texts in the collection are modest in historical detail.
Jung’s frequent quotations in Latin and Greek were also occasionally left untranslated, a vexing issue for most modern readers.
The Collected Works are not a complete edition of Jung’s writings; many things were left aside, some items may not then have been known.
Nonetheless, the mass of material selected for inclusion ended up filling 18 volumes.
Among them were topically titled volumes with multiple shorter works.
This arrangement unfortunately failed to convey the chronology of Jung’s publications; it became a smorgasbord of his thoughts from different periods of life.
Jung rewrote several of his publications over decades.
Versions changed subtly or substantially in progressive restatements.
When there were multiple versions, editors of the Collected Works chose to include only the last published example.
It was a reasonable editorial choice.
Nonetheless, those earlier versions reveal how Jung evolved, how his thoughts matured.
But to find those earlier editions, one must search outside the Collected Works.
The labor to produce a collected edition of Jung’s writings began around 1945, when Jung was 70 years old.
He still had 15 fertile years of work ahead; in those years, he went on to publish several more books and many more essays.
All of that material eventually had to be brought together under the evolving concept of a Collected Works.
Three decades after the project began, and 18 years after Jung’s death in 1961, the effort was declared done.
The editors—Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire—had accomplished a monumental task, a historically essential work.
But publishing a first—and 18-volume—collected edition of any important figure’s writing is a monumental undertaking, especially if that person is alive and working at the project’s inception.
Only time can tell whether a revised and more complete edition is warranted.
It takes a century or so to determine if a person’s work is in fact of ongoing historical merit.
The earliest attempts at collecting writings of any author are by nature aspirational.
Rare figures are deemed important enough by later generations to mandate a historically-informed and inclusive new scholarly edition of all their work.
History now deems C. G. Jung one such figure.~Lance S. Owens, Psychological Perspectives, Volume 68, Issue 1 / 2025 “History and the Transformation of Jung,” pp. 114–116
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