The spirit of the times corresponds to personality NO. 1, and the spirit of the depths corresponds to personality NO. 2.
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
