Revisiting Jung’s “Red Book”

This fall, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City is hosting a documentary series called The Red Book Dialogues, featuring conversations between celebrities and Jungian analysts as they explore pages from Carl Jung's Red Book.

The contents of the Red Book, which Jung began working on in 1914 and abandoned sometime around 1930, remained a closely guarded secret for most of a century, with only a few people ever having the chance to read it or even look at it. Jung's heirs were finally convinced to publish it in 2009. The Red Book, which consists of 205 pages of elaborate calligraphy and colorful drawings, is partly a mythological mystery and partly a journal of Jung's disturbing visions and inner voices. Though its contents were secret for decades, it was the inspiration for many of Jung's later works.

As John Tarrant wrote in his review of the Red Book in the Shambhala Sun, "Jung's journey is interesting, harrowing, ridiculous, pompous, incomprehensible, amusing, sad, frightening, wise—the whole range of the human is there. Just like Buddhist practice."

After its publication in 2009, the Rubin Museum invited various personalities — including David Byrne, Cornell West, Sarah Silverman, and Alice Walker (a frequent contributor to the Shambhala Sun; read her work here) — to explore a page of the book with a Jungian analyst. These conversations were filmed, and will be shown at the museum in October and November as part of the Lunch Matters documentary series.

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