There are certain books that defy easy categorization. Some argue they should never be read, while others insist they are required reading for every thinking person. Some call it a mystical diary; others, the notes of a brilliant psychotic. This particular story begins with a concealment, a book hidden from the world for nearly a century. Its author, Carl Jung, worked on it for 16 years, beginning in 1913, hiding its colorful, cryptic pages from even his closest friends and family.

A Crisis and a Confrontation

Early in his career, Carl Jung was the "adopted elder son and heir" to Sigmund Freud. But this intellectual kinship shattered in 1912 when Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, a work that directly challenged Freud's foundational ideas. The fallout was immediate and severe. Ostracized by the professional community, Jung, then 38, found himself in a state of profound isolation and on the brink of an existential crisis.

It was in this crucible of professional collapse that Jung experienced a series of twelve powerful, apocalyptic visions in the months leading up to the First World War. He understood this wasn't a breakdown to be medicated or ignored. Instead of seeing these inner experiences as symptoms, he saw them as a call. Every evening, he would retreat to his study and begin a deliberate descent inward.

What he found there was a world teeming with images from the depths of his own psyche: heroes and demons, wise elders and mythical beasts. He spoke to them, and they spoke back. He later compared this period—his "confrontation with the unconscious"—to a mescaline experiment. The visions were relentless. "I often had to cling to the table," he recalled, "so as not to fall apart." As a psychiatrist with an extraordinary creative mind, he chose not to suppress the circus erupting in his head but to tear down the wall between his rational self and the unconscious. He documented these encounters in a special manuscript, Liber Novus, which would later become known simply as The Red Book.

The Inner Altar

To open The Red Book is to handle something that feels less like a text and more like a sacred artifact. On its pages, you meet an ancient Egyptian serpent, a demonic woman, a sage, a wanderer, a murderer, and a man who resembles Christ. These figures are not scientific case studies; they act with a frightening, chaotic autonomy. The book is not a diary, a dissertation, or a fairy tale. It is an inner altar. Jung filled its pages with calligraphic script and painted intricate miniatures reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

The contents are a stark chronicle of a man wrestling with his own soul. Jung travels through the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he discovers is his sister, is crushed by a giant snake, and, in one terrifying vision, eats the liver of a small child. At one point, he is even sharply criticized by the Devil.

It’s no wonder the book was hidden. After Jung’s death in 1961, it was locked away in a safe. For decades, his family refused all requests to see it, believing the deeply personal work could ruin his scientific reputation. Others argued that without this book, the true foundation of his life's work would remain misunderstood. It was thanks to the persistent efforts of historian Sonu Shamdasani, who spent nearly a decade in negotiations with Jung's family, that the book was finally published in 2009, almost a century after its creation. The world was finally allowed to see a text it was perhaps still not ready for.

The Shadow of an Era

So, what exactly was Jung doing? He was engaging with the unconscious, which he believed had two layers. The personal unconscious holds our individual experiences, repressed memories, and inner conflicts. Beneath that lies the collective unconscious, a deeper layer containing universal images and motifs—archetypes—that appear in the myths and religions of all cultures. Jung developed a technique he called active imagination, a meditative practice of allowing these images to rise into consciousness, where he could then interact with them, draw them, and analyze them.

The Red Book is the record of this profound psychological experiment. Jung realized that the frantic, results-oriented rhythm of modern society makes us deaf to the call of our inner nature. "If a person does not find the soul," he wrote, "he is devoured by the horror of emptiness." He believed that the loss of this inner connection gives rise to neuroses and distorts human behavior, and that most of the world's ugliness is a consequence of our alienation from our own psyches.

In his visions, Jung repeatedly confronts destructive images of murder and madness. He understands these are not just his personal problems, but archetypal forces that activate when we pretend for too long to be only "good" people. The refined, civilized Carl Jung is horrified to discover a murderer, a seducer, and a fool living within him. But he comes to see that these are not enemies to be vanquished, but exiled parts of his soul. The Red Book reveals that the invisible shadow becomes a monster when it is ignored. Writing in the midst of the First World War, Jung felt that all of Europe was possessed by its repressed shadow, and he feared that if individuals did not confront their own darkness, it would erupt collectively as war.

Embracing the Absurdity of God

Jung's relationship with God was anything but simple. His visions forced him to reconsider the divine. He describes killing a god-like figure and being told by the "spirit of the depths" that "The highest truth is the same as absurdity." For Jung, the "death of God" was not a declaration of atheism, but an opportunity for spiritual renewal. The old, external, unambiguous image of God had to die within us to make way for a more complete, internal understanding.

He came to believe that truth lives beyond the purely rational. He argued that God could not be one-sided. "If God is only beauty and good, how can he contain the whole fullness of life?" he wrote. "How can a person live in God if God himself encompasses only one half of him?" For Jung, the divine had to include the beautiful and the repulsive, the good and the evil. In a striking passage, he declares, "To the extent that the Christianity of this age is devoid of madness, it is devoid of divine life. Madness is divine."

This journey led him to an inner guide, a figure he named Philemon—a wise magician who represented a connection to the unreasonable, to the deep knowledge that had been lost in the rational world. Philemon was to Jung what Zarathustra was to Nietzsche: a voice from a mythic imagination.

A Map, Not the Territory

Before The Red Book, Jung was a famous psychiatrist. After, he became something more. But he was still just a person, one who warned against the dogmatism he saw in both science and religion. His work is not a new scripture; it is a map. And as we know, a map is not the territory itself, but a tool for navigation.

The Red Book doesn't offer a clean methodology or promise a specific result. It simply shows that if you dare to descend into your own depths, you may find something. It may not be what you wanted, but it will be real. The book is not meant to be "understood" like a philosophical text. Its essence is in the feeling it leaves behind—an electrical trace that stirs something within.

Jung was ultimately forced to ask himself the most fundamental question: "In what myth do I live?" He realized he didn't have an answer and that discovering his own personal myth was the most important task of his life. Perhaps that is the book's ultimate invitation to us. In an age where the old answers no longer seem to work, it asks each of us to consider the same question.

References

• Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus (S. Shamdasani, Ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
  Sonu Shamdasani's extensive introduction provides the definitive history of the book's creation, its concealment by Jung's family, and the complex process of its eventual translation and publication. It is the essential companion for understanding the context and significance of Jung's work.
• Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
  In this unique autobiography, Jung recounts the period of his life he termed his "confrontation with the unconscious." Chapter VI, in particular, details the intense visions and inner dialogues that would form the raw material for The Red Book, offering his own retrospective view on this pivotal experience (pages 170-199).