Jung’s work fell into a natural dichotomy. On the one hand, his clinical practice was conducted in a relatively straight forward and public manner and yielded a remarkable success rate, leading to Jung being embraced as a revolutionary physician. On the other hand, there was Jung’s ‘mystical’ being, which involved the convergence of Jung’s personality, which was undoubtedly empirical, with the archetype of The Old Wise Man.
For outsiders, the idea, which Jung put forward variously in his later works – of incarnating one’s own myth, is quite foreign. The Red Book, so far as can be determined, is a record of the process of ‘psychical objectification’ of Jung’s personality. The reason it was not written up as notes, is because the process is ‘real’, not intellectual, and therefore it demanded the response of the whole man – the artist, Jung, as well as the scientist, Jung.
No one, who has not had a brush with this level of the unconscious, could possibly understand what Jung expressed in the Red Book, and though Jung realised, that in many cases any level of awakened awareness of the unconscious was dangerous, nevertheless for those who could profit, with guidance, it was a process worth undertaking.
The illumination derived from Jung confronting his ‘universal pre existent psychical counterpart in the unconscious’ – ‘The Self’, changed Jung irrevocably. For the personality to mine the unconscious, as Jung did, not only changes the man, but also changes reality. To usurp the unconscious and to deprive it of even a fraction of it’s power to control events and human destiny is an immeasurable victory for consciousness. Jung was more discreet, but he knew the value of this unique type of consciousness in an otherwise unconsciously determined universe.
Jung’s natural assumption was that others would take up the challenge of The Unconscious, but the status of a living mythological being elevated Jung to such a high place of reverence that his work with the unconscious was unsurpassed among his followers. His detractors, searching out the dirt of his human existence, (which he never denied), devalue his work by pointing to his human fallibility and mystical nature, not realising Jung’s message was precisely: THAT THE PERFECTION OF THE HUMAN SOUL IS ONLY RELATIVELY REALISABLE THROUGH THE PROCESS OF HUMAN INCARNATION. With Jung, this is overwhelmingly the case, especially since, and unavoidably, such latter empirical judgments are being applied illegitimately and unconsciously to the perfection of The Central Father Archetype, around which The Old Wise Man Archetype eternally orbits.
The confusion, between the empirical and the mythological, is at the root of most religious dilemmas and it is only latterly that we are getting glimpses behind the curtain at the empirical qualities of such mythologically imbued beings and events as are represented in the Christian texts of The New Testament. Jung was quite aware of this process and said so in his book Answer To Job. This book was a revolution in thinking about divinity, and his questioning and confrontation of the Old Testament God, in relation to the drama represented by the persecution of Job, is completely redolent of the way he conducted himself in relation to his Red Book fantasies. Jung was taken so seriously as a public figure in his time, that Answer To Job raised an unholy storm of indignation among the faithful in his predominantly Christian readership and following. The book also appears to have fulfilled a secret and terrifying childhood vision Jung had of God defecating on his own church.
Jung saw that the perfection of divinity (as represented by the bible) was far from conclusive, and to a more complete mind, covering up such inner contradictions - as seemed evident in the Deity, would stand as a barrier to the form of natural and spiritual self realisation represented by the process he had undertaken and was privately recording in the Red Book, which finally became the process of psychological Individuation.
The Red Book therefore, is as much a work of art as it is of science. It is one special man’s headlong journey into an interior world of meaning and power, yet because Jung occupies such a central point – through his psychical objectification, it is a journey that is valid for all.