March 5, 2021

Preparing for the Black Books Seminar has brought back a lot of memories from my visit to Zurich about a decade ago. I was working for The Philemon Foundation, the organization responsible for publishing Jung’s unpublished archives, including The Red Book and the Black Books. That red photo above shows me, the one leaning against the wall, at the opening of The Red Book exhibit at the Rietberg Museum in December 2010. It was a pretty magical time. 

Back then, the publication of the Black Books was just a twinkle in Sonu Shamdasani’s eye. They were on display at that same exhibit, inside a glass case, and plenty of discussions were happening about whether or not permissions would be given to translate and edit them for the public. One night around dinner, I got to peek at a top-secret pdf of them on someone’s phone. I was so excited to see them until I realized it was all in German. I was studying German at the time, but could only read a few words.

You can imagine the joy of being able to pore over them now in English some ten years later.

Listen, if you’ve yet to sign-up but are thinking about joining us for our eight-week journey through Jung’s Black Books starting Sunday, I’d love to nudge you one more time to do so. This is going to be a special dive into Jung’s notebooks which, as editor Sonu Shamdasani writes, are “records of a unique self-experimentation that Jung called ‘his confrontation with his soul.’” 

We’ve created a private web portal for weekly recordings and community discussion between seminar sessions, and we’ve got a good group gathered. I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome ride together. This is, after all, where it all started.

"My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me… Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, the integration into life.” -C.G. Jung

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies