My mother gifted me a copy of Jung’s Red Book in the winter of 2009, shortly after it was first published. I spent the following weeks on my bed crouched over the enormous volume, enthralled. (The original folio version is too big to comfortably read at a table.) Though it’s cryptic and novelesque, this massive book contains the foundation of Jung’s entire psychology, and I felt the magic of that as I began to pore over the sentences. This was where it all began. As Jung wrote, “Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, the integration into life.”
Since those early days, The Red Book has been as precious to me as I anticipated it would be.
2010: A blurry photo of me at The Red Book museum exhibit opening in Zurich
Within months of that first encounter, I had the opportunity to join the small staff of The Philemon Foundation, which edited and published The Red Book. Within a year, I traveled with them to Zurich to assist in the opening of The Red Book exhibit at the Reitberg Museum. I spent an extraordinary week in Switzerland, with a private tour of Jung’s home and the chance to sit at his desk, along with many hours spent at dinners with the Jung family and the scholars surrounding his work.
Since that time, this wonderous, cryptic book has continued to enhance my life with its mystery and brilliance. I’ve written about it a great deal, named an institute after its main female character (Salome!), and led many reading groups on its stories. I’ve also delivered lectures on its meaning, co-created a podcast all about it, and quoted it at the opening of my own book, Quarterlife:
2023: My book Quarterlife and Jung’s Red Book both Staff Picks at Powell’s in downtown Portland, OR.
“What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”
The Red Book is all about the mystery of individuation, of following your own singular journey through life. It is not, in my mind, a story just of midlife or of a man in midlife. It’s a human story, and a deeply courageous journey into madness, grief, and emptiness, and back out again, through the support of the feminine and the living psyche.
I’m excited to dive into its pages again soon with a new seminar in which we will read The Red Book together, along with the weaving-in of some of the (even more foundational) material from Jung’s original notebooks, The Black Books. This new eight-part seminar kicks off on March 17th! I’ll be sending out reading assignments and opening up the online seminar page soon. Of course, I would love to have you with us, if you’re not already registered.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies