March 16, 2023

In this wonderful 2009 NPR piece about the initial publication of The Red Book, editor Sonu Shamdasani says this:

“The overall narrative of the book is how Jung recovers his soul, [and] recovers meaning in his life through enabling the rebirth of the image of God in his soul.”

What is very often forgotten and lost in the further scholarship about this core work, however, is that Jung’s soul was feminine and that Jung also seriously considered the possibility that God is female.

“Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God? Is God a child, a maiden?”

-C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Unfortunately, the culture-wide amnesia from which Jung was trying to heal as he re-discovered his long-suffering soul still afflicts most of the scholars who write and lecture on The Red Book today.

Over and over, they miss, I dare say, the whole point.

The Red Book is the chronicle of a wealthy, successful, heterosexual man at the top of his career who is in the throes of a massive inner crisis and wrestling with the necessity to acknowledge his soul and feminine self as real and worthy of attention.

“I thought and spoke much of my soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. …

[T]he spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.”

-C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Given our age-old cultural reference points, it seems so much easier to understand Philemon in Jung’s Red Book, a gray-haired wizened old man who conveys riddled wisdom to Jung. It’s certainly far easier to understand this than follow Jung through his own detox and transformation to face the possibility that the life-giving force within him is a blind, neglected young “maiden” whom Jung initially mistook (due to thousands of years of misunderstanding) as a dangerous, salacious seductress to be avoided like the Devil.

Yet this feminine soul whom he over and over struggled to accept because of her youth, her sexuality, and her “banality” was the antidote to his crisis.

It was Jung’s understanding of this that transformed his life and then created the groundwork for his psychology so that we all might be able to follow what he learned. It’s so important then, that we do our best to make sense of this source work and not abandon its magic to the secondary interpretations of others!

But don’t take my word for it. Please join me to explore this extraordinary work page-by-strange-page in a new seminar starting tomorrow.

xo, Satya

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