Jung’s Red Book & Black Books
eight sessions
with Satya Doyle Byock
Fridays, March 17 - May 5, 2023
9 - 11am PDT | 12 - 2pm EDT
All seminars are hosted online. Recordings are provided to all registrants.
“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?”
In 2009, nearly fifty years after Jung’s death, his magnum opus was published in a stunning facsimile edition, a large red tome with dramatic paintings and visions inscribed in calligraphy. It is a modern illuminated manuscript whose story began shortly before the outbreak of WWI. It was not until 2021 that the six books of raw material that underlay the more polished red leather-bound volume were then also published. In total, these books capture Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” which began when he was thirty-eight years old. The extraordinary stories that they contain convey Jung’s personal experience with the living psyche and the genesis of his entire original psychology.
“The loving light was annihilated, and blood began to pour out. This was the great war. But the spirit of the depths wants this struggle to be understood as a conflict in every man’s own nature.”
In this eight-part seminar, we’ll read through the first two parts of The Red Book and weave-in readings from The Black Books as we explore the foundations of Jung’s groundbreaking concepts, including individuation, the anima and animus, the shadow, the Self, the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious, and more. We’ll see his thinking around the feminine and the masculine and the necessity of inner balance emerge, evolve, and then regress. While The Red Book can be a challenging and dense read, it is a riveting doorway to the rest of Jung’s works and an opportunity to read later writings with a more informed eye. It’s a wonderful book to read with others, discuss, and hear read aloud.
“The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth.”
Readings: You’ll want a copy of The Red Book reader’s edition to follow along with readings, though it’s not necessary to own the larger facsimile edition or The Black Books. And while we’ll explore some of Jung’s incredible paintings, the paintings themselves do not correlate clearly to the text (as is clarified with the text of The Black Books) and will not be the focus of our seminar. No matter your background in Jung’s work, this seminar will invite your curiosity and deepened understanding of his psychology.
“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. …My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung
Recordings: All sessions will be recorded and provided to registrants with 24 hours of the live gathering.
Cost: Non-Subscriber $295 / Community Subscriber $207 (30% discount)*
*To receive this discount, please first purchase the subscription package and you’ll receive a discount code in your email for additional registrations.
About Satya Doyle Byock, MA, LPC
Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon, the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022), and the founding director of The Salome Institute. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, and The Times of London, and her writing has been published in Literary Hub, Psychological Perspectives, The Utne Reader, Goop, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and elsewhere. Satya has lectured at Jung groups in the US and UK, and has been interviewed for her work on a number of podcasts. She has twenty years of practice with The I Ching and dreamwork.
Satya received a first edition of The Red Book for Christmas in 2009 and read it then for the first time. Shortly thereafter she went on to work for The Philemon Foundation, the organization responsible for the publication of The Red Book and Black Books. As one of two staff members, she had the opportunity to travel to Zurich to help with the opening of the Rietberg exhibit of The Red Book in 2010 and to work with the editors of Jung’s unpublished works. She has since led courses in reading The Red Book half-a-dozen times, inviting people who are both familiar and unfamiliar with Jung’s work to explore this profound work and explore the parallels to their individual lives and the modern world. She is the co-host of Carl Jung’s Red Book Podcast.
Register:
Scholarships & Discounts: It is important to us that this material be accessible. If finances would prevent you from joining us, please send an email with a short note. We would love for you to be able to join.
Readings: All students are strongly encouraged to purchase a copy of The Red Book, Reader’s Edition. Weekly chapters will be shared in advance with those who are registered. It is not necessary to have a copy of The Black Books or the folio edition of The Red Book.
CEU: Participants can earn 16 CEs — Continued Education Credit hours — for this seminar. Please review this page on Continued Education Credits.
Recordings: Same-day recordings will be provided. Recordings will expire to protect confidentiality.
Subscribers: To receive a 30% subscriber discount, please first purchase the subscription package and you’ll receive a discount code in your email for additional registrations.