A Fresh Look at The Red Book: Reading the Liber Novus with Jungian Psychoanalysts

Description

The Red Book, and more recently The Black Books, have led to reimagining Jung’s seminal concepts such as the Collective Unconscious, the Archetype, Individuation, and the Self. In this seminar we invite you to read The Red Book along with us and join in a series of six 3-hour salons in which we discuss and imagine our way into the space that became Jung’s The Red Book.

A leading Jungian Psychoanalyst guest will join Daniel Ross and Boris Matthews in each of the six salons.  The first guest will be George Bright, a psychoanalyst from the United Kingdom. Echoing a student in his seminars on The Red Book, George Bright describes this work as “psychoactive material.” George Bright has been researching what he calls Jung’s more “esoteric” writings (The Red Book and Jung’s journals known as The Black Books) with a fresh look at his more “exoteric” writings (The Collected Works).

As Jung said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, what he experienced and recorded in his journals, The Black Books, provided more than enough material for a life-time of work. Together, The Red Book, The Black Books, and the Collected Works constitute immediate experience and conscious, scholarly reflection over many decades.

As I (Daniel Ross) immersed myself in Jung’s Red Book, especially the first part, the “Liber Novus,” I came to realize that Bright’s perspective agrees with Sonu Shamdasani’s view that the decades-long “Freudocentric perspective” of Jung is no longer valid. Bright discovered that writing his 1912 Psychology of the Unconscious (translated by Beatrice Hinkel) was for Jung an act of hubris. In the “Liber Primus,” the first part of the Liber Novus, Jung calls for his soul: “My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?” By applying the scientific attitude to religion, an act of hubris, Jung had lost his soul: “I had judged her and turned her [my soul] into a scientific object.”

Over the years reading Jung, I (Boris Matthews) have more and more appreciated two of Jung’s early, foundational (circa 1916) statements. In the one, Jung emphasizes the necessity of adapting both to the world in which we exist–“outer adaptation”–and to what we essentially are–“inner adaptation”(CW 18, paras. 1084ff). In the second statement, Jung stresses the importance of following one’s own “life line,” i.e. the flow of one’s psychic energy (CW 7, paras. 500ff).

This salon will be online and live so that participants will be able to converse with the analysts and with each other.  Anyone—lay or professional—interested in learning more about The Red Book and how it can be used personally and clinically is invited.

George Bright will inaugurate our series as our first guest beginning Saturday, January 27, from 9:00am to 12 noon CST.  The remaining salons will take place monthly.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the series, attendees will be able to:

1. Discuss the origins of The Red Book from Jung’s life and lived experience rather than from the Freudocentric historical context in which it emerged.
2. Verbalize an understanding of George Bright’s belief that The Red Book came partially as a response to Jung’s hubristic use of science to understand the soul and the “loss of soul” that resulted.
3. Experience the “psychoactive” nature of The Red Book and its transformative potential in reading it.

Required Reading

Each salon will focus on a section of The Red Book as outlined in our course description. We expect that you have and will be reading the Red Book along with us. The first salon on January 27th will be an introduction to The Red Book and will require you read Sonu Shamdasani’s Introduction of the Reader’s edition of The Red Book. The facsimile which includes the paintings is more expensive but not necessary for our discussion. 

• Link to purchase The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition: https://amzn.to/4aPQZlX

Speakers

Daniel Ross, PMHNP is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner and Diplomate Jungian Analyst. He brings a medical, psychiatric, and analytical perspective to the field of end-of-life care. As he searched for a deeper understanding of his hospice work and his own personal life journey, he first completed the two-year Clinical Training Program at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago in 2008; then went on to complete the Analyst Training Program. Daniel is in private practice in the northwest suburbs working with adults seeking Jungian psychoanalysis. He has been Co-Director of the Jungian Psychotherapy Program and Jungian Studies Program (JPP/JSP) (2021-2023) at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago and is currently the Director of Training as well as a Training Analyst for the Analyst Training Program (ATP) at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He has presented widely on Death and Dying from a Jungian perspective. He has also presented at 2022 IAAP conference, Death and Immortality: From Gilgamesh to Frankenstein.

Boris Matthews, PhD, LCSW, NCPsyA graduated from the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, and maintains a practice of analytical psychology in the Milwaukee and Madison, WI, areas. He is particularly interested in working with persons who recognize need to develop a balanced adaptation to the “outside” and to the “inside” worlds, work that involves awareness of the individual’s psychological typology. Dreams, active imagination, and spiritual concerns are integral elements in the analytic work, the ultimate goal of which is to develop a functioning dialog with the non-ego center, the Self. He is former Director of Training of the Analyst Training Program, regularly teaches classes for analytic candidates, and conducts study groups in Madison as well as by video conference.

Guest Jungian Analysts

George Bright was educated at Cambridge University and The London School of Economics. He is a Training & Supervising Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and a co-founder of The Circle of Analytical Psychology, a London-based group engaged in the study of Jung’s Liber Novus and Black Books. He works in private practice in London. His 1997 paper Synchronicity as a basis of analytic attitude won the Michael Fordham Prize.

Ashok Bedi, MD is a Diplomat Jungian psychoanalyst and a board certified psychiatrist, a member of the Royal College of psychiatrists of Great Britain, a diplomat in Psychological Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of England, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at the medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, a faculty member at the Analyst Training Program at the Carl G. Jung Institute of Chicago and a Psychiatrist at the aurora Psychiatric Hospital and the Aurora Health Care Network. He has been a psychiatric consultant to several agencies in Metro Milwaukee. Presently he is the consultant for the Sexual Assault treatment center at the Aurora Sinai Samaritan Hospital, The Residential Recovery Program at the Dewey Center at the Aurora Psychiatric Hospital and the Pastoral Counseling Service of Greater Milwaukee.

Trained in India, Great Britain and the US, he is interested in the emerging frontiers of spirituality and Healing and the synapses of the Mind, Body, Soul and spirit. He is author of the book, Path to the Soul, Weiser Books, 2000, Awaken the Slumbering Goddess: The Latent Code of the Hindu Goddess Archetypes, Booksurge Publishers, 2007, and the coauthor of Retire your Family Karma, Nicholas-Hays, Inc. 2003. His activities can be previewed at his website www.pathtothesoul.com

Dr. Bedi has been in practice in Milwaukee for over thirty years and specializes in Adult Psychotherapy and Jungian Psychoanalysis. He regularly presents lectures and seminars in India, Great Britain, Ireland and USA on the topic of the Spiritual and analytic dimensions of treatment, healing and personal growth. Over the last several years, he has been the International Association of Analytical Psychologist’s liaison person for developing Jungian training programs in India and travels annually to India to teach, train the consult with the Jungian Developing groups at several centers in India including Ahmedabad &, Bangalore. He leads the annual “In the Footsteps of Carl Jung in India” study group to several centers in India under the auspices of the New York Jung Foundation.

Patricia Vesey-McGrew, MA, NCPsyA is a diplomate Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Cambridge and Rockport,
MA.  She is a supervising and training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston, where she is a past president and a faculty member. Additionally, she is Deputy Editor (US) for The Journal of Analytical Psychology, a member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology, a member of the Council on Accreditation of ABAP, and a past member of the NAAP Board of Directors. She has presented papers and workshops internationally on such topics as The Dead Mother and The Power of Dreams. Her most recent publication is “Getting on Top of Thought and Behavior Patterns” in Jungian Psychoanalysis, Volume Three.

Other Guests will be listed as they are secured.