The Red Book is C.G. Jung’s record of a period of deep penetration into his unconscious mind in a process that he called ‘active imagination’, undertaken during his mid-life period. Answer to Jung: Making Sense of ‘The Red Book’ provides a close reading of this magnificent yet perplexing text and its fascinating images, and demonstrates that the fantasies in The Red Book are not entirely original, but that their plots, characters and symbolism are remarkably similar to some of the higher degree rituals of Continental Freemasonry. It argues that the fantasies may be memories of a series of terrifying initiatory ordeals, possibly undergone in childhood, using altered or spurious versions of these Masonic rites. It then compares these initiatory scenarios with accounts of ritual trauma that have been reported since the 1980s. This is the first full-length study of The Red Book to focus on the fantasies themselves and provide such an external explanation for them. Sonu Shamdasani describes The Red Book as an incomplete task that Jung left to posterity as a ‘message in a bottle’ that would someday come ashore. Answer to Jung brings its message to shore, providing a coherent, but disturbing, interpretation of each of the fantasies and their accompanying images. Chapters: Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Answer to Jung is the first full-length study of The Red Book to focus on the fantasies themselves. It provides a clear explanation for the traumatic aspects of The Red Book, that is, the accounts of suffering, cruelty, confusion and terror in the text, and points to an external source for these fantasies.

Considered one of Jung's most controversial works, Answer to Job also stands as Jung's most extensive commentary on a biblical text. Here, he confronts the story of the man who challenged God, the man who experienced hell on earth and still did not reject his faith. Job's journey parallels Jung's own experience--as reported in The Red Book: Liber Novus--of descending into the depths of his own unconscious, confronting and reconciling the rejected aspects of his soul. This paperback edition of Jung's classic work includes a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at University College London. Described by Shamdasani as "the theology behind The Red Book," Answer to Job examines the symbolic role that theological concepts play in an individual's psychic life.

Greeted with controversy on its publication, Answer to Job has long been neglected by many serious commentators on Jung. This book offers an intellectual and cultural context for C.G.Jung's 1952 publication. In Jung's Answer to Job: A Commentary, the author argues that such neglect is due to a failure to understand Jung's objectives in this text and offers a new way of reading the work. The book places Answer to Job in the context of biblical commentary, and then examines the circumstances surrounding its compositions and immediate reception. A detailed commentary on the work discusses the major methodological presuppositions informing it and explains how key Jungian concepts operate in the text. Jung's Answer to Job: A Commentary unravels Jung's narrative by reading it in the chronological order of the biblical events it analyses and the book to which it refers, offering a comprehensive re-reading of Jung's text. An original argument put across in a scholarly and accessible style provides an essential framework for understanding the work. Whilst taking account of the tenets of analytical psychology, this commentary underlines Answer to Job's more general significance in terms of cultural history. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of analytical psychology, the history of ideas, intercultural studies, comparative literature, religion and religious studies.

Explores the religious symbolism present throughout the Bible as it reflects the nature, needs, and processes of the human consciousness

Well-known for his articulation of the "shadow side" of human individuality and culture, C. G. Jung wrote a great deal about the question of evil throughout his life and in scattered places in his work. In this book his position is pieced together from many sources. In his early work on the unconscious, for instance, he considered the role of evil in the mental processes of the severely disturbed. Later, he viewed the question of moral choice within the framework of his ideas about archetypes and discussions about moral choices, conscience, and the continual ethical reflection that is necessary for all of us. The material here includes letters to Freud and Father Victor White and selections from his writings ranging from his Answer to Job to his travel piece on North Africa.