Sonu Shamdasani and the Red Book of C.G. Jung
For decades, one of the most talked-about books of the twentieth century was a book almost nobody had seen. It was large, bound in red leather and filled with calligraphy and painted images. It was kept in a Swiss bank vault, and Carl Jung's family guarded it closely.
Scholars knew it existed, and some had glimpsed pages, but for most readers it remained a rumor. In 2009 that changed. The book appeared in print under the title Liber Novus, "The New Book," better known as The Red Book. The historian who made it possible was Sonu Shamdasani.
A Book Kept Under Lock
Jung began the work in 1913, shortly after his painful break with Freud. In those months he allowed himself to enter his own inner images deliberately, writing down what he saw and heard and then, for years afterward, copying it with great care into a large volume in a medieval manuscript style.
He kept working on it, on and off, until about 1930. He never published it. After his death in 1961 it stayed in the family's hands, and by the 1980s it was held in a bank safe-deposit box.
Shamdasani, a historian of psychology who teaches at University College London, spent years studying Jung's papers and negotiating with the family for access. He became the general editor of the Philemon Foundation, which was created to publish Jung's unpublished writings.
He edited and introduced The Red Book and prepared its English translation with Mark Kyburz and John Peck. It was published by W. W. Norton in October 2009, and an exhibition of the original soon traveled to museums, including the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.
Reading Jung Without Myth-Making
Before this publication, Jung was usually described in two opposite ways. For his admirers, he was a nearly infallible sage, and every sentence he wrote carried a hidden wisdom. For his critics, he was a mystic whose ideas had little to do with real science. Neither picture was based on his private manuscripts.
Shamdasani's approach has been different. He places Jung in his own time: the psychiatry of Zurich, the philosophy and literature of early twentieth-century Europe, and the currents of Western esotericism that were circulating then, from Gnosticism to alchemy. Reading Jung in context, Shamdasani argues, shows a man who was running a deliberate experiment on himself and trying to understand it, not a man who was simply overwhelmed.
Philemon, Salome and the Inner Voices
The book describes encounters with figures that Jung met in his inner visions. One of the most important is Philemon, an old man with the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull, who appeared to him in a vision in 1913 and became a kind of inner teacher.
Another is Salome, accompanied by a figure who calls himself Elijah. Jung did not treat them as inventions. He listened to them, questioned them and recorded what they said.
The method has a name: active imagination. The person enters an inner image while awake, lets it move and speak, and takes part in the exchange with full attention. Jung later taught it as a tool for self-knowledge. In The Red Book, we can see how he first discovered it by practicing it.
The Nucleus Thesis
Shamdasani's best-known claim is that The Red Book was not a side project or a private crisis, but the heart of Jung's later work. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung himself wrote that the years in which he pursued his inner images were the most important of his life, and that everything else was derived from them.
Shamdasani takes this at face value. In his reading, ideas such as the archetypes, the shadow, the anima and individuation were attempts to translate the raw experiences of 1913 to 1930 into the language of science and scholarship.
It is a strong thesis, and scholars still discuss it. Some see The Red Book mostly as a literary and religious work in its own right, whose relation to Jung's science is less direct. What nobody disputes is that the publication changed the conversation.
What Changed After 2009
The book opened new paths for study. Researchers could now read Jung's inner experiments in his own words and see how his ideas grew. Shamdasani went on to edit The Black Books, the seven notebooks in which Jung first recorded his visions between 1913 and 1932, published in 2020. Together, these works show the process more completely than ever before.
They also gave readers a model. The Red Book shows that a serious inner life can be pursued with discipline, written down with care and examined critically afterward.
Reflection: A Book of Your Own
Few people will paint a volume like Jung's. Yet the practice behind it is simple: a notebook in which dreams, images and conversations with inner figures are recorded honestly, without hurry and without censorship. Over time, recurring symbols appear. A guide, a place, a color returns again and again. The question is not what these images prove, but what they ask.
Closing
Sonu Shamdasani did not invent a new Jung. He opened a door that had been shut for almost fifty years and let readers see the master at work. The red book that once slept in a vault is now an open invitation: to look honestly at what rises from the depths of the self, and to do the patient work of understanding it.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Red Book (Liber Novus): Carl Jung's Descent into Darkness and the Birth of Analytical Psychology
- Carl Jung and the Psychology of Alchemy: Transmutation of the Psyche
- Beyond the Midlife Crisis: Jung's Guide to Finding Your True Self
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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