red flags

With busyness a wide-spread epidemic in our world, making time and putting value on dreaming is a conscious rebellious act. There isn’t much in Western-influenced culture that prioritizes dreamwork and dream states.

Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber Novus

Dreams are generally seen as mere flotsam and jetsam of our brain synapses. Especially in westernized culture, where we grow up surrounded by many levels of invalidation that denigrate and devalue dreams.

A world-renowned, founding figure in analytical psychology, and one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant thinkers, Carl Gustav Jung imbued as much inspiration, passion, and precision in what he made as in what he wrote.

C. G. Jung’s The Red Book

Though it spanned his entire lifetime and included painting, drawing, and sculpture, Jung’s practice of visual art was a talent that Jung himself consistently downplayed out of a stated desire never to claim the title “artist.”

The long-awaited and landmark publication in 2009 of C.G. Jung’s The Red Book revealed an astonishing visual dimension of a man so influential in the realm of thought and words, as it integrated stunning symbolic images.

The Incantations, 54 & 55

It is an exploration of thinking in images in therapeutic work and the development of the method of active imagination. The remarkable depictions that burst forth from the pages of this calligraphic volume remained largely unrecognized and unexplored until publication.

The Rubin Museum held an unprecedented exhibition to mark the first public presentation of the preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung’s (1875-1961) famous Red Book at the end of 2009. 

Illumination Pages 135 & 119 

During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. 

Jung’s vision and theories are artistic at their essence, and – although he refused to think of himself as an “artist” – he knew it. Liber Novus has been exhibited in museums and was featured as the nucleus of “Encyclopedic Palace,” the survey of visionary art in the 2013 Venice Biennale. 

C.G. Jung's mandalas & crosses

We now see that Jung was every bit the artist the Medieval monk or Persian courtier was. His art  dedicated to humanity and all that makes up the human being.