Caramoor Conversations:
The Red Book

Carl Jung, in full Carl Gustav Jung, (born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht), Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of people according to attitude types: extraverted (outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any given person. Results of this study were embodied in Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923). Jung’s wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it also had been in The Psychology of the Unconscious.

Jung devoted the rest of his life to developing his ideas, especially those on the relation between psychology and religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts of writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on Jung’s own dreams and fantasies but also on those of his patients; he thought it necessary for the successful practice of their art that psychotherapists become familiar with writings of the old masters.

His historical studies aided him in pioneering the psychotherapy of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those who felt their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to appreciate the place of their lives in the sequence of history. Most of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed in dream and imagination they would become more complete personalities. He called this process individuation.

In 2009 a manuscript that Jung wrote during the years 1914–30 was published in the original German with English translation as The Red Book = Liber Novus. It was, by Jung’s own description, a record of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” The work contains an account of his imaginings, fantasies, and induced hallucinations and his own colour illustrations.

Paola Prestini

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Composer Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that chart her interest in extra-musical themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Opera, among others. She created the largest communal VR opera with The Hubble Cantata, was part of the New York Philharmonic’s legendary Project 19 initiative, and has written and produced large scale projects like the eco-documentary The Colorado narrated by Mark Rylance (premiered and commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston Da Camera Series) and the lauded opera theater work Aging Magician (premiered and commissioned by the Walker Arts Center and the Krannert Center, with performances at ASU, the New Victory Theater and San Diego Opera). Prestini is known for her genre- and glass ceiling-breaking roles, including being the first woman in the New Works Initiative with her grand opera Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera), and bringing artificial intelligence and disability visibility/impact together in the chamber opera Sensorium Ex (Atlanta Opera and Beth Morrison Projects for the Prototype Festival). Her upcoming works include piano concertos for Awadagin Pratt and A Far Cry, and Lara Downes with the Louisville Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, and The Ravinia Festival. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn based arts institution and incubator, National Sawdust, and as part of her commitment to the next generation and equity, she started the Hildegard Competition for emerging female, trans, and non-binary composers and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers with The Juilliard School. She was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Fellow, has been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and MASS MoCA, and was a graduate of the Juilliard School.

Sonu Shamdasani

Sonu Shamdasani (born 1962) is a London-based author, editor, and professor at University College London. His research and writings focus on Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and cover the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times. Shamdasani edited the first publication of Jung’s major work: Liber Novus, The Red Book. Although its title had been well known for years, it was not until 2009 that its contents were revealed to the public and practicing psychotherapists