The Red Book Hours ― Discovering C.g. Jung's Art Mediums and Creative Process

In 1913, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) experienced powerful visions, often terrifying. However, seeing their great potential value, he found ways to encourage further visions and fantasies. Over many years, he recorded his experiences in a series of small journals, added commentaries and transcribed them, using calligraphy and illuminations, into a large, red, leather-bound volume, commonly known as The Red Book. Jung never published the Liber Novus, as he called this pivotal part of his oeuvre, and left no instructions for its final disposition, and it therefore remained unpublished until recently.

The Red Book Hours complements the facsimile edition and English-language translation of The Red Book, published in 2009, and draws out insights into Jung’s affinity with art as a means of personal insight. Psychologist and multimedia artist Jill Mellick documents copious research into Jung’s choices regarding media and technique and his careful design of environments in which he could experience creative processes and allow unconscious content to flow forth. Her unlikely journey includes explorations of memory, serendipity, and science. A stunning interplay of texts and images includes magnifications of the wildly colorful and intricately detailed sketches from The Red Book and a selection of Jung’s own pigments, never seen until now, The Red Book Hours presents a more comprehensive picture than ever before of the foundational psychoanalyst’s experience and expression of his rich inner world.

Jill Mellick, PhD, professor emerita, is a clinical psychologist, researcher, nonfiction and fiction author, and multimedia artist. She has been in private practice as a Jungian psychotherapist and expressive arts therapist in Palo Alto since 1984.