Lecture 1

From Experiment to Method: Jung’s Active Imagination in the Context of his Red Book

Punita Miranda (Universiteit Amsterdam)

For Punita Miranda The Red Book from the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is of great importance in the history of psychiatry. The Red Book published in 2009, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, is the literary document of Jung’s inner development. Jung’s ‘journey into the unconscious’ became the great mainspring from which his psychological system originated. With its poetic language and paintings, The Red Book represents Jung’s most personal attempt to bring together verbal and non-verbal expressions of what he called ‘Active Imagination’ – a type of dramatized thinking where he was the subject and the object of his experiences. In becoming both the active and suffering protagonist of an inner drama, Jung attempted on one hand to release the pressure of the unconscious material in a visionary dimension, but on the other, as a pioneer, he was discovering what was to become one of depth psychology’s most important empirical tools for investigating unconscious psychic process.
In her lecture Punita Miranda proposes to explore Jung’s technique for inducing spontaneous fantasies, with examples from his Red Book to illustrate how this can be used today as a tool for personal growth in therapy.
Punita Miranda is currently in the last year of a Research MA at the University of Amsterdam where she is studying Jung and his Red Book.

Lecture 2

Mandala Dynamics

Inger van Lamoen-Dommisse

In C.G. Jung’s Red Book, pictures of mandalas form a series of drawings, which are more or less loose from the text. This series of drawings, pages 79 – 97 from Liber Secundus, are unique and provide an insightful view of the individuation process.
Inger van Lamoen uses a power point presentation, with the images, to give an interpretation of the process that tentatively lies hidden behind these pictures. Importantly, the mandalas are not viewed only as single expressions, but the process of change being expressed through the series is followed. The explored process exhibits similarities with the biological development of man, which in turn reflects the individuation process.

Inger van Lamoen is family physician and Jungian Analyst (IAAP, NAAP). In her publication, Prentenboek van de Geest, Beeldtaal in Psychotherapie (Picturebook of the Soul, talking-images in psychotherapy), she has shown how the inner image can be brought to ‘speak’ in a Jungian therapy.

Lecture 3

Has publication of Jung’s Red Book advanced understanding of synchronicity?

Roderick Main (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies University of Essex, UK)

In this talk Dr Main considers whether publication of Jung’s Red Book has advanced understanding of synchronicity. He focuses on three aspects: first, Jung’s synchronistic events associated with The Red Book; second, some of Jung’s main preoccupations in The Red Book that later became central to his theorizing of synchronicity, such as meaning and the limitations of contemporary science and rationality; and, third, the significance, both in The Red Book and in Jung’s writings on synchronicity, of paganism and Western esotericism. Main assesses the impact of the publication of The Red Book both on his own understanding of synchronicity and on publications about synchronicity by others.

Roderick Main is Professor in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, UK. He is the author of The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (2004) and Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (2007), the editor of Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (1997), and the co-editor of Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013). He is currently leading a two-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project titled ‘“One world”: logical and ethical implications of holism’, which involves a comparison of concepts of the whole in the works of C. G. Jung and Gilles Deleuze.