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Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung's Red Book, published on August 26, 2013, is aptly titled in several ways. The book comprises a series of conversations between James Hillman , Director of Studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich from 1959 to 1969 and founder of the post-Jungian analytical school of archetypal psychology, and Sonu Shamdasani, Professor of Medical History at University College London and cofounder of the Philemon Foundation. Shamdasani labored for many years to edit the notebooks that make up the Red Book, having succeeded, in a three-year negotiation with Jung's heirs (who had kept the writings in a vault after his death), in obtaining their approval to publish them. He convinced the family that portions of the texts were accessible in the public domain and that it would be better were the entire work released in its best possible form.
The Red Book was written by Jung during a sixteen-year period after undergoing a psychological crisis at the age of thirty-eight. Jung worked on the notebooks, as well as the series of paintings and calligraphic renderings of figures in the text that are part of the work, from 1914 until 1930 (he would return to it later in life without completing the project). Hillman and Shamdasani's title suggests not only that an important part of the Red Book's narrative journey takes place among the dead, but also that the dead, still with us in their unfulfilled need to be heard, are largely ignored and that their voice is therefore plaintive. The title expresses even more so Hillman's and Shamdasani's conviction that the importance of the Red Book is to revise the way Jung's legacy to psychology is understood; if heeded, they believe, the book might alter the course of psychology. Finally, the title refers to the need to transform the understanding of Jung's idea of the archetype in light of the nature of the voice of the dead as they speak and act through us in unconscious ways (see Hoffman 2010).
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