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The publication of Jung's Black Books in October 2020 was a unique milestone in the history of analytical psychology. The Black Books provide the source material of Jung's Red Book (also known as Liber Novus, itself only published in ), and are the foundation of all subsequent concepts, techniques, and theoretical formulations of analytical psychology. They consist of seven diary notebooks where, in 981 pages, Jung records a series of active imaginations and visionary events that he experienced across 19 years, from November 1913 to December 1932. These experiences reflect his personal transformation which began with a conscious decision to depart from the hard scientific aims of psychiatry to which he had committed up to that point, and an immersion into a new, non-measurable and non-rational world, the world of soul. In his diary entry of 30 December 1913, he writes:
All kinds of things lead me far away from my scientific endeavour, which I thought I had subscribed to firmly. I wanted to serve humanity through it, and now, my soul, you lead me to these new things. Yes, it is the in- between world, the pathless, the manifold-dazzling … a new world, which had been alien to me previously. [T]he soul … knows her own way better, and … no intention can prescribe her a better one. I feel that a large chunk of science has been broken off … I find the thought that this must occur … agonizing … But my soul demands this achievement (Black Book 3, p. 99).
What follows is Jung's exploration of the imaginal realm as a separate, independent and infinite inner reality, vast as any outer reality. His entire opus from 1916 and until the end of his life was an attempt to interpret those experiences in conceptual language, and to attest to the reality of the soul. There is no technical terminology to be found in the Black Books, no terms which are familiar to Jungians today such as ‘unconscious’, ‘archetype’, ‘anima’ or ‘shadow’. Rather, we find the raw visionary experiences which unde