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The publication in October 2009 of Jung's Red Book, so-called after the colour of the binding of Liber Novus, has attracted attention from the analytical world, members of the public and the media. An article by the analytical psychologist and academic, Christopher Hauke, ‘Keeping secrets (and deciding what can be told). Individuation, power and the Red Book’, ‘takes as its focus the tension between the importance of keeping secrets and the needs of an information-hungry public. Hauke's theme is topical, coinciding as it does with the opening of the Leveson Inquiry hearings in November 2011. In effect, these amount to putting British popular journalism on trial, in the course of which, one of the journalists on the stand declared that he had hugely enjoyed snooping into people's secret lives for twenty years as he ‘never found anybody doing any good’ and that ‘privacy was for paedos’ (Financial Times 2012, p. 1).
Hauke's article sets out the case for Jung and the Society of Heirs keeping secret the Red Book as a ‘powerful achievement and act of the self’ that serves to preserve ‘individual uniqueness against pressures arising from conventional beliefs and prejudicial behaviours of the majority’ (p. 167). This view may offer insight into why, during the course of the Leveson Inquiry, politicians, entertainers, and others in the public eye have expressed feelings of outrage at having their secret lives invaded by phone-hacking tabloid journalists. It may also shed light on the flurry of excitement that followed the publication of the esoteric contents revealed in The Red Book which may, in part, have been driven by voyeurism, and perhaps explains why the article does not use direct quotes from them. Instead, it features extracts from the Preface to Liber Novus contributed by Jung's grandson, Ulrich Hoerni, and the informative Introduction by the book's editor and co-translator, Sonu Shamdasani.
Passages from Memories, Dreams, Reflections are included to illustrate the p