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Four years after the publication of The Red Book, the secondary literature is only just beginning to trickle into print. This slowness may be related to the density and complexity of Liber Novus (its editor suggested at the time of publication that the reader should spend at least a year with the text before attempting to comment on it) but perhaps relates also to the scale of the challenge which Liber Novus presents to those of us who have a vested professional or academic interest in Jung's work. It is now widely acknowledged that Liber Novus is the key to a radically revised understanding of Jung's subsequent thought and practice. Gone forever is the Freudocentric reading of Jung's place in the history of ideas. Gone, too, is the ahistorical libel of Jung's ‘psychotic breakdown’. ‘Interprefaction’, the claiming of the omniscient narrator's knowledge of Jung's state of mind, unreferenced to evidence, has been struck from the methodology. Much of the earlier academic and analytic Jungian literature invoked these now-redundant assumptions and methods, and revision of published ideas in the light of new information is not an easy process.
If a key has turned to release a new interpretative and hermeneutic stream, we also now risk being overwhelmed by newly-exposed richness in Jung's thought which can now far more clearly be read, critiqued and applied to understanding the therapeutic task. This book of reflections on Liber Novus will introduce the reader to something of the wealth of reinterpretation of Jung which has now become possible.
The proceedings of a conference held in San Francisco in 2010 are here presented as eight short essays. Careful readers will be richly rewarded for an unhurried reading of them. I shall first draw out two themes which recur independently in several of the essays as these seem to me to indicate points that are beginning to emerge in many places from the study of Liber Novus. I shall then comment briefly on each contribution in turn.
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