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‘I have told you a very great deal, but do not assume that I have told you all!‘
So Jung ended his fourth lecture to the 1925 Seminar on Analytical Psychology (2012), the only published instance of his explicit public presentation of Red Book (2009) material. Jung's Black Books, now published for the first time, comprise the six notebooks in which he made the contemporaneous record of his visionary experiences and active imaginations between 1913 and 1932. Much of the material in Black Books 2-6 is familiar as ‘Layer One’ of Liber Novus. The latter half of Black Book 6 and Book 7 contain active imaginations from mid-1916 to 1932 in which Jung's dialogue with his soul continues, some familiar interlocutors return and new figures are introduced. With the entry of this material into the public arena we are much closer to having been told ‘all’ than were the 33 participants in what was effectively a CPD event for English-speaking analysts given by Jung in Zürich in 1925.
It helps, in any critical reading of Jung, to bear in mind the audience he was addressing. When he writes for the general public, as in most of the Collected Works material, we hear Jung's exoteric voice. His language is in the register of scientific medical psychology as that was understood at the time he was writing. His frequent claims to being an empiricist are backed up, but not by the primary empirical data of his private visionary experiences. Rather, he presents analogous material gathered from patients or, more usually, from his extensive multi-disciplinary research in subjects such as comparative religion, comparative mythology, ethnology, alchemy, sinology and indology. When addressing other analytical psychologists the register changes. In the period covered by the Black Books, and particularly from 1916 onwards, Jung presented a number of papers to the newly-formed Union for Analytical Psychology in Zürich, the group of 20 or so analysts who had resigned with him from the International Psycho