The Red Book, by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, W. W. Norton, New York, 2009,  416 pp.

After many years of internecine warfare within psychoanalysis and psychodynamics, viewpoints previously ignored or set aside are now available for integration into the larger body of thinking about the psyche. Carl Jung's work is a case in point.

For Jung, psychic reality is not external, measurable reality—the psyche is defined by “immediate reality as we experience it” (Singer, 1973, p. xxix), as opposed to an external reality that is constantly changed by our own subjective interpretation of it. This ontological position was central to what Jung called analytical psychology. To Jung, the psyche includes the subjective “take” of an individual on what he or she experiences, in which the psyche itself adds its own elements to what is perceived. For Jung, the psyche is defined by and functions through phenomenological (first-person experience) events that can be studied scientifically. In this view, Jung was firmly in the tradition of William James.

The Red Book has only recently been allowed publication by Jung's family. It has already been reviewed in our journal by Thomas Kirsch, M.D. (Vol. 40, No. 2). That review is an excellent summary of the context in which the book was written, together with its content. Kirsch also affirms that this content, which amounts to a personal journal, provides the “raw material from which Jung developed most of his mature writings” (Kirsch, 2012, p. 353). This needs elaboration.

This present review of the Red Book is intended to be adjunctive to other reviews, by focusing on its significance for evolving psychodynamic theory, using detail from its content and background only inasmuch as to further that purpose. As for the specific fantasy material involved, refer to the Red Book itself as well as to the Kirsch review.

Some background is a necessary prerequisite for addressing psychodynamic significance. Beginning around 1914 after he and Freud severed their relationship, Jung went t