Jung’s Red Book and the Diagnosis of the Soul

We live inside an information space. This is no longer a metaphor. Disconnect the networks, destroy the databases and the hardware that hold them, and much of modern life would grind to a halt. A loss of information would be its own kind of crisis, no less disruptive than one of food or energy. Excessive control over the exchange of information does more than degrade knowledge, education, and medicine. It narrows the space in which history, culture, and meaning can move.

A Warning in the Red Book

Writing in his Red Book between roughly 1914 and 1930, C.G. Jung sensed where such narrowing could lead. He was uneasy about the swelling role of the State, an institution that, rather than protecting order and human life, can harden into an apparatus for imposing opinion and suppressing the individual. This happens, he suggested, when politics becomes a substitute for spirituality, and personal conscience, one’s responsibility to one’s own soul, cannot withstand the collective currents of despair, distrust, and hatred.

Jung was careful. He wrote as Europe drifted toward another war, and he did not always name things directly. On the surface he appeared to be working through his own search for truth, art, and a psychotherapy that could awaken self-awareness and process inner conflict. Yet he left a series of warnings about the neglect of the soul, or, in his later terms, the collective unconscious.

His hope, put simply, was that the State would take mental health seriously, and stop quietly appealing to the lower layers of the psyche, where fear, illusion, egoism, and aggression collect, under the banner of “higher values” and “common interests.”

The Path of Individuation

As an alternative, he offered individuation: the slow work of coming to know one’s own depths by integrating the soul’s opposing tendencies, good and evil, love and hate, belonging and isolation, creation and destruction. He documented his own version of that work through dreams, visions, and dialogues with the figures he met inside himself.

The Soul as Something Real

Because the Red Book was not published until 2009, most readers still know Jung mainly through his later writing on the collective unconscious and archetypes. To me, the deeper claim running through all of it is that the soul is real. I think of it, as Plato did, as an individual entity that links us to a larger store of meaning, whether we call it the Logos, the Noosphere, or simply Being. I hold this as a conviction, not a proof, and I would not press a formula from physics into service as evidence for it.

Many people have felt what Jung called synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence with no ordinary cause, an improbable thought that surfaces and then, somehow, meets us in the world. Experiences like these can shift not only how a person sees their life but the direction of it.

It is here that my own work begins. In my practice I read these currents in the soul as ontological tendencies, a lens I have found useful for understanding psychological difficulty, including the kind bound up with a person’s whole worldview. I am exploring that lens across several articles for this magazine.

What Jung Knew, and What He Kept Quiet

Was Jung aware of this dimension? He was. In the Red Book (Liber Primus, “Soul and God”) he writes openly of his conversations with his soul, the “spirit of the depths.” In his published work he was more guarded, reaching for the language of Self, Ego, archetype, and complex. We can be grateful even for that.

Unlike Freud, Jung avoided the word “tendencies.” To use it, he would have had to explain where they come from, how many there are, and how they differ. He kept to an objective, experimental stance and rarely spoke of his faith. Only late in life, in a 1959 BBC interview, when asked whether he believed in God, did he answer: “I don’t need to believe. I know.” There is also a well-known account of Jung declining to treat a case of alcoholism through his method alone, on the grounds that what the man needed was closer to a spiritual awakening than a theory.

Jung’s life held stranger chapters too. During the Second World War he worked quietly for Allen Dulles and the American OSS in Switzerland, appearing in Dulles’s dispatches under the code name “Agent 488,” a detail carried mostly by later biographers rather than the official record.

The Diagnosis Ahead

Even now, most of us look for the meaning of life not in individuation but in comfort, recognition, and wealth. States are content to encourage that appetite. The result tends to be the same: any model of society built on endless accumulation carries its own suffering and injustice with it. The dominance of a few tendencies in the human soul has never produced harmony in the whole.

So what becomes of our mental health? We have few clinicians left like Jung, able to read the state of a soul in a patient’s drawings and to work with what is conscious and unconscious in it alike. I hope they appear again.