Liber Novus (The Red Book)

Liber Novus, known as The Red Book, is the private record of C. G. Jung's self-experiment during the years around the First World War, when he deliberately descended into his own unconscious and transcribed the visions, dialogues, and figures he encountered there.

Confronting inner personalities such as Philemon, Jung developed the method he would later call active imagination and gathered the raw material for his mature theories of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation. The work is at once a visionary manuscript, illuminated in his own hand, and the laboratory notebook of a psychology.

Withheld from publication until 2009, it revealed the mythic and experiential root beneath Jung's later science — the encounter with the psyche's autonomous depths from which his entire system grew.