Dedicated to the Soul

The title of this review is a deliberate reflection of the famous Red Book (and Black Books) of C.G. Jung – also to evoke the extraordinary significance of this publication in allowing the true voice of Emma Jung (1882-1955) to be heard for the first time. Joseph Cambray writes that she can ‘now be more fully appreciated as a profound scholar – analyst – visionary in her own right as well as an essential dialogue partner with C.G. Jung.’ Likewise, Sonu Shamdasani, editor of the Red Book, writes that the volume helps her regain her rightful place as the central figure in C.G. Jung’s life, ‘an essential collaborator in the making of analytical psychology and a fervent explorer of the soul’s mysteries in her own right.’ The sensitively edited volume brings together previously unpublished materials from the Jung private archive, featuring informative introductory essays, lectures, journal entries, poems, a verse play, dreams and fantasies with her commentaries, her own illustrated cosmology and, even more strikingly, her paintings – the Red Book contains many of Jung’s symbolic paintings as links between the ordinary world of consciousness and the archetypal or transpersonal world. The book is illustrated with many archive photographs, including two striking portraits by Erica Anderson, who made a film documentary on Albert Schweitzer.

The book begins with some insightful biographical background. In a letter to Carl in 1901, Emma writes that ‘I am not marrying an illustrious position or a fortune, but a human being. My soul needs a soul and not outward appearances.’ In return, Carl aspires to kindle not only the fire of love, ‘but also the highest spiritual life; it alone is the true life and provides the most intense delight in being.’ However, Emma had to navigate being the wife of a famous and charismatic man, wondering to Freud, how she could hold her own: ‘I have no friends, all the people who associate with us really only want to see Carl, except for a few boring and to me quite uninteresting persons. Naturally, the women are all in love with him, and with the men I am instantly cordoned off as the wife of the father or friend.’ Freud responds that he would not be surprised if Emma emerged as a writer herself – as she fully does in this book, which also documents how central she was in the development of analytical psychology as well as her role as an analyst. I was moved and inspired by her journal entry (p. 59) from 1952 when she asked herself what she had achieved, remarking ‘I know only this: that I have made every effort to become what I am.’

The lectures on the tale of the two brothers and on guilt show her profound knowledge of fairy tales and their symbolism as they bear on the essentials of the human condition. The two brothers represent the polarities of life, complementary or opposing tendencies, ‘something that is the same yet different’, one being conscious and the other unconscious. She concludes that the fairy tale ‘provides us with a symbolic representation of a universal human problem that has remained the same throughout all ages, the solution to which we must work on: it is the unification of the human being with his own self, with his soul’, which includes the shadow and what she later calls the ascending process of spiritualisation (Vergeistigung), the return to the One after we have descended into matter. If the lower form of guilt is represented as disobedience, then the higher is represented by ‘the non-use or wrong application of intellectual feeling-related judgement, and the associated irresponsibility and stupidity.’ (p. 155)

I found her reflections on a passage by Meister Eckhart from 1922 quite extraordinary. The passage is about leaving God in order to find him. She finds that her searching only brings her back to herself, and she is emphatic that she is not God. However, this misses out a perception of the universal Christ within, the Self that we all are. She writes that God can never be attained through knowledge; his essence is mystery. This is why we need gnosis as direct unmediated knowing. Strikingly, she writes that she must be aware that God is seeking her, ‘at this hour, here and now, I must therefore be in my place at this hour, at every hour… we must be ready to be found today, this hour, this minute. However, Christianity has shifted the focus from here and now to eternity, away from this earth and life.’ Emma can’t accept this, noting that this is especially difficult for us, ‘for we want anything but what is now and here, just as it is. We are always looking for possibilities, past or future, that could invalidate the here and now.’ (p. 158) She concludes that ‘only in this way am I completely human; and only when I am completely human can God be completely God.’ In a related piece, she writes that God is becoming, and that our task is to become human - balancing head and heart. If this is not achieved, the system has to fall apart and be reassembled, which is the case with our contemporary western culture.

There are many emotional tones in the poems, some bleak, some lyrical, with the original German on the left-hand page. In one image, she evokes stones gnawed by wind and wave, softening, crumbling, vanishing in air and water, ‘but human guilt and suffering endure forever.’ Redemption, however, is possible through penitence, atonement and grace. The new God frees the world from fear. The God image is also the theme of a verse play on the Mystery of the Crusade, much of which consists of a dialogue between the Angel Gabriel and the Good Lord, who is told that if He wants to understand humans, he needs to descend to Earth. Refusing this option, He sends Gabriel instead, who finds that the Crusaders are still interested in battle – and women - after death (p. 215). There is an extraordinary encounter with the Virgin Mary, who tells Gabriel that humanity should have been saved by her son’s life, not by his death: ‘A thousand times I’d have preferred the love and life of my son.’ Gabriel finds the secret in the soul of the woman, her image of a fully integrated man, strong yet kind, brave, just but not infallible, possessing great love ‘that contains scorn and hatred.’ The woman as anima is seeking the animus, living and embodied, but in the process God is forgotten – in parallel with Jung’s own thinking, Emma asks if God is truly good.

Some of the dreams and fantasies are illustrated with her paintings as well as detailed commentary. Themes include the miraculous city, the Grail, the figure of Christ, a dream of the world turned upside down, and journey to the underworld. Most of those recorded take place during the First World War when Jung himself had descended into the unconscious. The last part consists of an exposition of her cosmology, illustrated with her own handwritten text and drawings, followed by an appendix with her Grail abstracts. The symbolism of colours is important, and is also illustrated along with symbolic shapes such as the diamond, cross, spiral and vortex. Emma notes that the vortex stays on the surface, but the spiral goes from one level to the other. She arrives at the conclusion that spirit and matter are complementary opposites, ‘mutually related and even able to transform into each other.’ Spatially, this is moving apart and back together, or descent (materialisation) and corresponding ascent (spiritualisation/ dematerialisation) – the process of individuation, the uniting of opposites within oneself. All this is represented in a remarkable painting (p. 361), an image of an emerging world.

Any serious students of C.G. Jung should read this remarkable volume, but it will also appeal to those more generally interested in psycho-spiritual development, and it acts as a counterbalance of women and the anima to Jung himself as the animus (not that Jung himself did not achieve a coincidentia oppositorum), the integration of left and right hemisphere modes of attention. Emma’s vibrant inner life is sure to illuminate the spiritual path of seekers in our turbulent time.