Re-Noted: Carl Jung's Midlife-Crisis Notebooks

"I had the feeling--this is mythology!"

As he approached 40, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, had everything he wanted: a successful career, a large family, plenty of money. And then, he began to experience psychotic visions: he saw a monstrous yellow flood bearing garbage and corpses piling up against the Alps.¹

Jung feared that he was descending into madness. As he lectured on schizophrenia in July of 1914, he worried that he might be talking about himself:

I kept saying to myself: “I’ll be speaking of myself! Very likely I’ll go mad after reading out this paper.”²

In his despair and isolation, Jung did what many of us would do: he turned to his notebooks.

In his notebooks, Jung wrote down his visions and analyzed them. He worked himself out of despair, while simultaneously developing some of his most influential theories (the archetypes³ and collective unconscious⁴).

These notebooks became known as The Black Books (1913-1932)—so named for their color.

Some of Jung’s Black Books

Jung understood that he was experiencing a moment of crises that afflicts many of us as we pass through middle age. He wrote:

A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death.⁵

Jung had reached the midway point in life, and it was time to go deeper.

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Jung’s Notes on his Fantasies and Dreams

In 1912, Jung published Psychology and the Unconscious, which led to the final break with Sigmund Freud, his former mentor and collaborator.⁶ This break meant Jung found himself professionally isolated. It is likely that his psychotic visions had something to do with his professional exile.

At his doctor’s encouragement, Jung began to play with building blocks as he had done in childhood. It was then that he decided to record his visions in The Black Books:

…I had the feeling—this is mythology!…[T]hat was the beginning….And that’s when I started The Black Book.⁷

And so, Jung began to record his disturbing visions and dreams as they occurred. He had kept journals up until 1900 and decided it might be time to re-start the practice.⁸

Jung’s entry for 15 November 1913, The Black Books

Writing The Black Books was his “most difficult experiment” because they were “a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.”

This was the experiment: he was trying to get at what exists when we turn off our consciousness.

At night, Jung recorded his fantasies in The Black Books.⁹ Though he wrote down his visions in dated entries, Jung was not keeping a diary. He was recording an experiment. Each entry represents his personal confrontation with “his soul,” which he described with “literary metaphor[s].”

He begins his entry for November 12, 1913 by addressing his soul:

My Soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again....¹⁰

“My Soul, where are you?” Jung’s entry from 12 November 1913

All of this was an attempt to tap into his unconscious. To do this, Jung deliberately evoked fantasies while awake— he called this process the “active imagination.”

Throughout his journey, Jung records visions and dreams like this one:

I am with several young Swiss…in Liverpool down by the docks. It is a dark rainy night, with smoke and clouds. We walk up to the upper part of town, which lies on a plateau. We come to a small circular lake in a centrally located garden. In the middle of this there is an island. The men speak of a Swiss who lives here in such a sooty, dark dirty city. But I see that on the island stands a magnolia tree covered with red flowers illuminated by an eternal sun and think, “Now I know, why this Swiss fellow lives here. He apparently also knows why.” I see a city map:¹¹

Jung’s drawing of the city in his dreams

Here is a close up of the map:

Later, Jung would recall that this dream represented his life at the time. Things were “unpleasant” but he had “a vision of unearthly beauty”¹² which allowed him to continue living.

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Jung’s Characters

Often, The Black Books read like an epic fantasy, especially when Jung encounters characters that guide him. These characters are archetypes— general characters or themes that we fill with our own personal experiences.

According to Jung, we develop our own unique identity by conversing with these archetypes.

Within the Black Books, Jung meets Philemon—a pagan old man. Jung saw Philemon as a guru, someone to lead him through his visions and dreams. Philemon, he explains,

…was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought.¹³

Jung would say that we all have a “Philemon”—a wise teacher figure—but this archetype will take different forms for each of us.

Later, Jung would depict Philemon this way:

Philemon, as painted by Jung in The Red Book

Philemon’s father, named Ha, also communicated with Jung. Ha was a “black magician,” who understood the runes, letters from an ancient Germanic alphabet. But Ha’s runes are completely new—they do not exist in history. And they look like this:

Close up the runes in The Black Books

Ha describes the runes as “…my science.” Jung wants to learn the runes, but Ha refuses to teach him. Instead, Ha flashes images of the runes across Jung’s vision and explains their symbolism.

Soon, Jung is covering the Black Books with Ha’s runes:

The runes in The Black Books

These runes appear throughout the gorgeously illustrated Red Book that Jung produced from the visions he had recorded in The Black Books.

Here is a close up of the runes:

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The Red Book

Noticing a pattern forming in The Black Books, Jung decided to collect his observations in a single, large notebook. He commissioned a red-leather folio— The Red Book—again named for the cover’s color. He had its title, Liber Novus (the new book), engraved on its spine:

Jung illustrated The Red Book as though it were a medieval manuscript. The finished product is breathtakingly beautiful.

Jung considered the Red Book to be his crowning achievement—the most important work of his life. But it wasn’t published in his life-time. We are the first generation to have access to it—thanks to the brilliant work of the Jung-scholar Sonu Shamdasani.

Around half of the material in The Red Book comes from The Black Books. Jung re-copied around thirty of the fantasies he had recorded previously. But this time, he elaborates on them and explains their significance.

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The Way of What is to Come

This is the first page of “The Red Book,” which Jung called “Liber Novus” (the new book). From the first page, Jung imitates medieval scribes, beginning with the lavishly illustrated first initial.

The first page of Liber Novus, “The Way of What is to Come”

After he copies out passages from the Bible in Latin, Jung imitates Medieval colophons—brief statements with information about publication (such as where and when the manuscript was produced). Jung writes:

written by C.G. Jung with his own hand in his house in Kunsnacht / Zurich in the year 1915

The Red Book reached around one-thousand pages of hand-written reflections and paintings. There is a lot more to say—in fact, I wrote another post dedicated to this fascinating book.

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Notes on Jung’s Notes

• Write out things you don’t understand—like your dreams: Jung used his notebooks as a way to externalize his visions so that he could study them. He approached his own mind with incredible humility and he opened himself up to its mysteries.

• Setbacks can be valuable: Often great things come out of difficult times. Jung’s midlife crises was shattering. He isolated himself and gave up his job as a professor. Given that he was a leading figure of psychoanalysis, he turned his theories on himself. He became his own patient. And he produced some of our most enduring theories of psychoanalysis through his “confrontation with the unconscious.”

• Find note-taking guides: You don’t need to invent a Philemon, but I have found that studying notes often guides how I structure my own notebooks. I find figures I respect, who have note-taking methods that resonate with me. And then I try out their style for a while. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I always learn something from the experiment. In this week’s postscript, I’ll explore a practice I learned from Jung.

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Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Yours in Note-Taking,

1. This is how Jung describes it:

When I had the vision of the flood in October of the year 1913, it happened I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness…The vision of the flood seized me and I felt the spirit of the depths, but I did not understand him.

The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, p.127

2. Qtd. in “Introduction” to The Black Books by Sonu Shamdasani, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

3. Archetypes are universal ideas or patterns of thought—for example, characters such as the “old wise man” or the “shadow”—that exist in literature throughout time and across cultures.

4. The collective unconscious refers to inherited thought patterns (like archetypes) that exist for all of us, beneath our consciousness.

5. Combat Interview, 1952. Qtd. by Shamdasani p. 199.

6. Jung thought Freud put too much importance on our animal nature (read: sexuality) at the cost of our spiritual lives. See Elkind, David. “Freud, Jung and the Collective Unconscious.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 1970.

7. Qtd. in Bair, Deirdre. Jung: A Biography. Little, Brown, 2004, p. 245.

I recalled that until 1900 I had kept a diary, and I thought that this would be a possibility for me to try to observe myself. This would be an attempt to meditate on myself, and I began to describe my inner states. These represented themselves to me in a literary metaphor: for example, I was in a desert, and sun shone unbearably (sun=consciousness).

8. Bair describes Jung’s earlier diaries: they contained “…the random thoughts, daily happenings, and jottings from readings that had filled his earlier journals…” From Jung: A Biography, p. 291.

9. Even as he worried he was on the verge of madness, Jung maintained a successful private practice and saw patients daily. He did, however, give up his job as a professor.

10. Black Book 2, p. 58. Translations are by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.

11. Black Book 7, p. 120.

12. Jung, Carl G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. p. 120

13. Quoted by the Philemon Foundation.