Red Book, Middle Way

Red Book, Middle Way offers a new interpretation of Jung’s Red Book, in terms of the Middle Way, as a universal principle and embodied ethic, paralleled both in the Buddha’s teachings and elsewhere.

Jung’s Red Book, finally published only in 2009, is a highly ambiguous text describing a succession of extraordinary visions, together with Jung’s interpretation of them. Jung explicitly discusses the Middle Way in the Red Book (although this has been largely ignored by scholars so far) and offers lots of material that can be understood in its terms. This book interprets the Red Book in relation to the archetypes met in its visions — the hero, the feminine, the Shadow, God and Christ — and follows Jung’s process of integrating these different internal figures. To do this Jung needs to find the Middle Way between absolutes at every point, in a way similar to the Buddha.

Red Book, Middle Way will engage both those inspired by Jung and those interested in the Middle Way of the Buddha, offering a source of deep imaginative reflection on our practical human motives.