/lit/ - Literature

>>17907876
>https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/01/jungs-therapeutic-gnosticism
>I have to admit that I have never been an admirer of Jung’s writings, even on those rare occasions when I have fleetingly spied what looked like a glimmer of insight among their caliginous fogs. The Red Book, however, makes his other works seem quite tolerable by comparison. It is an essentially silly exercise—sub-Nietzschean, sub-Blakean, sub-Swedenborgian—full of the kinds of garish symbolism and pompous antinomianism one expects from more adolescent minds. To anyone seeking fantastic journeys through strange oneiric realms, I would much more readily recommend Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which are far better written, far better illustrated, and far more profound (Humpty Dumpty’s discourse on the meanings of words puts all of Philemon’s drearily portentous maunderings to shame).

>I am omitting many details, admittedly, but I doubt it matters. What is truly astonishing about this sort of psychologistic reductionism is its absolute inversion of the spiritual aspirations it is meant to explain. The Red Book manages to preserve the most ungainly aspects of ancient Gnosticism—its boringly rambling symbolic narratives, the pretensions of its spiritual patriciate, its self-absorption and ethical sterility—but none of its genuinely sympathetic religious qualities: the ennobling sorrow, the tragic sense of estrangement from the world, the delightful paranoia.

>To tell the truth, I find The Red Book a rather disconcerting document, not simply because it has the feel of an expression of arrested pubescence, lurching clumsily between the morbid and the hilarious in its attempts at profundity, but because I cannot shake the sense that it is somehow a real reflection of the spiritual situation of our times.

>>17907876

The had a copy in a used bookstore a few months ago, asking 150. I was tempted despite not knowing SHIT about psychology or Jung's deal. Fortunately someone else took it so that removed the temptation (we covet what we see every day).

I flipped through it just once. It was like this old German script translated and what looked like medieval Germanic drawings of village life.

>>17907876

Have you read any other of Jung's work?

I've read a bit but haven't started the red book as I don't think I'm ready, from all accounts it's one of the last things of his you should read and not the first.

It's literally his dream diary desu

>>17908018
>I have to admit that I have never been an admirer of Jung’s writings
>proceeds to talk about author despite not having read some/most of his work, thus lacking context to the work he is reviewing.

you can tell he kind of misses the point of the book since his article about it keeps stating that its "thoroughly gnostic"

protip: its not

It's the most inspired writing I have ever come across.

>>17907876
Disappointment.

>>17908018
i haven't seen a filtering of this magnitude in decades

>>17907876

I read it during a manic episode on mountains of pills and felt everything in it to be entirely true so take that for what you will I'm just saying a lot of people seem to suggest his more dry work to break you into his ideas and unless you're going mad yourself you will probably fall into this category

>>17907876
I read it while I was dying in a hospital bed. Similar to >>17911015 I was not in a "normal" state of mind, but it all felt like he was speaking what I knew to be true. First Jung I ever read, but very enjoyable.