Edited by Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt, the essays in the series Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions are geared to the recognition that the posthumous publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus by C.G. Jung in 2009 was a meaningful gift to our contemporary world.
The Red Book can be considered as a contribution to the “Golden Chain” (aurea catena) of the world’s imaginative literature reaching back to the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. As Jung describes this tradition in a letter to Max Rychner, “Faust is the most recent pillar in that bridge of the spirit which spans the morass of world history, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic, the I Ching, the Upanishads, the Tao-te-Ching, the fragments of Heraclitus, and continuing in the Gospel of St. John, the letters of St. Paul, in Meister Eckhart and in Dante.” The Red Book extends the “Golden Chain” into our era. Each of the 18 essays in this third volume of the series, Jung’s Red Book for Our Time, is unique, and all of them converge on the central theme of the relevance of The Red Book for people today in search of soul under postmodern conditions.
This is the third volume of a multi-volume series set up on a global and multicultural level and includes essays from the following distinguished Jungian analysts and scholars:
- Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt: Introduction
- Stephen A. Aizenstat: The Quest for One’s Own Red Book in the Digital Age
- Paul Brutsche: The Creative Power of Soul: A Central Testimony of Jung’s Red Book
- Joseph Cambray: The Red Book Today: From Novelty to Innovation – Not Art but Nature
- Linda Carter: Jung as Craftsman
- George B. Hogenson: The Schreber Case and the Origins of the Red Book
- Toshio Kawai: From Internal to Open Psyche: Overcoming Modern Consciousness?
- Samir Mahmoud: Reading and Re-Reading Jung as a Muslim: From Traditionalist Critique to the New Possibilities of The Red Book
- Christine Maillard: C.G. Jung’s Subversive Christology in The Red Book and its Meaning for Our Times
- Mathew Mather: Jung’s Red Book and the Alchemical Coniunctio
- Patricia Michan: The Golden Seed: The Hidden Potentiality within the Vile and the Misshapen
- Gunilla Midbøe: Troll Music in The Red Book
- Anna Milashevich: The Red Book and the Black Swan: The Trickster as a Psychological Factor behind the Boom and Bust Cycle
- Velimir B. Popović: “I am as I am not” – The Role of Imagination in Construing Dialogical Self
- Ingrid Riedel: Transformation of the God-Image in Jung’s Red Book: Foundations for a New Psychology of Religion
- Murray Stein: Jung’s Red Book as a New Link in the Aurea Catena
- Žanet Prinčevac de Villablanca: The Spirit of This Time: “No One’s Child”, a Postmodern Fairy Tale
- Megumi Yama: The Red Book: A Journey from West to East via the Realm of the Dead
- Mari Yoshikawa: A Japanese Perspective on the Meaning of the Serpent in The Red Book
Murray Stein, Ph.D., studied as an undergraduate at Yale University (B.A. in English) and attended graduate school at Yale Divinity School (M.Div.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in Religion and Psychological Studies). He trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich. From 1976 to 2003 he was a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, of which he was a founding member and President from 1980 to 1985. In 1989, he joined the Executive Committee of IAAP as Honorary Secretary for Dr. Thomas Kirsch as President (1989-1995) and served as President of the IAAP from 2001 to 2004. He was president of ISAP Zurich 2008-2012 and is currently a training and supervising analyst there. He resides in Goldiwil (Thun), Switzerland. His special interests are psychotherapy and spirituality, methods of Jungian psychoanalytic treatment, and the individuation process. Major publications: In Midlife, Jung's Map of the Soul, Minding the Self, Soul: Retrieval and Treatment, Transformation: Emergence of the Self, and Outside, Inside and All Around. Web page: www.murraystein.com; contact email: murraywstein@gmail.com.
Thomas Arzt, Ph.D., was educated in Physics and Mathematics at Giessen University (Germany). Research Assistant at Princeton University (USA) with the special focus on atomic, nuclear and plasma physics. 1988 Training and Certification in Initiatic Therapy at the "Schule für Initiatische Therapie" of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim and Maria Hippus-Gräfin Dürckheim in Todtmoos-Rütte (Black Forest, Germany). 2016 Training Program Continuing Education in Analytical Psychology at ISAP Zurich. Since 1999, President and Managing Director of Strategic Advisors for Transformation GmbH, an international consulting company for simulation technology, complexity management, and "Strategic Foresight under Deep Uncertainty" in Freiburg, Germany. He resides in Lenzkirch (Black Forest, Germany). Major publications: Various publications on Naturphilosophie in the context of Wolfgang Pauli und C.G. Jung: Unus Mundus: Kosmos und Sympathie (ed., 1992), Philosophia Naturalis (ed., 1996), Wolfgang Pauli und der Geist der Materie (ed., 2002). Editor of the German series Studienreihe zur Analytischen Psychologie. Web page: www.thomasarzt.de; contact email: thomasdrarzt@gmail.com.
