Jung at Heart (2024-2025): My Self: Who Am I Or: What Am I? From the Red Book Part 1

Saturday, November 2 & 16, 2024; 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
MY SELF: WHO AM I? OR: WHAT AM I?
FROM THE RED BOOK TO AION
Jung began to give a unique and novel meaning to the term “Self” from 1916 as a result of visionary experiences which had radically changed his understanding of human nature, of man’s place in the becoming of the Cosmos, and of the practice of psychotherapy. “The Self” has been a central concept in analytical psychology from its inception but has suffered considerable linguistic drift from Jung’s formulations, leading to re-significations often mutually incompatible and far from Jung’s original intentions.
In these two seminars I will use Jung’s own words and images in his Red Book, Liber Novus and Black Books material to help participants to grasp the highly original ideas for which Jung was striving to find apt expression in his new use of the term “the Self”. My first seminar will aim to recover a sense of Jung’s meaning.
From 1950 Jung returned to the primary insights of Liber Novus in a new attempt to convey them to the public without directly revealing their Liber Novus source. Aion, subtitled “Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” was the first of these publications and is currently the best-selling volume of Jung’s Collected Works. In the second seminar we will re-read key passages of Aion which were, at best, suggestive but opaque before publication of Liber Novus to establish a coherent, consistent and radical understanding of what Jung intended us to understand by “the Self”

George Bright, MA, MSc, DipTheol, was educated at Cambridge University and The London School of Economics. He is a Training & Supervising Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and a co-founder of The Circle of Analytical Psychology, a London-based group engaged in the study of Jung’s Liber Novus and Black Books. He works in private practice in London. His 1997 paper, Synchronicity as a Basis of Analytic Attitude, won the Michael Fordham Prize.