C. G. JUNG is widely recognized as a major figure in modern Westernthought, and his work continues to spark controversies. He played criticalroles in the formation of modern psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry,and a large international profession of analytical psychologists worl(under his name. His worl( has had its widest impact, however, outsideprofessional circles: J ung and Freud are the names that most people firstthinl( of in connection with psychology, and their ideas have been widelydisseminated in the arts, the humanities, films, and popular culture. Jungis also widely regarded as one of the instigators of the New Age movement.However, it is startling to realize that the bool( that stands at the centerof his oeuvre, on which he worked for over sixteen years, is only nowbeing published.There can be few unpublished works that have already exerted suchfar-reaching effects upon twentieth-century social and intellectual historyas Jung's Red Book, or Liber Novus (New Book). Nominated by Jung tocontain the nucleus of his later works, it has long been recognized asthe l(ey to comprehending their genesis. Yet aside from a few tantalizingglimpses, it has remained unavailable for study. 

The Cultural MomentThe first few decades of the twentieth century saw a Great dealof experimentation in literature, psychology; and the visual arts. , ~Writers tried to throw off the limitations of representationalconventions to explore and depict the full range of innerexperience-dreams, visions, and fantasies. They experimentedwith new forms and utilized old forms in novel ways. From theautomatic writing of the surrealists to the gothic fantasies ofGustav Meyrink writers came into close proximity and collisionwith the researches of psychologists, who were engaged in similarexplorations. Artists and writers collaborated to try out newforms of illustration and typography; new configurations of textand image. Psychologists sought to overcome the limitations ofphilosophical psychology; and they began to explore the sameterrain as artists and writers. Clear demarcations among literature,art, and psychology had not yet been set; writers and artistsborrowed from psychologists, and vice versa. A number ofmajor psychologists, such as Alfred Binet and Charles Richet,wrote dramatic and fictional works, often under assumed names,whose themes mirrored those of their "scientific" works.' GustavFechner, one of the founders of psychophysics and experimentalpsychology; wrote on the soul life of plants and of the earthas a blue ange1.3 Meanwhile writers such as Andre Breton andPhilippe Soupault assiduously read and utilized the works ofpsychical researchers and abnormal psychologists, such asFrederick Myers, Theodore Flournoy; and Pierre Janet. W B.Yeats utilized spiritualistic automatic writing to compose apoetic psycho cosmology in A Vision. 4 On all sides, individualswere searching for new forms with which to depict the actualitiesof inner experience, in a quest for spiritual and cultural renewal.In Berlin, Hugo Ball noted:  

The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life iscompletely confined and shackled. A kind of economicfatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists itor not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interestsand his character. The church is regarded as a "redemptionfactory" of little importance, literature as a safety valve . . .The most burning question day and night is: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough to put an end to thisstate of affairs? And if not, how can one escape it?

Within this cultural crisis Jung conceived of undertaking anextended process of self-experimentation, which resulted in LiberNovus, a work of psychology in a literary form.We stand today on the other side of a divide between psychologyand literature. To consider Liber Novus today is to take up a workthat could have emerged only before these separations had beenfirmly established. Its study helps us understand how the divideoccurred. But first, we may ask