ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Jung’s Red Book is an exercise in self-narration (or even self-construction). The Red Book is insistent on its textual, visual, and hence artistic aspect. Jung makes the strategic decision to exchange verbal discourse for the medium of the image (Bild), mirrored in his shift away from Freud’s approach to dreams. The Red Book exhibits a narrative structure of crisis and (near) resolution, conforming to a pattern displayed by such key works in the German tradition as Wolfam von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Goethe’s Faust, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The parallels in narrative sequence between these works and the Red Book reveal their deep affinity with one another, as explored in this chapter. At the same time, these texts are pervaded by an ironic, even parodic, tone that subverts the epic dimension of the narrative structure. Paralleling Aristotle’s assertion that unity must arise from the combination of various aspects of a narrative, in Jung’s view the Self emerges from the combination of various components of consciousness and the unconscious. The process of individuation could be described as way of narrating the Self into being.
