Lament of the Dead

The language of the Red Book is in my view Jung’s most insightful, precisely because it is not conceptual.

That is what he’s been doing up to 1912, and it’s left him empty.

which is that psychology itself should be based not on statistics and sociology, whatever we want to call it, political realities and so on, but based on the story that a human life lives and is presented by literature.

that it’s describing.

At that point he realizes conceptual language is inadequate to encapsulate the language of the soul. It is the language of the soul, as far as he’s concerned, because it is his dialogue to and with his soul.

in which everything is psychological because everything is metaphorical and mythical.

The language of psychology today doesn’t convey any emotion or any beauty of the experience itself

Explanation—within the problematic that Jung is involved within the Red Book—is what kills.

But his opening gambit, if you will, is to say that maybe these figures can instruct me and maybe I can learn from them.