Black Books

The Black Books are a collection of seven private journals recorded by Carl Gustav Jung principally between 1913 and 1932. They have been referred to as the "Black Books" due to the colour of the final five journal covers (the first two journals actually have a brown cover). The portion of the journal account that is of particular interest begins in the second of the seven journals, on the night of 12 November 1913. Jung's motivation was to conduct a difficult "experiment" on himself consisting of a confrontation with the contents of his mind, paying no heed to the daily occurrences of his ordinary life. The journal entries continue over several following years and fill the next six notebooks. In these notebooks Carl Jung recorded his imaginative and visionary experiences during the transformative period that has been called his "confrontation with the unconscious." This ledger of experiences was the foundation for the text of Jung's Red Book: Liber Novus. The majority of the journal entries were made prior to 1920, however Jung continued to make occasional entries up until at least 1932. Though the "Black Books" are referenced and occasionally quoted by Sonu Shamdasani in his editorial to The Red Book: Liber Novus, the journals have otherwise previously been unavailable for academic study. Context and content Jung recorded these deliberately-evoked fantasies or visions in the "Black Books". These journals are Jung's contemporaneous clinical ledger to his "most difficult experiment", or what he later describes as "a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world." He later termed the process "mythopoetic imagination". The events and visions were recorded nightly in the "Black Book" journals. The first entry on 12 November 1913 begins with this petition: