9. More is learned about the travels of Carl Gustav Jung into hell. Hell is a place that must be encountered. Down there in hell, you learn to be the person you had always been in the first place. It’s a paradox. But a nice one.
So we have to take in the information that Carl Gustav Jung, who had all the visions and dreams, the Carl Gustav Jung who wrote The Red Book and who made all of the drawings and the paintings that make up The Red Book, this Swiss, this Carl Gustav Jung, this fellow with his wool suits that always seem to me, amusingly, these suits that always seem to be just about one size too large, this Carl Gustav Jung was a man who traveled through the depths of hell and who came back out again. He went to hell, and then he came out and went back to Switzerland.
The Red Book is simply an account of a journey, a journey that happened within the mind or some might say the soul of a Swiss named Carl Gustav Jung. This journey was the journey from sanity into insanity. There is, here, a simple, thumbnail difference between the life and work of Sigmund Freud and the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, by the way. The thumbnail difference is just this. Freud worked his whole life in order not to get uncorked, to help others re-cork themselves and to figure out ways not to get uncorked in the first place. Jung continually sought to get uncorked and while he did sometimes help others in their re-corking, the people he was most interested in, the experiences he sought the most were amongst those who had let the uncorking go as far as possible, let it go beyond the edge and out the other side again.
It is precisely in getting uncorked, or so the proposition goes, in losing oneself completely, in going over to the other side, that one can find oneself again, or, better said, find oneself really and truly for the first time. That was Carl Gustav Jung’s obsession and what he always preached, if he can be said to have preached, and it is the primary story which he put into the images and visions of The Red Book, a book that speaks on the level of myth and of symbols and of the archaic but which is always saying more or less the same thing, which is that hell is real and you really ought to go there. You should get uncorked, descend into hell, and then emerge again, and in doing so you have a very good chance of knowing who you actually are, not who you thought you were, which was necessarily an illusion, but who you actually are. What Carl Gustav Jung found in hell, what he found in the dark place, what he found amongst the deepest shadows, the truly scary place of the darkest and most obscure shit that we all have within ourselves, that place, the place that everyone pretends, most of the time, does not exist at all but most assuredly does exist, it exists within, and one can find those shadows, those most terrifying corners and empty hallways of the soul, down in the depths of those most horrible places where Carl Gustav Jung dared to go, and in this sense he was quite a courageous Swiss indeed, down there in the pit, the pit that is within each and every one of us, there in the fiery pit is where Carl Gustav Jung discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that he was, and should be, a ridiculous Swiss doctor wearing one-size-too-large wool suits and a person playing the game of being the professional and the academic and the eminent man of his time.
The great and hellish journey, the visions of flood and fire and then of ice, the journey to face witches and dragons, all of this is undertaken by Carl Gustav Jung, all of this grand and incredible narrative, all of which is related in the portentous and sweeping and more or less medieval tale of epic grandeur that is The Red Book, and at the end of it, the final lesson that we get from all of this is that Carl Gustav Jung gets to be exactly what he’d already been, he gets to be a somewhat ridiculous provincial doctor wearing ill-fitting suits. There is some footage of Carl Gustav Jung in his elder days, comfortable in his position as the eminent man, speaking on this or that topic. But there are moments when a smile can be seen flittering across the face of this Carl Gustav Jung. One can see that he is standing just a bit outside himself. He is playing the role. He is in himself. But he is also outside himself. He is in and out. He is, just for a second or two, observing himself perhaps from one of those strange places that he tells us about in The Red Book. And what he sees is a silly man completely bound and determined by the lifeworld of his time, by the petty circumstances of being a Swiss doctor and academic. And he smiles because he knows it is absurd. He knows it is absurd, but he has completely embraced it nonetheless. He has become that person completely and totally even though he is fully aware that he is a kind of joke even to himself. And that, he seems to be saying, is what it means to be individuated. Really and truly it is nothing more than that. To play it out. To play out the joke that you are. To be bound completely by space and time and limitations of every sort, by culture and era and history and circumstance, to be held into place by childhood moments that you could never have chosen or controlled, to be buffeted by thoughts and feelings that were generated and that shaped your soul before you ever had the chance even to realize what was happening. To be all of that. To be all of the pettiness even as one knows that it is possible to step outside of that pathetic individuation, to know that one can touch upon the great sweep of Being, a consciousness that is, in fact, beyond the consciousness of oneself as the individuated self. To have stepped into the fires of hell and burned it all away. To have melted into the great humming pulsing cosmic throb of Being like an ancient maenad or something, to have merged into the crazy swirl of absolute being and to have emerged from that swirl and gone back to Switzerland. Why would anyone do it, why would anyone return to the doctorly practice in Switzerland after having undertaken the extraordinary adventures of The Red Book? Why would anyone choose the mundane when one had glimpsed, so to speak, the actual face of God? Why does Jung come back to us?
Because he has to, of course. Because that is what he learned in hell. What you learn in hell, what you learn in the shadows and from the shadows, what you are supposed finally to figure out is that you do, actually, have to be the fucked-up person that you don’t really want to be, that in some deep sense you hate. You must embrace, fully and completely, being the pathetic and limited individual that you actually are. That’s it. That’s the thing one learns in hell. Simple. But very hard to carry out. Very hard to live through.
Reprinted with permission from The Grand Valley by Morgan Meis, published in © 2026 by Slant Books. All rights reserved.
