When unknown materials from the unconscious surface and in effect become known to one's ordinary ego-consciousness, they in effect become the known unknown, or partly known unknown. Jung spontaneously valued the materials that had surfaced from the unconscious as a kind of revelation and eventually decided to commemorate them to the best of his ability through the vivid paintings and the calligraphy records that we now can see for ourselves in The Red Book: Liber Novus, which he stopped working on in 1930. But Jung's efforts to understand the known unknowns involved in his dangerous experiment with active imagination continued well beyond 1930 in other ways, including but not limited to his massive research project involving the imagery used in alchemical texts.
In 1944, after Jung suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, he spontaneously experienced mystic visions as vivid as the visions that he had experienced years earlier during his dangerous experiment with active imagination. For the male psyche, mystic visions often involve the archetypal feminine dimension of the psyche -- the mother complex and/or the anima complex. From Jung's record of his earlier experiences in The Red Book: Liber Novus, it appears that he experienced the full range of the archetypal field.
After Jung had recuperated from his hearts attack, he subsequently went on to complete and publish his magnum opus in German in 1955 and 1956 about the imagery used in alchemical texts, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 2nd ed., translated by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1970). Jung died in 1961 at the age of 85.
For further information about Jung's thought, see my essay "Understanding Jung's Thought" at the UMD library's digital commons:
http://hdl.handle.net/10792/2576
For further information about Jung's life, see Claire Dunne's amply illustrated book Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, 2nd ed. (Watkins, 2015).
THE QUOTABLE JUNG
The 375-page book The Quotable Jung includes a chronology of Jung's life (pages xvii-xx) and a really useful index (compiled by Victoria Cowan, pages 325-341). The quotations from Jung are arranged in the following eighteen chapters, with a bibliographic citation after each quotation:
(1) The Unconscious (pages 1- 32)
(2) The Structure of the Psyche (pages 33-56)
(3) The Symbolic Life (pages 56-68)
(4) Dreams (pages 68-84)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
