Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book

by James Hillman, Sonu Shamdasani

With Jung’s Red Book as their point of departure, two leading scholars explore issues relevant to our thinking today.

In this book of dialogues, James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani reassess psychology, history, and creativity through the lens of Carl Jung’s Red Book. Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, was one of the most prominent psychologists in America and is widely acknowledged as the most original figure to emerge from Jung’s school. Shamdasani, editor and cotranslator of Jung’s Red Book, is regarded as the leading Jung historian. Hillman and Shamdasani explore a number of the issues in the Red Book—such as our relation with the dead, the figures of our dreams and fantasies, the nature of creative expression, the relation of psychology to art, narrative and storytelling, the significance of depth psychology as a cultural form, the legacy of Christianity, and our relation to the past—and examine the implications these have for our thinking today.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Spirituality, Nonfiction

257 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 26, 2013

About the author

James Hillman (1926-2011) was an American psychologist. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944 to 1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950.

In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and founded a movement toward archetypal psychology, was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969.

In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978.

Retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27, 2011 from bone cancer.

Reviews

[David Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that this book even exists is practically a miracle. Jung's The Red Book was only published in 2009 after over seventy years gathering dust, and James Hillman passed away in 2011. That he had an opportunity to read it, reflect on it, have conversations with the one person most knowledgeable of The Red Book and the two put it in perspective for the professional and lay Jungian community... It's just difficult to fathom how we could be so fortunate.

First, note that the dustcover is the same color as the inside pages of The Red Book. The book without the dustcover is red, the same red as both the dustcover and cloth cover of The Red Book. Undoubtedly those colors were chosen to be symbolic of its connection with the The Red Book and shows the attention this little volume has received by its publisher.

Next, the title, Lament of the Dead, speaks so loudly and on many levels, only one of which is that James Hillman is no longer with us. When I opened this book and read the first few lines, it took my breath away:
______

James Hillman: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual and I think we don't do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.

Sonu Shamdasani: It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's `Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
______

So it is with opening this book, for James Hillman speaks to us practically from the grave. Those words rippled through my perception of my own writing as I read them, not only because Hillman is no longer with us and we are still trying to come to terms with him and the loss of him, but also because I'm getting along in years myself, and my own works have come to reflect more emphasis on the questions of mortality and immortality. That, and I've been engaged in an ongoing project using Jung's active imagination for the last three years, which is of course a process of descending into the underworld, and that work is definitely a book of the dead also, or the undead. I believe that each of us will find something for ourselves reflected in their words.

Also, I first ran onto Hillman's work at the suggestion of the late poet Renate Wood some twenty-five years ago. I was struggling with Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (another story of descent into the underworld), and she recommended that I take a look at a little volume titled Oedipus Variations written by both Hillman and Kerenyi. I was blown away by the depth of Hillman's understanding of Sophocles. Dr. Wood was my mentor, and the gifts she gave me so unassumingly continue to speak to me today. One of them led me to this book. I can still hear her speaking from the grave, and the way she comes to me is as a background voice, someone looking over my shoulder and whispering between-the-lines secrets as I read the words of Hillman and Shamdasani. I have no way of knowing for sure that this book will speak to you as it does to me, but I'm guessing if you are here reading this review that it will.

[Bill Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite James Hillman books are the ones that transcribe his conversations, capturing his thoughts on the fly. Lament of the Dead is a series of conversations between Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani, the editor of Jung’s Red Book – a Herculean undertaking that he achieved with incredible patience and skill. Listening in on (reading) their talks is thrillingly enlightening. While there is a lot of repetition here, with the two of them going over the same ideas and material again and again in different conversations, as well as repeated statements of Hillman’s stance and work on psychology (which may already be familiar to some readers), the book is nonetheless rewarding for the often brilliant insights into not only Jung and his Red Book, but into our culture.

The chief concern of the Red Book, according to Hillman and Shamdasani, is giving voice to the dead – to history, to the actual dead, to buried ideas. Our culture is so forward looking, valuing novelty over reflection on the past, that the ancestors are too often forgotten. If we don’t deal with them, their lament will continue to haunt us and foil our intents. True novelty requires the seed-bed of the past’s rich loam.

This is an excellent companion to the Red Book. While the conversationalists don’t try to elucidate the meaning of individual passages of that difficult work, their talks do help the reader to understand and amplify its meaning and possible impact for our culture today, in the aftermath of the Red Book’s posthumous printing. As they remark, Jung’s opus was not for personal effect, but to bring something from the depths back to the world. The proper concern of psychology shouldn’t be the exclusive working out of purely personal disorders but should instead aim for a therapy of the world.

[K]

This book is so densely packed with themes, ideas, references, and excellent quotes that I'll eventually need to purchase my own copy so I can return to it again and again, making many marks.

Several times I had to put the book down because my cognitive functions got too overstimulated. Several times, I put it down out of frustration and grief that I can't download Hillman's vast cultural and mythological knowledge into my own brain.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

This curious book is the record of 15 conversations between the late James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani, editor and translator of Jung's Red Book. Before I type another word, let me say that I haven't read the Red Book and doubt I ever will. Jung's shamanic persona leaves me unmoved, cold. So it's fair to say I don't know what Hillman and Shamdasani are talking about.

On the other hand, I've been reading Hillman since the 70s, and Hillman (the first director of the Jung Institute in Zurich) has made a fascinating career out of re-visioning Jung while founding the field of archetypal psychology. The conversations in Lament of the Dead come from the very last years of his life – and he's as lively as ever. Hillman has long been interested in the language of the soul. His breakthrough book (to the extent he ever "broke through") was The Soul's Code – but he never had the success of his Christian interpreter Thomas Moore. Moore, to my mind, reduces the polytheism and perplexity of Hillman's mercurial intellect to a soothing set of pastoral homilies. Moore wrote for the congregation; Hillman for the daimon.

In these dialogues, Hillman still doubts that Psychology solves anything. "I've come to the conclusion that psychological language does do damage, it isn't really the language of the soul." He's much more convinced by Auden's observation that "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand." His aim – evident in all his writings, but most brilliantly presented in Re-visioning Psychology – is to keep the psyche in touch with its images. "If I return to the Greeks and the Romans, the whole movement was not to restore the old religion... It's to restore the mythical, the fact that none of it is real or true." This skepticism or negative capability is what separates Hillman's psychology from Jung. There is no redemption; no transformative individuation. There's no Christ; no victory over death and dreams. There is instead the conversation with "the dead" – who are never exactly defined. For Hillman the dead are artists and storytellers, the scholars who inform his work on every page (his footnotes and "excurses" are one of the chief pleasures of his writing). They are "the figures, the memories, the ghosts, it's all there, and as you get older, your borders dissolve, and you realize I am among them." And he is. And so are we.

If you haven't read Hillman, this probably isn't the place to begin; if you have, it's a pleasure to watch him think out loud. Jung's Red Book is as good an excuse as any.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of conversations between the late James Hillman, one of the most popular interpreters of Jung, and Sonu Shamdasani, publisher, editor, and commentator on Jung’s Red Book. In freewheeling exchanges, they discuss Jung’s de-conceptualization of psychology, his modernist and pseudo-artistic embrasure of fantasy, his psycho-spiritual quest of giving voice to the dead—both literally and figuratively—his struggle to connect the individualistic/existential and collective/essential dimensions of the inner world, the paradoxicality of his usage of demotic, detached, “scientific” language to decry the West’s detachment from humanity’s natural state of “imminent dwelling within the cosmos”: its unreflective participation in the numinous, and Jung’s place within the intellectual streams of psychological science, art, and literature in the twentieth century.

At times lacking focus (as is the nature of conversation), but also bristling with insights into Jung's creative process.

[Joel Blackstock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video Review: https://youtu.be/kFsgAVRG_9M?si=fbNyj...

Podcast Audio Review: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean....

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”

― C.G. Jung, preface for The Red Book: Liber Novus

James Hillman: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual and I think we don't do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.

Sonu Shamdasani: It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's `Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
Lament for the Dead, Psychology after Jung’s Red Book (2013) Pg. 1

Begun in 1914, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s The Red Book lay dormant for almost 100 years before its eventual publication. Opinions are divided on whether Jung would have published the book if he had lived longer. He did send drafts to publishers early in life but seemed in no hurry to publish the book despite his advancing age. Regardless, it was of enormous importance to the psychologist, being shown to only a few confidants and family members. More importantly, the process of writing The Red Book was one of the most formative periods of Jung’s life. In the time that Jung worked on the book he came into direct experience with the forces of the deep mind and collective unconscious. For the remainder of his career he would use the experience to build concepts and theories about the unconscious and repressed parts of the human mind.

In the broadest since, Jungian psychology has two goals.

1. Integrate and understand the deepest and most repressed parts of the the human mind

and

2. Don’t let them eat you alive in the process.

Jungian psychology is about excavating the most repressed parts of self and learning to hold them so that we can know exactly who and what we are. Jung called this process individuation. Jungian psychology is not and should not be understood as an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt to build a psychological container for the forces of the unconscious. While not a religion, it served a similar containing function like a religion. It was a psychology that served \ as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. Jung described his psychology as a bridge to religion. His hope was that it could help psychology understand the functions of the human need for religion, mythology and the transcendental. Jung hoped that his psychology could make religion occupy a healthier, more mindful place in our culture by making the religious functions of humanity more conscious.

Jungian psychology itself has roots in Hindu religious traditions. Jung often recommended that patients of lapsed faith return to their religions of origin. He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Jung did have a caveat though. He recommended that patients return to their traditions with an open mind. Instead of viewing the religious traditions and prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self discovery and processes for introspection. Jung saw no reason to make religious patients question their faith. He did see the need for patients who had abandoned religion to re-examine its purpose and function.

The process of writing The Red Book was itself a religious experience for Jung. He realized after his falling out from Freud that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time. Some scholars believe Jung was partially psychotic while writing the book, others claim he was in a state of partial dissociation or simply use Jung’s term “active imagination”.

The psychotic is drowning while the artist is swimming. The waters both inhabit, however, are the same. Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and timeless quality. It is written on vellum in heavy calligraphy with gorgeous hand illuminated script. Jung took inspiration for mystical and alchemical texts for its full page illustrations.

It is easier to define The Red Book by what it is not than by what it is. According to Jung, it is not a work of art. It is not a scholarly psychological endeavor. It is also not an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. The Red Book was a kind of container to help Jung witness the forces of the deep unconscious. In the same way, religion and Jungian psychology are containers for the ancient unconscious forces in the vast ocean under the human psyche.

Lament for the Dead, Psychology after Carl Jung’s The Red Book is a dialogue between ex Jungian analyst James Hillman and Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani about the implications the Red Book has for Jungian psychology. Like the Red Book it was controversial when it was released.

James Hillman was an early protege of Jung who later became a loud critic of parts of Jung’s psychology. Hillman wanted to create an “archetypal” psychology that would allow patients to directly experience and not merely analyze the psyche. His new psychology never really came together coherently and he never found the technique to validate his instincts. Hillman had been out of the Jungian fold for almost 30 years before he returned as an expert during the publication of The Red Book. Hillman’s interest in The Red Book was enough to make him swallow his pride, and many previous statements, enough to join the Jungians again. It is likely that the archetypal psychology he was trying to create is what The Red Book itself was describing.

Sonu Shamdasani is not a psychologist but a scholar of the history of psychology. His insights have the detachment of the theoretical where Hillman’s are more felt and more intuitive but also more personal. One gets the sense in the book that Hillman is marveling painfully at an experience that he had been hungry for for a long time. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. While there is a pain in Hillman’s words there is also a peace that was rare to hear from such a flamboyant and unsettled psychologist.

Sonu Shamdasani is the perfect living dialogue partner for Hillman to have in the talks that make up Lament. Shamdasani has one of the best BS detectors of maybe any Jungian save David Tacey. Shamdasani has deftly avoided the fads, misappropriations and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school of thought for decades. As editor of the Red Book he knows more about the history and assembly of the text than any person save for Jung. Not only is he also one of the foremost living experts on Jung, but as a scholar he does not threaten the famously egotistical Hillman as a competing interpreting psychologist. The skin that Shamdasani has in this game is as an academic while Hillman gets to play the prophet and hero of the new psychology they describe without threat or competition.

Presumedly these talks were recorded as research for a collaborative book to be co authored by the two friends and the death of Hillman in 2011 made the publication as a dialogue a necessity. If that is not the case the format of a dialogue makes little sense. If that is the case it gives the book itself an almost mystical quality and elevates the conversation more to the spirit of a philosophical dialogue.

We are only able to hear these men talk to each other and not to us. There is a deep resonance in the implications these men are seeing The Red Book have for modern psychology. However, they do not explain their insights to the reader and their understandings can only be glimpsed intuitively. Like the briefcase in the film Pulp Fiction the audience sees the object through its indirect effect on the characters. We see the animating and spiritually fulfilling quality of the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and the lives of Jung. This enriches a text that is ultimately about the limitations of understanding.

One of the biggest criticisms of the book when it was published was that the terms the speaker used are never defined and thus the book's thesis is never objectivised or clarified. While this is true if you are an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see these limitations as the book’s strengths. The philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that supports the themes of the text. Much like a socratic dialogue or a film script the the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. The prophet and the scholar describe their function and limitations as gatekeepers of the spiritual experience.

Reading the Lament, much like reading The Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author(s). Normally that would be a weakness but here it becomes a strength. Where normally the reader feels that a book is for them, here we feel that we are eavesdropping through a keyhole or from a phone line downstairs. The effect is superficially frustrating but also gives Lament a subtle quality to its spirituality that The Red Book lacks.

Many of the obvious elements and events for a discussion of the enormous Red Book are completely ignored in the dialogue. Hillman and Shamdasani’s main takeaway is that The Red Book is about “the dead”. What they mean by “the dead” is never qualified directly. This was a major sticking point for other reviewers, but I think their point works better undefined. They talk about the dead as a numinous term. Perhaps they are speaking about the reality of death itself. Perhaps about the dead of history. Perhaps they are describing the impenetrable veil we can see others enter but never see past ourselves. Maybe the concept contains all of these elements.

Perhaps it is undefined because these men are feeling something or intuitively, seeing something that the living lack the intellectual language for. It is not that the authors do not know what they are talking about. They know, but they are not able to completely say it. Hillman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate. In other works this led to a didactic and self righteous tone that his writing is largely worse for. Here,this limitation becomes one of Lament’s biggest strengths. Hillman, who was 84 at the time of having the conversations in Lament, may have been using The Red Book and his dialogue with Shamdasani to come to terms with his feelings about his own impending death.

David Tacey has made the very good point that Jung abandoned the direction that The Red Book was taking him in. He saw it as a dead end for experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of “archetypes”. On the publication of The Red Book, Jungians celebrate the book as the “culmination” of Jungian thought when instead it was merely a part of its origins. The Red Book represents a proto Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration. Hillman and Shamdasani probe the psychology’s origins for hints of its future in Lament.

Their thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. Are there any universal directions for living and behaving that Jungian psychology compels us towards (ethics)? Is there an external worldview that the, notoriously phenomenological, nature of Jungian psychology might imply (cosmology)? These are the major questions Hillman and Shamdasani confront in Lament.Their answer is not an answer as much as it is a question for the psychologists of the future.

Their conclusion is that “the dead'' of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived life upon us. It is up to us, and our therapists, to help us deal with the burden of “the dead”. It is not us that live, but the dead that live through us. Hillman quotes Auden several times when at a lack for words.

-We are lived through powers that we pretend to understand. - W.H. Auden

A major tenant of Jungian psychology is that adult children struggle under the unlived life of the parent. The Jungian analyst helps the patient acknowledge and integrate all of the forces of the psyche that the parent ran from, so they are not passed down to future generations. A passive implication of the ethics and the cosmology laid out in Lament, is that to have a future we must reckon with not only the unlived life of the parent but also the unlived life of all the dead.

It is our job as the living to answer the questions and face the contradictions our humanity posits in order to discover what we really are. The half truths and outright lies from the past masquerade as tradition for traditions sake, literalized religion, and unconscious tribal identity must be overthrown. The weight of the dead of history can remain immovable if we try to merely discard it but drowns us if we cling to it too tightly. We need to use our history and traditions to give us a container to reckon with the future. The container must remain flexible if we are to grow into our humanity as a society and an aware people.

If you find yourself saying “Yes, but what does “the dead” mean!” Then this book is not for you. If you find yourself confused but humbled by this thesis then perhaps it is. Instead of a further explanation of the ethical and cosmological future for psychology that his book posits I will give you a tangible example about how its message was liberatory for me.

Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung’s reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. Jung hated Schweitzer. He hated him because he had descended into Africa and gone native. In Jung’s mind Schweitzer had “refused the call” to do anything and “brought nothing home”. Surely the Africans that were fed and clothed felt they had been benefited! Was Jung’s ethics informed by racism, cluelessness, arrogance or some other unknown myopism?

A clue might be found in Jung’s reaction to modern art exploring the unconscious or in his relationship with Hinduism. Jung took the broad strokes of his psychology from the fundamentals of the brahman/atman and dharma/moksha dichotomies of Hinduism. Jung also despised the practice of eastern mysticism practices by westerners but admired it in Easterners. Why? His psychology stole something that his ethics disallowed in practice.

Jung’s views on contemporary (modern) artists of his time were similar. He did not want to look at depictions of the unconscious.In his mind discarding all the lessons of classicism was a “cop out”. He viewed artists that descended into the abstract with no path back or acknowledgement of the history that gave them that path as failures. He wanted artists to make the descent into the subjective world and return with a torch of it’s fire but not be consumed by it blaze. Depicting the direct experience of the unconscious was the mark of a failed artist to Jung. To Jung the destination was the point, not the journey. The only thing that mattered is what you were able to bring back from the world of the dead. He had managed to contain these things in The Red Book, why couldn’t they? The Red Book was Jung’s golden bough.

Jung took steps to keep the art in The Red Book both outside of the modernist tradition and beyond the historical tradition. The Red Book uses a partially medieval format but Jung both celebrates and overcomes the constraints of his chosen style. The Red Book was not modern or historical, it was Jun’s experience of both. In Lament, Hillman describes this as the ethics that should inform modern psychology. Life should become ones own but part of ones self ownership is that we take responsibility for driving a tradition forward not a slave to repeating it.


read the rest of this review or listen to the review as a podcast @ GetTherapyBirmingham.com

[Randolph Severson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is saddening that both Jung’s Red Book and this one appeared so late — the Red Book almost a Century after it was written and Lament of the Dead so late in Hillman’s life and career. The supreme irony is that their publication turns the ‘history’ of Jungian psychology upside down in that James Hillman, putatively the great ‘revolutionary’ in the Jungian tradition, the Betrayer even, turns out to be the true Jungian, the keeper of the flame so to speak, who more than any other Jungian - Neuman, Fordham, von Franz or Edinger — valuable writers all — in his insistence on the primacy of the personified and poetic imagination that is most faithful to psychic reality when in speaks in a personified and poetic fashion. The idea of psychology, especially Hungian psychology, as either a science or as an ensoulung of arid overspiritualized religions drowns in the depths and tides of Jung’s personified, poetic, haunting, lyrical imaginings — ‘blood for the ghosts’ of the sacred Dead.

[Tamer Sadek · Rating 2 out of 5]

The text is only superficially about the Red Book, what we are mostly left with are loose commentaries on related themes which never quite manage to give an elucidating word on the meaning of Liber Novus other than some paltry chat on the theme of the ancestors.

I came to this book looking for exegetical material addressing the context and meaning of Jung's Red Book, and I cannot say that this work is able to provide that.

Lastly I would say it is a somewhat inward-looking series of conversations which we are given, the reader is somewhat left outside of the internal signification of the dialogue, and as such unable to really assimilate it into any wider contexts of understanding.

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe the intent of this book is to leave you feeling uncomfortable with the entire western structure of modern psychology or it is a humble admission that we truly don’t know how to comprehend the human psyche. The authors make the argument that Jung’s “Red Book” reveals the truth about Jung’s real feelings around the conceptual Jungian psychology that his followers created. It does this through illustrating the complexity and richness of his own inner cosmology. The dialogue between the authors is a long Wrestling match of wrenching the human psyche back from the over simplification and reductionist view of the mind.

The central thesis is what to do with psychology now, how does it move forward after Jung’s Red Book demonstrates that humans need a better map for navigating their own inner cosmology. Jung seems to be bent on redeeming the central Christian mythos as the central guiding story for western civilization. That modern art is too focused on descending and staying in the underworld, the wasteland and not returning with anything of value to help the further evolution and growth of culture and civilization.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was amazing when Carl Jung's Red Book/Liber Novus was released in 2009, including the original illlumination as well as translations and footnotes. Even then, it was a bit heady...obtuse, abstract and a bit meandering in my opinion. To be fair, Jung was developing his own personal cosmology while grappling with the notion that myths are universal.

Lament of the Dead is a bit of codex to it, through the conversations of two Jung scholar's we get some nice glimmerings and gleanings that went over my head.

It's not a definitive summary, but it's helping properly frame the work--that it's a book for and about the dead. "We need the coldness of death to see clearly", interestingly Hillman died during the production of this book.

[Dana Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is, in my opinion, for those who have an interest and also some previous study/experience with Carl Jung and Jungian psychology. It is a two-way series of conversations by the translator, compiler, and editor of Jung's "Red Book" and the noted psychologist, James Hillman. I don't believe it is necessary to get something out of this book without, as in my case, having read the Red Book.
That said, I got a lot out of the book and feel, within the caveats noted above, others with similar experiences would likewise benefit. Even so, have your dictionary close at hand.

[Michael Neal]

Brilliant and annoying. These two - Hillman and Shamdasani - seem to have no idea what other people - people other than Jungians - have been doing with Jung's material. Their intention to bring the dead back into awareness is typical of this. They recognize their importance but seem incapable -of offering advice - caught savagely against their unspoken rock of disbelief.

[Anita Ashland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insights from Hillman about the Red Book in a conversational format, which makes for ease of reading. Especially interesting are the discussions about Christianity in the Red Book. These conversations provide a nice overview of the Red Book.

[Adam Kościuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Good

[Chris Tou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read.

[DAVID ADAMS · Rating 5 out of 5]

I get a kick out of these men discussing art, and saying what it is and what it is not. (Page 43 and onward). Actually, they don’t have a clue what they are talking about. Jung was a very good artist, no ifs ands or buts. They have an aversion to call it what it is. They make assumptions of what went on in the minds of artists when they were working.
Albert Schweitzer was an example of Jung’s individuated man, yet he was envious of him. Jung was human! (Pages 54-55).
I may critique, but this is both a profound dialogue and a fun read. You get to listen to two Jungian giants.
During this time I again made a list of the books that most influenced my life from early childhood until now. These are my closest archetypal forms, the voices and people who influenced my inner being.
This discussion opens many vistas. It is about tossing ideas back and forth, while you are adding a 3rd. Voice by the notes you write in your own black book. It is all very expansive, a valuable text in the Jungian canon. Most valuable in that it questions the whole enterprise. What are we really doing when we are doing psychology? How did the publication of The Red Book change everything about the way we read Jung? The more you read into this little book the more weight it carries.

[J. Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect companion piece to Jung' Red Book.I
I started reading the Red Book three years ago, I've gone through it twice.
Then I read these conversations between Shamdasani and Hillman, and it reflected back to me the appropriateness of my own insights.

Fifteen conversations about the Book, Jung and the state of psychology.

The earliest conversations explicate Jung's work, providing a framework for exploring and understanding the Book. The explanations of their perspectives is illuminating. They discuss the lament inherent in Jung, and express what it means to communicate, to open oneself to attend to the dead. Not your personal dead, but the mythical dead, the historical dead.

The final conversations revolve around what has become of psychology over the decade since Jung began his explorations into the psyche.

I myself have a B.A. in psychology, and I've spent the rest of my time on Earth discovering what consciousness is about.

Academic psychology and I were never a good fit, and I always blamed my inadequacies for the lack of pursuit in that are. It turns out that professional psychology is too small a box to fit my own explorations into it.

I'm the Red Book, discovers and travels with the archetypes, and constructs his own mythology and psychology from this experiences of the writing of the Red Book.

I would recommend these two volumes to anyone in pursuit of or interested in psychology, philosophy, psychology, and even sociology. Even the Book about the Book has that wide-ranging scope and depth.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are familiar with the Jung's ideas of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation, and want to know more, then this conversation between two prominent Jungians can help you. I read the Red Book looking for more on the transcendent in his life and works. Jeffry C.Miller, Transcendent Function: Jung's Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue with the Unconscious, was a more suitable choice for me.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not one of my favorite texts in terms of understanding the importance of CG jung's Redbook. However, the commentary offered by James Hillman throughout these various chapters are gems. I also continue to have a reaction to Sony Shamdasani. He has a reputation for keeping lock and key as regards the Jung family archive, and this is still quite present in his commentary.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Red Book in Perspective

From Abraxas to the Red One, the Sacrificed Girl, Siegfried, Philemon, the Worm and the Blue Shade (Christ), an x ray of the culmination of everything from the pre Socratics, Wotan, Roman religions, Christianity and the nihilism of the modern age.

[August · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book of dialogues from two people who spent their life immersed in all aspects of Jungian psychology and The Red Book. Extraordinary book...

[Martin Hassman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kratší! Mělo to být kratší!! Získalo by to na přehlednosti a srozumitelnosti. Dobrá kniha, ale ty rozhovory chtělo víc editovat a krátit.

[Lindsay Moore]

There could be no better authors to explore the end of Jung's thought than James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani. The book is cast as a conversation between the authors as they explore the outer limits of Jungian psychology. It is a study of psychology and where it stands with the recent publication of Jung's previously unknown 'Red Book,' and what it portends, which is "the end of psychology" as consciousness rises to an intuitive level that is too intuitive to reveal. While the Red Book is quite a study in itself, the 'Lament of the Dead' assumes an understanding of this secret work of Jung's to move forward into the transcendence of the psyche, and that which lies beyond. It is a very profound work, and at once an "easy" book of intuitive insights and a very difficult book that thinks pass the psyche. I took this book on a vacation with my partner to Iceland in the winter of 2014 to explore the awful remoteness of the central glaciers and the Northern Lights. I read it all the way there on the airplane and all the way back, finishing it as we flew down across Canada and North America pacing the setting sun. It was the perfect setting, as was the solitary loneliness of Iceland's snowy mountains.