Lament of the Dead

Book excerpt: 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.