In 1913 when C. G. Jung began to grapple with his life-changing journey of self-transformation, he copied in his personal Black Books a few lines from Dante’s Commedia which enigmatically referred to the powerful purifying action of the “flame of love”. A little later, Toni Wolff annotated at the top of Black Book 4 a reference to the “Primal Love” which is mentioned in Dante’s inscription to the gate of Hell. Starting from here, in a properly Dantesque fashion, the motif of eros and love impregnates the pages of Jung’s “most difficult experiment”, The Red Book, upon a continuous intersection of personal and symbolical events. This seminar interrogates Jung’s phenomenology of love at the crossroad of eros and psyche and positions it as a crucial key to access The Red Book,while unfolding a fundamental thread of the psychological system which developed on its basis.    

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Dante, 2008 (1308-1321), The Divine Comedy (Commedia), tr. by Charles H. Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Jung, C. G., 2009 (1913-1959), “Mysterium”, in The Red Book: Liber novus (New York/London: Norton & Company), pp. 245-255

Jung, C.G., “The Worship of Woman and theWorship of the Soul”, Psychological Types (Psychologische Typen),Collected Works, Vol. 6, §§375-406

Klages, Ludwig, 2018 (1922), OfCosmogonic Eros (Von kosmogonischen Eros) (Munich: Theion Publishing), Ch.1-4, pp. 79-143  

Shamdasani, Sonu, 2020,“Toward a Visionary Science: Jung’s Notebooks of Transformation”, in C. G.Jung, Black Books, 7 vols., (New York/London: Norton & Company), pp. 11-112.

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