Apparently, Jung induced his own hallucinations, and then over a 16+ year period, kept notes and made detailed illustrations of his psychedelic experiences, which is the book that is soon to be released.
It also appears to me that this man, Richard Noll, had found copies of parts of Jung's work, “The Red Book”, and was prepared to release it with or without the collaboration of the Jung heirs.
Jung's method, if I understand correctly, is for a person to record their dreams and have a specialist analyze them. So it kind of makes sense that he would induce his own “dreams” and then try to analyze them. I have some concerns that inducing dreams with drugs is the way to go, but that's another issue.
From the descriptions of the illustrations he made, it sounds like he had some pretty vivid “dreams” - or would it be fair to call them “hallucinations”?
What I got from the article is that Carl Jung was a complicated man, with complicated issues. And that this book, “The Red Book”, to be released soon, is a difficult and complicated read.
As for me, I rarely dream, and when I do, it tends to be of a problem solving nature. I wonder what Jung would say about that... 8^)
Gregor Mendel is called the father of genetics because of his lineage studies of pea plants. But modern analysis of his actual datasets pretty much establish that he fudged them a bit to control the flyers. Nonetheless, this doesn’t take away from his insights into the structure of the generational ordering he was observing - he just wanted to make a stronger case for his theory.
I think Jung is a lot like that. Not that he fudged his data (Jung’s data was hardly quantifiable), but rather, he was trying to correlate reproduceable patterns of meaning where other people were simply caught up in the mental experiences. But this was actually a strength for Jung, because whenever the experiences were non-normal, through drugs or even abnormal hallucinations, he still simply observed their patterns and recorded them according to their symbolism. As a result, he was able to extract invaluable signal from all the noise, and go on to explore the meanings of those patterns.
And even if he was wrong about the meanings of the patterns (many of which are better explained by cognitive psychology and brain function analysis), he formalized the meta-analysis of mental patterns itself, and really, in that, invented psychology as a science. In comparison, Freud just took Jung’s ideas and applied his own meanings to Jung’s pattern formalization process.