C.G. Jung

After his painful break with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung went through a period of profound upheaval. To find his way through it, he began letting images and inner voices speak to him, writing down what came. Over time, this became The Red Book, an illustrated manuscript in which Jung stages visitations from the dead and inner figures who teach him things he did not consciously know.

At one point, a restless crowd of the dead returns to Jung's study: "We have come back from Jerusalem, where we did not find what we sought." Earlier in the manuscript, one voice identifies himself plainly: "I am Ezechiel, and I am an Anabaptist.”

The Anabaptists were a radical current within the sixteenth-century Reformation, born in Zürich in 1525 when a small group performed an illegal adult baptism, insisting that faith had to be personally chosen and felt, not inherited through ritual or church authority. The same conviction resurfaces later: in the mystic Jakob Böhme, in the Pietist movement, and in the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who described true religion not as correct doctrine but as a felt, intuitive sense of connection to something infinite.

Our exhibition traces an ancient thread into Jung's own century, arguing that his private Red Book was his attempt at this kind of lived transformation: not belief on trust, but knowledge won through experience. It is also, the exhibition proposes, the quiet engine behind Jung's mature psychology and his concept of individuation — becoming, through experience rather than instruction, more fully the person one actually is.

As you move through the books and images gathered here, one question runs beneath them all: can faith, or any big change in who we are, really be handed to us from outside — or must it be lived, felt, and known before it becomes truly our own?