Have We Ever Really Read Jung? Sonu Shamdasani on the Collected Works Crisis

Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. So, Lisa, I hear that you recently were talking with Sonu about this big project that the Philharmon Foundation is taking on. They are going through the collected works with a fine tooth comb. They seem to be, challenging a lot of the editorial decisions that were made in the first round in translation. So what did you find out? And by the way, let's, let's let everybody know that you were just in Zurich, Switzerland Right. For the international, conference on analytical psychology and talking with Sonu Shamdasani, the premier historian of all things Jung In and the man responsible for bringing the Red Book, to the public. Yes. So what I'll say is that, when we had Sonu, who is as you said, Jeff, he's really the the world's leading authority on union scholarship, like, hands down. You know, he's kind of a rock star. And we had him on the podcast. It would have been in '20 or '21 when the black books came out, and we we should link to that episode, but we had a wonderful conversation with him, which I remember very well. And I remember him in that conversation talking about the need to reissue the collected works. And, you know, he said they need to be re edited and and re retranslated. And he talked about, how they were the the collected works are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. And I remember he he talked about, you know, wanting to reissue them and and do it chronologically, and it just sort of swept over me. First of all, what what a tremendous amount of work that would be, but also how wonderful that would be because you'd really be able to understand the, you know, the development of Jung's thinking. So I remember in our conversation him saying this and I just well, the penny sort of dropped and I went, God, yes. But he he was, you know, he was talking about how much money it would be to do that and how that just didn't really seem something that was feasible and sort of off in a distant dreamland. So there I was in Zurich at the, International Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, which is the sort of the, you know, Jungian Coachella. You know, it's the big conference that we have every every three years, and this time was in was in Zurich. At least it's not Burning Man. It's just Coachella. Okay. It might be that too. But, and and there it was on …