The Red Book and the Long Afternoon in the Madhouse of God.

Carl Jung spent the years between 1913 and 1916 voluntarily locked in a cage fight with the unconscious, and the unconscious showed up with brass knuckles made of archetypes.He called it his “confrontation with the unconscious,” but that’s Swiss for “I opened the basement door and the entire abyss threw a house party in my skull.” Visions came nightly: blood-red suns, serpents eating prophets, a bearded old man named Philemon who had owl wings and better one-liners than most psychiatrists. Jung didn’t take notes. He took dictation from God’s id.The neighbors thought he’d finally snapped. His wife budgeted for extra laundry because the man kept coming to breakfast covered in paint and the residue of murdered egos. Freud, hearing rumors, sent a postcard that basically said “told you so” and signed it with the smugness of a man who still believed sex explained everything.Meanwhile Jung built a stone tower by the lake the way other men build bomb shelters, because when the collective unconscious declares war on your personality, you want good masonry. He painted the walls with whatever the depths vomited up: mandalas that spun like UFO hubcaps, dragons French-kissing angels, and one particularly stubborn liver-colored gnome who insisted on being addressed as the Honorable Mister Asshole.The punchline, delivered by Philemon over tea and imaginary biscuits:“You spent your life trying to cure people of God, and God just cured you of being merely Carl.”Years later, when the smoke cleared and the Red Book was locked in a Swiss vault like plutonium wrapped in velvet, Jung looked back on the whole catastrophe with the calm of a man who’s been mugged by the numinous and discovered his wallet was full of get-out-of-ego-free cards.He told his students: “I don’t need to believe in God. I have met him. He’s a bastard, but he has excellent taste in nightmares.”The tower still stands. On quiet nights you can hear the lake laughing at the joke that took forty years to land:The most dangerous thing a psychologist can do is get well.And Jung got so well he had to invent a whole new wing of the madhouse just to check himself out.