The red book liber novus is a red leather bound folio manuscript crafted by the swiss psychiatrist carl gustav jung between 1915 and about 1930 it recounts and comments upon the authors psychological experiments between 1913 and 1916 and is based on manuscripts known as black books first drafted by jung in 1913 15 and 1917 despite being nominated as the central work in jungs oeuvre it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009 in october 2009 . The red book published to wide acclaim in 2009 contains the nucleus of c g jungs later works it was here that he developed his principal theories of the archetypes the collective unconscious and the process of individuation that would transform psychotherapy from treatment of the sick into a means for the higher development of the personality. The red book published to wide acclaim in 2009 contains the nucleus of c g jungs later works it was here that he developed his principal theories of the archetypes the collective unconscious and the process of individuation that would transform psychotherapy from treatment of the sick into a means for the higher development of the personality. In 1957 c g jung stated that the imaginative and visionary events recorded in the red book liber novus which he began transcribing in 1914 were the foundation to all his subsequent work my entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream