Works by
Sonu Shamdasani
(Writer)

Books

• The Red Book [Liber Novus] (October 7, 2009 release), Sonu Shamdasani, ed. and translator) with John Peck and Mark Kyburz, translators
  The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. When Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the heart of it was The Red Book, a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned wit
  
  While Jung considered The Red Book to be his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Now, in a complete facsimile and translation, it is available to scholars and the general public. It is an astonishing example of calligraphy and art on a par with The Book of Kells and the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. This publication of The Red Book is a watershed that will cast new light on the making of modern psychology.  212 color illustrations.  

• Jung Stripped Bare: By His Biographers, Even (2005)
  How many ‘posthumous’ lives does a man have to live? Nearly half a century after his death, C. G. Jung is a subject of continual controversies. Every few years, a new life of Jung appears, each promising to provide the missing master key to the mysteries of his life and work, and to lay bare their secrets. However, with every successive ‘life,’ Jung becomes shrouded in an ever increasing web of rumor, gossip, innuendo and fantasy. We may ask the questions, why are Jung biographies so filled with shortcomings? How did Jung become a fiction? This book addresses these issues. It demonstrates the pitfalls and fallacies of such works, and sets out how his life and work should be approached on an historical basis, drawing on decades of archival investigation and new documentation. It surveys attempts to write Jung’s biography from during his own lifetime till the present, shows how Memories, Dreams, Reflections came to be falsely perceived as his autobiography, and why his Collected Works was never completed. Thus this work lays out an agenda for future studies and discussions of Jung and of his impact on modern psychology and contemporary culture.

• Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (2004)
  After decades of myth making, C. G. Jung remains one of the most misunderstood figures in Western intellectual history. This comprehensive study of the origins of his psychology provides a new perspective on the rise of modern psychology and psychotherapy. It reconstructs the reception of Jung's work in the human sciences, and its impact on the social and intellectual history of the twentieth century. The book creates a basis for any future discussion of Jung by opening new vistas in psychology.

• 
  Les Energies de l'âme: Séminaire sur le yoga de la Kundalini donné en 1932 (2000) by Carl Gustav Jung, Sonu Shamdasani, and Zéno Bianu

• The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga (1999)
  Jung's seminar on Kundalini yoga, presented to the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1932, has been widely regarded as a milestone in the psychological understanding of Eastern thought and of the symbolic transformations of inner experience. Kundalini yoga presented Jung with a model for the developmental phases of higher consciousness, and he interpreted its symbols in terms of the process of individuation. With sensitivity toward a new generation's interest in alternative religions and psychological exploration, Sonu Shamdasani has brought together the lectures and discussions from this seminar. In this volume, he re-creates for today's reader the fascination with which many intellectuals of prewar Europe regarded Eastern spirituality as they discovered more and more of its resources, from yoga to tantric texts. Reconstructing this seminar through new documentation, Shamdasani explains, in his introduction, why Jung thought that the comprehension of Eastern thought was essential if Western psychology was to develop. He goes on to orient today's audience toward an appreciation of some of the questions that stirred the minds of Jung and his seminar group: What is the relation between Eastern schools of liberation and Western psychotherapy? What connection is there between esoteric religious traditions and spontaneous individual experience? What light do the symbols of Kundalini yoga shed on conditions diagnosed as psychotic? Not only were these questions important to analysts in the 1930s but, as Shamdasani stresses, they continue to have psychological relevance for readers on the threshold of the twenty-first century. This volume also offers newly translated material from Jung's German language seminars, a seminar by the indologist Wilhelm Hauer presented in conjunction with that of Jung, illustrations of the chakras, and Sir John Woodroffe's classic translation of the tantric text, the Sat-cakra Nirupana.

• Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (1998)
  As the inspection of Freud's legacy leads scholars to examine seriously his persona, so has analytical psychology come under scrutiny in a whirl of controversy over the character of its founder, C. G. Jung. In Cult Fictions, leading Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani presents the history of the movement's founding, from Jung's establishment of The Psychological Club in Zurich in 1916 to the later reformulations of his approach. Shamdasani relates the disputes over the legitimacy of Jungian analysis to current concerns about the institutionalization of psychotherapy as a science, its impact on popular and academic views of self and society, and the widespread panic concerning cults that has led Jung to be regarded by some as a figure analogous to David Koresh or Jim Jones. Cult Fictions presents a sober, accurate and revealing account of the history of the Jungian movement and an agenda for the evaluation of analytical psychology today.

• Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture (1994)
  Speculations After Freud confronts the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis by bringing together some of the most influential and best known writers on psychoanalysis and culture. These advocates and critics of psychoanalysis, both institutional and theoretical, reveal the powerful role psychoanalytic speculation plays in all areas of culture.
  
  Psychoanalysis has played a pivotal role in challenging the modernist notions of rationality and selfhood. It offers an alternative means of examining how identity is engendered, yet its identity has come into question because of multiple claims to its possession. This volume addresses the dilemmas that afflict contemporary psychoanalysis, transforms the terms in which psychoanalysis has to be seen and shows the portents in store as we enter a post-analytic age.

Other

• Archetypal Sex: Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture (No. 57, 1996) by Jay Livernois, Rachel Pollack, Sonu Shamdasani, and James Hillman

• From India to the Planet Mars (1994) by Theodore Flournoy, Mireille Cifali, and Sonu Shamdasani
  Originally published in 1900, this classic psychological work depicted the multiple existence of the medium Helene Smith, who claimed to have been reincarnated many times. The author provided a psychological interpretation of her beliefs, which contributed to the understanding of the unconscious.