New York ? The Red Book, an intricate 16-year record of Carl Jung’s journey into his unconscious that has never been seen publicly, is going on display in an exhibit at a New York museum that coincides with publication of the volume, rendered in the Swiss psychoanalyst’s elaborate calligraphy and richly hued paintings.

The tome’s existence had always been known, but scholars and the public have never seen it. After Jung’s death in 1961, it was left in his Zurich home until it was moved to a bank safe deposit box sometime in the late 1980s.

Jung’s descendants resisted historians’ requests over the years to have the Red Book published. But after two partial typed draft manuscripts surfaced, they allowed a London historian of psychology, Sonu Shamdasani, who first approached them in 1997, to translate the work from the original.

The Red Book — equal parts extraordinary book of science and work of art — is an exquisite illuminated manuscript comparable to the artistry of the Book of Kells. It is written on heavy-gauge paper in Jung’s elegant calligraphy and filled with his dreamlike and painstaking tempera paintings of mythological figures and symbolic graphic forms in deep red, teal, blue and green brushstrokes.