Housing Complexes: Redesigning the house of psyche in light of a curious mistranslation of C. G. Jung appropriated by Gaston Bachelard

Jung's metaphor of house as psyche is often regarded as little more than an arbitrary and reductive ‘diagram’ that imposes structure onto his conception of psyche with its various parts and underpinning libidinal processes. And yet, as this paper argues, the impact and relevance of the architectural metaphor extends beyond a conceptual consideration of psyche into a lived experience of it. It is thus also Jung's phenomenological description of the way human beings dwell and experience their placement or non-placement within the world in which they find themselves. This paper elucidates these different interpretations. First, through Jung's accounts of his ‘dream-house’ in connection with the likely architectural influences of those houses in which he had lived or had designs to live; and second, through an examination of a curious mistranslation of one of Jung's overlooked descriptions of the architectural metaphor found in the celebrated work, La poetique de l'espace (1957)/The poetics of space (1958) by the renowned French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The metaphorical description under scrutiny is the relationship between cellar and attic rooms, which Jung uses in his essay ‘Allgemeines zur komplextheorie’ (1934)/‘A review of the complex theory’ (1948a) to expound his understanding of the effects of the complex on ego-consciousness. Bachelard's misreading inadvertently reverts the placement of the two rooms, thereby proffering something akin to a ‘topsy-turvy’ house of psyche. The implications of Bachelard's misreading for an understanding of Jungian complex theory is explored, and the wider conceptual and phenomenological implications for the possible redesign or renovation of Jung's metaphor of house as psyche are ascertained.