Abstract


Although in recent years a few writers have explored the relationship between place and psychology from a psychoanalytic perspective, a more Jungian reading has received less critical attention. The premise of this thesis is that the role of the “outer” environment in the evolution of Jung’s sense of Self and the constructs of analytical psychology has been overlooked on account of a preoccupation with the “inner”. That Jung dedicated an entire chapter of his “autobiography” to a particular place, The Tower, indicates its pivotal role in his life and work, and yet the analysis of its evolution and interpretation found in MDR is surprisingly short. Whilst that narrative is beguiling, I contend that it is underexamined, incomplete, inaccurate, and consequently inadequate in aiding an understanding of a Jungian sense of place. In resituating the Tower, both historically and symbolically, interweaving the topography of the unconscious with the typology of place, a meaningful sense of belonging can be constructed that transcends both inner and outer worlds – Psychic Place.

My study begins by locating Bollingen within the archetypal field of towers whose associative range spans the military, economic, intellectual, erotic, spiritual and alchemical in expressing worldly power and embodying a vessel of psychic transformation. As such a vessel, the “dark sequestered room” of Jung’s childhood home where he was transfixed by Reni’s image of David and Goliath suggests three themes discernible in the Tower, and these define my analysis of it: the above and below, the sacred geometries of the circle and square, and the Other. In my second chapter I trace the Tower’s familial history, set it within a wider landscape and summarise its evolutionary episodes, providing the foundation for the detailed examination that follows which explores “real places” associated with Jung as much as “unreal places”. In the first instance the “anima experiences” that Jung encountered in his youthful environments can be understood as Formative Place and those that he is moved by in later life as Archetypal Place and these constitute chapters III and IV respectively. In realising unconscious material Jung was a prolific painter and many visions found in The Red Book and elsewhere hold clues to his architectural imagination as the imagined places that also form part of chapter IV. Whilst the “house dream” is enshrined in the Jungian canon there are several other “architectural dreams” that can also be read as the architects of Bollingen and indeed Küsnacht, as developed in chapter V, Dream Place. Finally in considering the idea of the Individuating Tower, Christiania Morgan’s cylindrical tower in Massachusetts and Marie-Louise von Franz’s quadrate in Bollingen develop and challenge the predominance of Jung’s Tower as the defining architectural motif of his psychological system.


Martin Gledhill Oct. 2023.