Tower C. G. Jung

GRAD­U­ALLY, through my sci­en­tific work, I was able to put my fan­tasies and the con­tents of the un­con­scious on a solid foot­ing. Words and pa­per, how­ever, did not seem real enough to me; some­thing more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in stone of my in­ner­most thoughts and of the knowl­edge I had ac­quired. Or, to put it an­other way, I had to make a con­fes­sion of faith in stone. That was the be­gin­ning of the “Tower,” the house which I built for my­self at Bollin­gen.
 It was set­tled from the start that I would build near the wa­ter. I had al­ways been cu­ri­ously drawn by the scenic charm of the up­per lake of Zürich, and so in 1922 I bought some land in Bollin­gen. It is sit­u­ated in the area of St. Mein­rad and is old church land, hav­ing for­merly be­longed to the monastery of St. Gall.

At first I did not plan a proper house, but merely a kind of prim­i­tive one-story dwelling. It was to be a round struc­ture with a hearth in the cen­ter and bunks along the walls. I more or less had in mind an African hut where the fire, ringed by a few stones, burns in the mid­dle, and the whole life of the fam­ily re­volves around this cen­ter. Prim­i­tive huts con­cretize an idea of whole­ness, a fa­mil­ial whole­ness in which all sorts of small do­mes­tic an­i­mals like­wise par­tic­i­pate. But I al­tered the plan even dur­ing the first stages of build­ing, for I felt it was too prim­i­tive. I re­al­ized it would have to be a reg­u­lar two-story house, not a mere hut crouched on the ground. So in 1923 the first round house was built, and when it was fin­ished I saw that it had be­come a suit­able dwelling tower.

The feel­ing of re­pose and re­newal that I had in this tower was in­tense from the start. It rep­re­sented for me the ma­ter­nal hearth. But I be­came in­creas­ingly aware that it did not yet ex­press ev­ery­thing that needed say­ing, that some­thing was still lack­ing. And so, four years later, in 1927, the cen­tral struc­ture was added, with a tower-like an­nex.
 Af­ter some time had passed — again the in­ter­val was four years — I once more had a feel­ing of in­com­plete­ness. The build­ing still seemed too prim­i­tive to me, and so in 1931 the tower-like an­nex was ex­tended. I wanted a room in this tower where I could ex­ist for my­self alone. I had in mind what I had seen in In­dian houses, in which there is usu­ally an area — though it may be only a cor­ner of a room sep­a­rated off by a cur­tain — to which the in­hab­i­tants can with­draw. There they med­i­tate for per­haps a quar­ter or half an hour, or do Yoga ex­er­cises. Such an area of re­tire­ment is es­sen­tial in In­dia, where peo­ple live crowded very close to­gether.
 In my re­tir­ing room I am by my­self. I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is al­lowed in there ex­cept with my per­mis­sion. In the course of the years I have done paint­ings on the walls, and so have ex­pressed all those things which have car­ried me out of time into seclu­sion, out of the present into time­less­ness. Thus the sec­ond tower be­came for me a place of spir­i­tual con­cen­tra­tion.
 In 1935, the de­sire arose in me for a piece of fenced-in land. I needed a larger space that would stand open to the sky and to na­ture. And so — once again af­ter an in­ter­val of four years — I added a court­yard and a log­gia by the lake, which formed a fourth el­e­ment that was sep­a­rated from the uni­tary three­ness of the house. Thus a qua­ter­nity had arisen, four dif­fer­ent parts of the build­ing, and, more­over, in the course of twelve years.
 Af­ter my wife’s death in 1955, I felt an in­ner obli­ga­tion to be­come what I my­self am. To put it in the lan­guage of the Bollin­gen house, I sud­denly re­al­ized that the small cen­tral sec­tion which crouched so low, so hid­den, was my­self! I could no longer hide my­self be­hind the “ma­ter­nal” and the “spir­i­tual” tow­ers. So, in that same year, I added an up­per story to this sec­tion, which rep­re­sents my­self, or my ego-per­son­al­ity. Ear­lier, I would not have been able to do this; I would have re­garded it as pre­sump­tu­ous self-em­pha­sis. Now it sig­ni­fied an ex­ten­sion of con­scious­ness achieved in old age. With that the build­ing was com­plete. I had started the first tower in 1923, two months af­ter the death of my mother. These two dates are mean­ing­ful be­cause the Tower, as we shall see, is con­nected with the dead.
C. G. Jung from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

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