Basel Upbringing

Abstract

In 1923 Jung began to build his famous tower at Bollingen on the shore of Lake Zurich. There he could retreat from the social and professional demands associated with his home down the lake in Küsnacht and satisfy his deep need for introversion. To avoid the distractions of everyday modern life he deliberately did without such things as plumbing and the telephone. He chopped wood for his stove and used an outhouse built a short distance from the tower. Attuning himself to these simple activities and to the natural rhythms of the seasons fostered the creativity that found expression in his art work, stone carvings, and in his voluminous writings. Jung begins Memories, Dreams, Reflections (hereafter MDR) with the statement “My life is the story of the self-realization of the unconscious.”1 The tower was the realization of the first systemic fantasy that he had ever experienced and occurred when he was a boy in Basel. While walking along the Rhine on his way to school he imagined the city as situated on a huge lake from which arose a rocky hill. “On the rock stood a well-fortified castle with a tall keep, a watchtower. This was my house.”2 That it contained a library and an alchemical laboratory prefigured his activities at Bollingen where he was to carve his famous stone with alchemical inscriptions in Latin and Greek.KeywordsPatrician FamilyGerman WriterNefarious ActivityLatin TeacherClassical MythologyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.