The central and most important aspect of Carl Jung’s psychology is his concept of the collective unconscious. Everything else is essentially an outworking or a consequence of that most central idea. So, what is the collective unconscious? It is the deepest-most part of our psyches. Our psyche can be divided up into three parts: first, our conscious, which is exactly that - everything we are conscious of in any given moment. So now, for instance, you are conscious of me, this space we’re in, and whatever other thoughts happen to be occupying you, perhaps what you’re having for dinner tonight. Then secondly, there’s your personal unconscious, which is everything in your head that was put there by you, by way of your own experiences, which you’re not conscious of at this very moment. And finally, the hypothetical collective unconscious is everything in your head that you’re not currently conscious of, that was not put there by you - images, sounds, ideas, which we have all residually inherited from our ancestors. Speaking non-literally, it’s in our blood, or in our DNA. It’s within us all “collectively”, hence the collective unconscious. So, what does this have to do with architecture?

Well, let’s take a piece of architecture we’re familiar with: our own homes. The concept of home can be thought about using these three levels of the psyche. First, our conscious. When I speak about home, you will bring to awareness, usually, the building within which you currently live, your own home. It’s the place where you can relax, it's a place where you can be yourself, which is in itself interesting. Why have we designated that particular box, but no other, the place where we can be ourselves? And when we move house, as I have done recently, it doesn’t feel like home for a time. It often has an uncanny feel to it, we need to get used to this new place, or in a strange way, the new place needs to get used to us. Home almost acts like a tangible extension to who we are that has expanded out to fill the house that we occupy. My office in particular is a lot like that, an outward expression of my interior self. From the furniture we install, to the way we arrange it, from the pictures we hang, to the indoor plants that we tend, all this says something about us. So what, then, informs our sense of home? Well, our concept of home will have been shaped by us consciously only to a very small extent.

Generally, our feelings and beliefs concerning home are shaped unconsciously. There is one big exception to that, and that is if our sense of home has been violated at some point. If we have been harmed within our home in one way or another, that often entails a process in which we must consciously re-establish our sense of home. But generally, our sense is shaped unconsciously. It’s shaped by the home (or homes) we have been part of, most significantly (probably) our childhood home. Our beliefs concerning home are greatly informed by our childhood home. That’s not to say that our current home necessarily shares our childhood home’s aesthetic, rather I’m referring to our more intangible beliefs concerning home: what is the purpose of a home; how does one act and be within the home; is your ideal home loud and busy or is it quiet and subdued…? In these ways, our beliefs concerning home are either a reflection of, or (if it was trying), a reaction against, our childhood home.

And then finally, going deeper into the psyche, into the unconscious, how does the collective unconscious inform our sense of home? What are the universal ideals concerning home, the images, and senses, which we all as human beings share? The first word that comes to mind is ‘safety’. You can imagine primordial man in search of the place where he might lay his head, the safe refuge. This must be the most fundamental aspect of home; when a home becomes unsafe, for whatever reason, we feel shaken right down to our core, and understandably so, for this archaic image that is imprinted upon our souls is being violated.

The second word that comes to mind, which is very closely related to safety, is territory. Safety and territory go hand in hand. Again you can imagine primordial man seeking to establish and protect territory. When territorial space is invaded, one’s safety is threatened - the invasion of space automatically entails threat. And what is territory? It is literally parcelled out space on the ground, which is important to specify, because of course today one does not necessarily live upon one's own parcelled out space on the ground, like our ancestors did. One may live in a high-rise flat for instance.

So, the argument could be made that to live in a space which is not a territorially established parcel of land is in fact a violation of our inherited (through the collective unconscious) image of home, which seems, to me, problematic and true in equal measure. After all, if you imagine the ideal family home, who among us imagines a flat? I think everyone intuites the ideal to be a home which is separate, unique, private, and protected. But of course, whether they can achieve that, or even whether they should strive to achieve, that is another question.

Part 2

We intuit home to be so crucial, so fundamental, that we even give the gods homes on earth. That is what temples are - homes for gods to reside in. The central focus of the Old Testament is the Temple in Jerusalem, because that is God’s home on earth. He was thought to be (in some sense), really in there. There is a recurring idea in Jewish mythology that to look upon God directly causes you to die, because his glory is more than we can take. And so, whenever God does appear to people in the Old Testament, he almost always obscures or covers himself in some way, to protect us mere mortals. Such as when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to receive the law - the mountain is enveloped in cloud. Which is why, when it came to God taking up residence within his Temple in Jerusalem, people accidentally catching sight of God and dying as a result was an actual concern. Every year, the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies, (the innermost part of the temple) to sprinkle blood on the altar, to fulfil Levitical law. But what if the high priest accidentally caught sight of God and died? Solution: the high priest had a rope tied around his waist, so that if he did accidentally see God and die, it was at least possible to pull his body back out. So, homes are critical. Even gods (apparently) require them.

Our unconscious desires concerning homes, such as the ones I’ve already mentioned (the need for safety and territory), are so fundamental that they are projected onto the divine. God requires a parcel of land, the temple, and a legal, religious and social system about him to ensure his safety. And the real existential crisis for the Jewish people arose when God’s home, God’s safety and territory, was violated. Most gods, when conquered in this way by a foreign power, die, but Yahweh instead evolved. He becomes nomadic with his people, transcending some of his human-like traits, such as the need for designated territory and human-ensured safety. And as the tradition increasingly stresses, ‘my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord’.

Okay so, the primordial or received wisdom of the collective unconscious sets us on a trajectory towards safety and territory. As I’ve alluded to, our (what should I call it?) deep seated psychological propensity is to desire territory, and that does create some problems - namely, that it is surely not possible for our global economy to sustain a system in which that psychological want is realised for every individual. And even if it were possible, the environment could certainly not sustain such a system, as it cannot even sustain this system. Indeed, the economy, and the environment, seem to compel us necessarily towards tighter and tighter urban configurations. It’s a strange paradox that those who live in tiny high-rise flats in heavily urbanised areas, totally alienated from nature, and consequently themselves, are in fact, per capita, (it seems) doing considerably less damage to nature when compared to those who live in rural areas, close to nature, particularly those trying to realise some agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal. What I’m saying is, I believe, or it at least seems to me, that seeking one’s own self-actualisation is at least to some degree in conflict with what is in the interest of humanity, collectively. And that is a really big problem that I hope I’m wrong about. It is almost as if we have been pre-programmed in such a way that we will inevitably bring about our own destruction.

If it is fair to set our own self-actualisation up against the longevity of the planet and the human race in general in this way, if that is a fair dichotomy to pose, then it's worth considering, given that stark choice, which of those two options you would choose. I already know which I would choose: I would choose the meaning of life over life itself. I would choose self-actualisation, and my own individuation, over self-denial for the sake of longevity for longevity’s sake. I do not, however, choose ignorance. My lot is to seek my own self-actualisation, while at the same time wholly recognising the harm and damage I am necessarily causing in the process. And so, all this brings me to the final, primordially realised truism of the image of home. It must be safe, it must be territorially situated, and once those two are realised it can also come to be a reflection of my interior self. And to illustrate this, we had our second reading, from Carl Jung, concerning his Tower, which we can take as the ideal - the self being realised in architecture.

Of course this project of Jung’s was less complicated in the 1920s, because it wasn’t evident then that we were on an environmentally destructive trajectory at that point, and so he was at liberty to be what we might characterise today as self-indulgent. But who knows, maybe as I’ve suggested we should all strive forward in a likewise manner, if we do want to hold up our own individuation as paramount. So, what did Jung’s tower entail? In the period following his infamous estrangement from Sigmund Freud, he went through a period that has been referred to as his “creative illness” stage, which some have described as a psychotic break. I don’t think this is a fair characterisation, because a psychotic break entails a state of mind which renders someone incapable of functioning normatively within society, and that never happened for Jung. Even at the height of his so-called “creative illness” he was still functioning within society, seeing and treating patients. And immediately following this stage is when he set about building his tower on Lake Zurich. A lot could be said about the tower, more than I can cover now, so I’ll just make a few salient points.

First, the tower is still there on Lake Zurich. However, it is not a museum, or in the public domain; it is still in the Jung family as private property. Second, part of the mythology surrounding the tower is that Jung himself built it, a claim which is made more explicit later in the chapter, but it's not really true. He, at most, helped build it. It’s a realisation of his vision, but it certainly wasn’t made brick for brick by him. Third, what the tower is then, is a physical representation of his own conceived-of mythology, his own imaginal world, literally concretised, which I think is an amazing idea. It’s not just him filling pre-created space, as we all do, it’s him shaping his own space, and moving past what the socially contrived demands of his time are for how space should be used, should be treated, towards his own architectural expression of space which reflects deeply himself, and perhaps even beyond that, the longings of our own unconsciously realised primordial self, collectively.

I have not been there personally. Given that it’s private property, it is a difficult place to visit. But I have heard first-hand accounts that attest to its numinous quality, which suggests to me something which I think is quite profound. When we wholly allow our interior self to find an exterior tangible expression in the world, the result is numinosity. The result is something that we feel intuitively drawn towards. And that feels to me like something we should all strive to pursue, a tangible expression in the world of our innermost selves. For therein, numinosity lies…

Amen.

Home, Individuation, and the Tower