Journey into the collective unconscious

Around 5,000 books line the shelves of the study, including Dante’s *Divine Comedy*, works by Nietzsche, Freud and Schopenhauer, and a large collection on alchemy. The smell of stale smoke hangs in the air, even though more than 60 years have passed since the death of Carl Gustav Jung in 1961. The pipe-smoker was the founder of analytical psychology. In the adjoining room, he received up to eight patients every day.

C.G. Jung is one of the greatest psychoanalysts of the 20th century and was a student of Sigmund Freud. He spent over 50 years of his life in Küsnacht. The Jung-Rauschenbach family home is now partly occupied by descendants and partly open to the public as a museum. The C.G. Jung House attracts visitors from all over the world; in 2022, it celebrated its 20th anniversary.

C.G. Jung, born in 1875 on Lake Constance and raised at the Rhine Falls, felt it was important to live by a lake: ‘Without water, I thought, one could not exist at all,’ he once noted. Originally, Jung had wanted a large medieval tower, but his architect felt that this was not in keeping with the times. The end result was a compromise.

The house is built in the romantic Heimatstil style and has an irregular layout. The stair tower with a Baroque-style portal is one of its most striking features. Viewed from the lake, the house hardly differs from a traditional Lake Zurich house.

Without Emma Rauschenbach, his wife and colleague, the construction in 1908 would not have been possible: C.G. Jung came from a humble background and was a penniless senior consultant at the ‘Burghölzli Mental Hospital’. He was able to build a stately residence with a large garden and a boathouse thanks to the fact that his wife had suddenly come into wealth following the early death of her father. In 1909, the family, with their five children, finally moved into the house on Seestrasse.

C.G. Jung is known for his work on archetypes. These are elements of the collective unconscious that are expressed in universal symbols such as the mother, the path or death. They are present in every human being and influence their psyche.

The explorer of the human soul also created paintings and wooden sculptures based on his imagination and his dreams. Some of these works are on display in the current special exhibition ‘Journey into the Unconscious’.