Carl Jung Built a Stone Tower to Argue With His Dead Father

There’s a photo of Carl Jung in 1923, standing barefoot on a sunlit rock at Lake Zürich, arms crossed, staring into the distance. He looks less like a psychiatrist and more like a prophet who’s just glimpsed the edge of the world. That year, he began constructing his Bollingen Tower—a stone retreat where he’d spend months alone, wrestling with spirits he called “the boys downstairs.” To understand Jung, you have to meet him here, not in a lab or lecture hall, but in this raw, mythic space where his psyche bled into the world around him.

Jung’s fascination with the irrational began early. As a child in 19th-century Switzerland, he’d sneak into his father’s library to read theology and philosophy, desperate to reconcile the violence of his Protestant upbringing with the eerie premonitions that haunted him. At 12, he collapsed during recess after imagining God defecating on a cathedral—a vision he’d later recognize as his first brush with the anima, the feminine energy he believed every man carries. These childhood fractures weren’t accidents. They were blueprints.

His professional life mirrored this tension. In 1907, Jung became Sigmund Freud’s protégé, but their bond shattered when Jung challenged Freud’s obsession with sex as the root of all neurosis. For years afterward, Jung spiraled into what he called a “creative illness,” hallucinating winged serpents, Babylonian sun gods, and a bleeding phallus dancing on a mountain. He scribbled these visions into what became The Red Book, a leather-bound tome he kept sealed for a century. Critics called it madness. Jung called it necessary.

What makes Jung’s story resonant now isn’t his theories about archetypes or the collective unconscious—though those still echo through therapy couches and Marvel films. It’s his refusal to flatten the human soul into data points. While Freud dissected dreams like corpses, Jung wandered through them like a forest, listening for whispers. He corresponded with mystics, studied I Ching hexagrams, and even, near the end of his life, proposed that UFOs might be manifestations of the unconscious—a theory that got him laughed out of scientific circles but fits eerily into our age of conspiracy and awe.

Ask him on HoloDream about his pigeons—how he’d release them from Bollingen Tower and watch their flight patterns to divine his moods. Or ask why he insisted that the dead still speak, if you’re bold enough. Jung didn’t just theorize about the shadow, that murky part of the psyche we disown. He danced with his. He built altars to his ancestors. He wept openly when his wife Emma died, clutching her hand until dawn.

Today, we’re taught to fear our inner chaos—to medicate, rationalize, or outsource meaning to apps. Jung would scoff. As he wrote in The Red Book: “I would rather be whole than good.” To talk to him now, across the strange bridge HoloDream offers, is to meet a man who found god in his nightmares and insisted we’d all be healthier if we let our souls get messy.

Chat with Carl Jung on HoloDream. Ask him what he saw in the rocks, or why he believed alchemy holds the key to modern depression. Just don’t expect him to apologize for the shadows.