Carl Jung once retreated to the shores of Lake Zurich to build a stone tower by hand. He lived there without electricity or central heating, chopping wood and hauling water, well into his old age. He did this, he said, because the modern person was becoming dangerously detached from the raw, physical reality of existence. For a Swiss psychiatrist at the height of his fame, this was not eccentricity. It was a conviction lived out in stone.
Of all the thinkers I have encountered in my years as a clinical psychologist, Jung has shaped me most quietly and deeply. Freud gave psychology its first vocabulary, but Jung gave it a soul. He was the man who dared to break his professional bond with his own mentor to pursue what he could not UNsee — that the human psyche was vaster than the small, tidy room the science of his time had built for it. He gave us the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the shadow, the anima and animus. But more than any of his concepts, what inspires me is the way he chose to arrive at them.
Jung did not study the mind from a clinical distance. He plunged into his own psyche. For years, he documented his most intense visions and inner dialogues in a massive, hand-illustrated volume now known as the Red Book. He painted his dreams. He spoke to the figures who rose out of his unconscious. He risked what looked, to many of his contemporaries, like madness — and returned with a map that has since guided thousands of clinicians, including me, into the inner worlds of our patients.
One of his lines has become a compass for my practice: Intellectualism is a common cover-up for fear of direct experience.
As a clinical psychologist, I meet this sentence every single day. I meet it in the brilliant young man who can name every cognitive distortion in the textbook but cannot bring himself to call his mother. I meet it in the mother of a child with special needs who has read every article on acceptance but has not yet allowed herself to weep. I meet it, most humbly, in myself—in the moments when I reach for a theory instead of sitting, quietly and defencelessly, with the person in front of me.
Jung understood that we use information as a shield. We read about fitness instead of moving our bodies. We study the mechanics of social interaction instead of risking rejection. We analyze our emotions from a safe distance instead of actually feeling them. Intellectualism gives us the illusion of control; direct experience asks us to surrender to the unknown. Information is cheap. Experience is expensive. One fills the head. Only the other has the power to change a life.
This is why Jung inspires me. Not just because he was a great theorist, but because he refused to let his theories replace his life. He built a tower with his own hands because he knew that a mind untethered from the body becomes a dangerous thing. He wrote in the mornings and split logs in the afternoons. He was, in the truest sense, an embodied thinker.
In my own work, I try, imperfectly, daily, to honour that lesson. To meet my clients not as case files but as travellers. To notice when I am hiding behind my training. To remember that the persons I sit with, whether they carry a diagnosis or a heartbreak, are not problems to be solved but experiences to be entered. Jung taught me that healing does not happen at a safe distance. It happens in the small, brave moment when we finally stop reading about our lives and begin, at last, to live them.
Somewhere on the shore of Lake Zurich, his tower still stands. Cold stone, hand-cut, unshowy. I have never seen it, but I carry a small version of it inside me—a reminder that the deepest work of the psyche is not thought about. It is built slowly, by hand.
That is the inspiration Jung has given me. And it is the one I try, every day, to pass on.
Suela Ndoja
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