Carl Jung on the Permeability of Psyche: Nature, Ancestry and the Living World
- aphillipsarts
- Apr 9, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 27, 2025
Introduction
Carl Gustav Jung often wrote with the intimacy of someone who had listened closely to the more-than-human world. In his reflections from Bollingen, the place where he built his tower along the shore of Lake Zurich, we glimpse a vision of the psyche that is not contained within the limits of the individual. Instead, it stretches, permeates, and participates in everything that lives. Jung’s writing here is not only philosophical but experiential. He is describing something lived, embodied, and felt.
Although diverging from Jung on many points, James Hillman (founder of Archetypal Psychology) also emphasised that psyche is within us, and we are within psyche. I highly recommend Hillman's work in general, and in this instance with particular reference to nature, animals, and beauty, about which he spoke very profoundly.
Jung’s Experience at Bollingen: Psyche as Landscape
"At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splash of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."
In this quote Jung is describing his experience of the tower he constructed at Bollingen on the shore of lake Zurich. This suggests that psyche is not simply 'inside' the human, but flows through all life. Or a better way to put it might be - through all being. If we look outside we see our inner nature reflected, when we look deeply within we find connection to all that seemed to be so separate. This connection also relates to our past, which for Jung tends to mean beyond our individual lives and includes the ancestors, the neglect of which is a recurring theme in his work.
"Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland."
Although he feels the way of modern humanity so often deviates from the 'natural' world in certain respects, there is always connection to our personal ancestral history, and by extension the deep past as a species.
Jung’s time at Bollingen was central to his understanding of the psyche as something far larger than the individual. Bollingen was not a retreat from life but a return to its wider dimensions. He described the tower as a kind of living symbol of his own unfolding, built gradually as different phases of his inner life emerged. Being there allowed him to inhabit his inner world while recognising his deep kinship with the earth itself.
Bollingen becomes almost a character in Jung’s memoir, a place where stones, water, trees, and seasons reveal something of the soul. His description invites us to ask: what if psyche is not something we possess, but something we participate in? What if our sense of individuality is only one expression of a wider and older intelligence continuous with the natural world?
The Ancestral Dimension: Psyche That Includes Those Who Came Before Us
"There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house."
This passage reveals another essential aspect of Jung’s understanding: the psyche is not only shared across the natural world but extended across time. Our psychological life is inseparable from the lives of those who came before us. For Jung, the ancestors lived not as literal ghosts but as formative presences, questions, unfinished patterns, and tendencies carried in the collective psyche.
Modern culture often imagines the self as a neatly bounded unit. Jung’s writing challenges that assumption. He suggests that psychological work is relational not only with other people but with the larger field of time. The past is not gone. It speaks through dreams, symptoms, stories, images, and intuitions. It asks to be acknowledged.
The idea that we must tend to the ancestral dimension appears throughout Jung’s work.
He was concerned that modernity had severed many of these vital threads. In ignoring the ancestors, he felt, we put ourselves at risk of a profound psychic amnesia. At Bollingen, he sensed the unbroken continuity between his life and the lives that preceded him. In carving figures and symbols into the stone, he felt he was responding to ancient questions that still lingered.
Many people today are drawn to the idea of intergenerational stories and the psychological influence of ancestry. Jung’s reflections show that these ideas are not new. They belong to a long history of recognising our place within a deep lineage.
The Rhizome of Life: The Hidden Ground of Being
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains."
This passage encapsulates Jung’s sense of a deeper continuity underlying the visible world. The rhizome is a powerful metaphor for the unseen foundation of life, a vast, interconnected root system from which individual lives and cultures sprout and fade. The visible is temporary, and the invisible persists.
This idea is deeply ecological, long before ecological psychology (usually abbreviated now as ecopsychology) existed. Jung recognised the continuous cycles of life and civilisation, yet also the presence of something enduring beneath these cycles. Psyche, in this sense, is linked to the enduring root system of being. Our lives are blossoms that appear briefly but arise from something far more ancient.
In psychotherapy today, many people come seeking reconnection, grounding, or meaning. Jung’s image of the rhizome suggests that connection is not something we must invent. It is something that already holds us, quietly and continually. Our work is to rediscover the roots that sustain us.
Psyche, Nature, and Modern Life: Why Jung Still Matters
The quotes gathered from "The Earth Has a Soul", edited by Meredith Sabini, reveal how Jung grappled with nature, technology, and the modern world. His concerns remain profoundly contemporary. In a time of ecological crisis, digital overload, and fragmentation, Jung’s insistence that psyche is permeable, relational, and rooted in the more-than-human world feels especially relevant.
Reconnection with the natural world
Jung’s reflections challenge our cultural habit of imagining psyche as something confined to the individual mind. Instead, we are invited to see ourselves as expressions within a wider field of life.
Remembering ancestry and lineage
Jung believed that modernity often forgets the past. Psychological health requires acknowledging the stories and patterns we inherit.
Attention to what is hidden
The rhizome teaches that the foundations of life are mostly unseen. Depth psychology begins where appearances end.
Living experience over intellectual theory
For Jung, Bollingen was an embodied encounter with the soul. His psychology was rooted in presence, not abstraction.
Source
Quotes were found in "The Earth Has A Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life", edited by Meredith Sabini.
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Psychotherapist, and Creative Mentor in south Wales.
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