Carl Jung and the Permeability of Psyche
- aphillipsarts
- Apr 9, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
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, where he built his tower on the shore of Lake Zurich, we encounter a vision of psyche that is not contained within the limits of the individual, but stretches into landscape, ancestry and the wider life around us.
Jung did not use permeability of psyche as the name for a particular concept. I use the phrase here to describe something that appears repeatedly in these reflections: a sense that inner and outer life are not entirely sealed from one another, and that psyche participates in a much wider field of being.
Jung was not writing only philosophically. His descriptions arise from lived experience: dwelling beside the lake, working with stone, observing animals and seasons, and experiencing his own life as continuous with something much older.
This quality of permeability is one of the aspects of Jung’s work that continues to interest me most. Psyche is within us, but perhaps we are also within psyche.
Although he diverged from Jung in many respects, James Hillman developed this understanding in particularly fruitful directions through his writing on nature, beauty and the anima mundi, or soul of the world.
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.
Jung is describing his experience at Bollingen, where the tower he constructed gradually became both home and image of his inner life. What emerges from this passage is a sense that psyche does not simply reside “inside” the human being, but participates in a much larger field of existence.
Perhaps being is the better word. Looking outward, we may find something of our inner nature reflected back to us, while looking deeply within may disclose relationships with what initially seemed separate.
This permeability also reaches backwards through time. For Jung, the past often extended well beyond individual biography into ancestry and the deep history of human life.
Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.
Jung frequently felt that modern humanity had become estranged from aspects of the natural world, yet Bollingen allowed him to inhabit a different relationship with time and locality. The tower developed gradually as his life changed, becoming a physical expression of something inward while embedding him more deeply within the surrounding earth.
Bollingen also carries a distinctly mythic, almost haunted atmosphere in Jung’s own accounts. He wrote of hearing footsteps, voices and music around the Tower when no one was there, and elsewhere described the house as populated by the presence of the dead and of his ancestors. Whether these experiences are understood psychologically, spiritually, or somewhere between the two, they deepen the sense that Bollingen was for Jung a place where the usual boundaries of the self seemed unusually permeable.
The Tower becomes almost a character in Jung’s memoir. Stone, water, trees and seasons possess their own presence, and his descriptions invite a larger question: what if psyche is something we participate in rather than something we simply possess? This is a key principle in depth psychology of the kind I practice.
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 introduces another dimension of permeability: psyche extends beyond the individual not only into the surrounding world, but backwards through time.
Jung often wrote of the ancestors as continuing presences whose questions and unfinished concerns live on within us. Whether these are understood psychologically, spiritually, or through some combination of the two, he does not treat the past as something simply finished.
Modern culture often imagines the self as a neatly bounded unit beginning with our own birth. Jung’s writing unsettles that assumption. Dreams, images and inherited stories may carry something of lives that preceded ours, and psychological life becomes part of a much longer conversation.
At Bollingen he experienced this continuity particularly strongly. The figures and symbols he carved into stone were ways of responding to questions that seemed to come from somewhere deeper and older than his conscious personality.
Many people now speak about intergenerational patterns and the psychological influence of ancestry. Jung’s approach reaches beyond a straightforward model of inheritance because ancestry belongs to his wider understanding of psyche as collective, imaginal and not entirely contained by ordinary ideas of individuality.
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 is one of Jung’s most powerful images of continuity. Individual lives and cultures appear briefly above the surface, while something older and less visible persists beneath them.
The rhizome is especially suggestive because it resists the image of the isolated individual. What appears separate above ground may belong below the surface to a much wider system of connection.
There is an ecological dimension here that predates the language of ecopsychology. Jung repeatedly recognised cycles of growth and decay while retaining a strong sense that visible life emerged from something enduring beneath its changing forms.
For me, this image also complicates the contemporary language of “reconnection”. Connection may not be something we need to manufacture from nothing. The rhizome suggests that we are already implicated in relationships we have forgotten how to perceive.
Psyche, nature and modern life
The passages gathered by Meredith Sabini in The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life reveal how persistently Jung returned to the relationship between psyche and the wider world.
His concern feels increasingly relevant in a culture that so often encourages us to experience ourselves as separate units, moving through environments understood primarily in terms of use or convenience. Jung’s writing offers a different picture in which psychological life is porous, relational and entangled with what surrounds us.
This has implications for how we understand psychological suffering and our relationship with the natural world. A sense of disconnection may involve personal history, while also belonging partly to the conditions in which we are living.
Jung’s reflections on ancestry similarly resist the assumption that psychological life begins and ends with the individual. We inherit stories, absences and unresolved questions, while the past continues to work upon us in ways that are not always immediately visible.
His image of the rhizome gathers these ideas together particularly well. Much of what sustains life remains hidden, and depth psychology begins precisely with an interest in what lies beneath the immediately apparent.
Bollingen also reminds us that these ideas were not merely theoretical for Jung. He built, carved, cooked, watched the lake and lived for periods without many of the conveniences of modern life. His psychology emerged partly through sustained attention to a particular way of inhabiting the world.
Experiences of permeability need not be dramatic. They may arise through a recurring image, an unusual sense of connection with a particular locality, or the feeling that something encountered outside us has somehow entered into correspondence with something within.
This is one reason I find a curious connection with my reflection on Paul Holman’s Sussex Coils & Loops. Holman is working in a very different context, through folklore, ritual and encounters with particular sites, yet both raise questions about what becomes possible when the world around us is approached as something we participate in rather than merely observe.
Perhaps Jung’s enduring value here lies in his willingness to take such experiences seriously without requiring them to fit neatly within the boundaries of the individual mind.
Source
Quotations in this article are drawn from The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life, edited by Meredith Sabini.
