What I Learned About the Unconscious in Carl Jung's Own Backyard

Marking Jung’s 150th birthday with a journey into the home of his work in Zurich, Switzerland.

There’s something that happens to the senses in Zürich. Everything widens. The air feels pure, honest, like breathing straight from the heavens. Even when you're close to something, it somehow stretches into a vastness that asks you to take a step back and see the whole picture. Like a living painting, dimensional and deep.

It feels fitting to write this now, just after what would have been Carl Jung’s 150th birthday! To honor the man who gave us the language of shadow, introvert, extravert, archetypes, synchronicity, and the deeper layers of the soul.

This summer, I walked the same streets he once did. Every morning, I trekked 30 minutes on foot to the C.G. Jung Institute. His legacy is grounded in the very soil of Küsnacht. It became a kind of warm-up, a silent preparation for the mental marathon awaiting inside…

The CG Jung Institute is a building of history that holds itself together with quiet reverence. You can feel the residue of thought, the waft of dreams that were once analyzed there. Inside, I found 40+ students from around the world seated side-by-side in a single classroom. No air conditioning. Each hour that passed made the room hotter, as if the unconscious itself wanted to test our willingness to endure. It felt less like a lecture hall and more like a psychological sweat lodge where the heat was both literal and spiritual.

The first day hit the hardest. Three back-to-back lectures, each one a 2-hour+ flood of insight and psychological revelations that felt like rare gems being held in the palm of thought: admired, questioned, and honored by those witnessing. Those who asked questions were swimming upstream; those who listened, floating in the current of it all. I had a notebook of questions I wanted to ask, but every time I formed one, someone else voiced it. It felt like we were thinking together.

Here are some of the questions I came home still holding:

• How do we discern whether someone genuinely wants to do shadow work, or just wants to appear insightful?
  I think the difference here is about what they do with the insight. Do they use it as leverage? Or as substance to add more depth in the way they choose to live life more honestly?

• How do we mourn in a world that avoids discomfort?
  And also: how do we sit in discomfort in a world built on comfort? Just sitting in that humid room, breathing through the sweat and stillness, was a kind of mourning. I wonder what others in the room were imagining, conjuring about why they were there. Some squirmed around and fanned themselves, and some just sat still and poised. There was some meaning in that. People from all walks of life, all ages. A post-grad female from New York. A retired medical professional whose wife told him they’d divorce if he didn’t leave Canada and try something new. And me: a writer, a seeker, someone who’s still learning how to listen to the soul.

So how do we learn to mourn? By example? By giving ourselves permission to cry, move, laugh, or remember. We can’t “do” mourning, because it’s something we just let happen. And when we let it, we show others what’s possible too.

• If narcissists can perform soulfulness, how do we help them embody it?
  Narcissists thrive on the stage. But their role doesn’t exist offstage, and that’s where the emptiness sets in. Maybe, helping them embody soulfulness means inviting them into roles that require presence.

Dr. Susan Schwartz gave one of the lectures that left an imprint. She spoke about Narcissism as a mirror of modern self-hate and performance. She reminded us that to love the self is not the same as to obsess over the image. To be seen is not the same as being known. She also reminded us that narcissism is also a cultural symptom.

We live in a world that rewards the image, not the essence. We're conditioned to curate ourselves, perform for success, and confuse visibility with worth. In many ways, it's impossible not to develop some narcissistic tendencies in a society that constantly asks us to brand ourselves before we even know who we are.

What I Learned About the Unconscious

If there’s one thing Zürich taught me, it’s that the unconscious is not only within us, planted under the skin, in the body and mind of every living thing.... It’s also all around us, always. It's leaking through our language, our projections, our longings, our dreams. It's shaping our choices before we’re even aware we’re making them.

• The unconscious speaks in symbols, not solutions. Trying to decode it with logic alone is like trying to smell music. You have to feel your way through it. You have to be willing to sit with the image, the memory, the dream—without forcing it into a box.

• Ignoring the unconscious doesn’t make it disappear. It only makes it louder. We think we’re “fine,” but suddenly we’re triggered by a stranger’s comment or caught in a pattern we swore we’d outgrown. The parts we suppress don’t die; they disguise themselves.

• The unconscious is a mirror, not a monster. So many of us are afraid of what we might find “down there,” in the depths of ourselves, but more often than not, what we find is a part of ourselves that’s just been waiting to be acknowledged and/or loved. It’s not darkness for the sake of darkness and mystery. It’s darkness holding a hand out to the light.

• The psyche has an intelligence of its own. One lecture described it like a compass: the unconscious pulls us toward experiences and people that mirror what we need to integrate. Not necessarily what we want, but what we need in order to evolve as individuals.

More than anything, because the unconscious isn’t underneath us, but around us, I learned that you don’t get to the unconscious by digging harder, but by listening deeper. Slowing down enough to notice when something in you reacts. And choosing not to run from it.

I’d love to go deeper in future posts and interviews with Dr. Connie Zweig on self-love and self-hate, imposter syndrome, the creative process, creative imagination, anima and animus, and love…

Let me know: would you want to read more on these topics? For more discussions, prompts, and exclusives— join our Substack Chat below!

In the meantime, I leave you with this question:

What would a pilgrimage to your unconscious look like?
Where would it take you?

And what would you have to leave behind in order to find yourself?

And lastly,

to Carl Jung, born July 26, 1875, thank you for daring to look inward when the world was looking away. For teaching us that the soul has its own language, that the shadow holds our gold, and that healing begins the moment we’re willing to face ourselves.

With love,

Keila Shaheen