bollingen tower visit

This site is dedicated to the work founded by Carl Gustav Jung.

The intention of the website is to provide a bridge between the anglophone and francophone Jungian communities in the world.

JPS contains part of the content of  Espace Francophone Jungien  that has been translated into English.

In addition, it contains anglophone articles, whose French translations have been published on the Francophone mother site.

The C.G. Jung Tower in Bollingen

C.G. Jung: « It was settled from the start that I would build near the water: I had always been curiously drawn by the scenic charm of the upper lake of Zürich, and so in 1922 I bought some land in Bollingen. »

« From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation – a maternal womb or maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am, and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone. It is thus a concretization of the individuation process, a memorial aere perennius  »

Federico Fellini, the famous Italian film director and screenwriter, wrote the following about the Bollingen Tower:

« This tower […] ressembles a small house built on the edge of the lake. Although it is gigantic, it looks like the work of a child, an object made from clay, by hand. I felt a lot of respect because it looks like a poor people’s manger, but also a bit like a small theatre, and because Jung carried out his task with the humility of an old actor, as someone who repeats the roles of old Caucasian shepherds, with a simple and mysterious ritual. Furthermore, the whole suits me, because not only does he attempt to reproduce something from Antiquity, from the Middle Ages, but it also has a very theatrical feel to it […] 

We went up a small and narrow staircase in the rock and we opened a small door. First everything was dark, but then I saw a tiny, stuffy room. It had two small Gothic windows in thick alabaster, walls painted by Jung himself, mandalas and a study of different myths, and small objects… »

Loosely translated from « Mon cher Fellini », éditions Cahiers du cinéma, by Carissimo Simenon, 2003.

C.G. Jung: « 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 splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go in the procession of the seasons. »

« In 1950 I made a kind of monument out of stone to express what the tower means to me. »

« The stone monument is located outside of the tower and acts as an explanation for it. It is an expression of the person who lives there, even though it remains incomprehensible to people. »

Translation of what’s written on the stone monument:

First side: « Here stands the mean, uncomely stone, ‘Tis very cheap in price! The more it is despised by fools, The more loved by the wise. »

followed by: « In memory of his 75th birthday, C.G. Jung erected and made this out of gratitude, in the year 1950. »

Second side (photo on the left): « Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of the dreams. »

Third side (photo on the right, facing the lake): « I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons. »

The C.G. Jung Tower is located on the border of the lake, in the wooded area in the right part of the photo.

View of the other side, in the direction of Schmerikon.

Photos taken on the border of Lake Zurich, close to the C.G. Jung Tower.

The landscape of Bollingen with the C.G. Jung Tower (in the center).

The citations on this page, with the exception of those by Fellini, are taken from the book « Memories, Dreams, Reflections », by C.G. Jung, p. 223-227.

Important: The tower is not a museum. It is privately owned by a family trust and is not open to the public.

See also the page on Bollingen : the village centre, the church, the M.L. von Franz tower.

Living places of C.G. Jung

The House of C.G. Jung

The C.G. Jung tower in Bollingen

Map of Switzerland and information

Bollingen in Switzerland

Laufen in switzerland

Kesswil in Switzerland

Küsnacht in Switzerland

Kesswil , his place of birth.

Laufen , where he lived from the age of 6 months until 4 years.

Küsnacht , where he lived from 1909 onwards.

Bollingen , where he built his tower from 1922 onwards.

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The former residence of Carl Gustav and Emma Jung-Rauschenbach is a place of remembrance of extraordinary presence. The house, as well as the gardens, bear the distinctive signature of C.G. Jung and reflect significant facets of his personality. Interested persons and groups can visit the estate, which is both a scholarly house as well as a domestic museum, granting visitors a sense of the hospitality of C.G. and Emma Jung-Rauschenbach and allowing them to catch a glimpse of their scholarly and family life. Hopefully, the house will become a place of encounter and exchange in the spirit of C.G. Jung.

The permanent exhibition includes the parlour, the dining room and the sunroom on the ground floor, the consulting room (study), C.G. Jung's library and the waiting room for patients on the first floor. In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum offers a changing special exhibition in the special exhibition room on the ground floor. Visitors can explore the estate's garden on their own during opening hours. A museum shop offers books by and about C.G. Jung as well as souvenirs.

Conversion of a family house into a museum

The couple’s estate has thankfully always remained in the possession of their descendants and been passed down from children to grandchildren who have maintained the house, its interiors and the surrounding gardens with great love and care, thus preserving the place’s unique character.

Thanks to a generous donation and goodwill on the part of the Jung family, in particular of Andreas and Vreni Jung, the Foundation C.G. Jung Küsnacht, established in 2002, was able to take over and refurbish the residence with the invaluable help of the current inhabitants. The house was carefully modernized and the gardens were restored true to the original design, taking great care that the memory of C.G. Jung and his family lives on.

After the Jung-Gerber family had ceded a part of the building for the purpose of hosting a museum, the Foundation set out to realize a long-cherished wish, namely to open up the house including the representative rooms along with the garden and its many enchanting nooks and crannies to an interested public and thus provide a better understanding of the life and work of C.G. Jung and his family. With this in mind, the former house of C.G. Jung was transformed into a “small but exquisite” museum and opened in 2018.

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An encounter with Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower

You can read about the “Tower House” in Jung’s memoir, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” and there are photographs and other images of the house you can call up with the flick of a google search. The house is somewhat of a monument to Jung’s life and work that he built himself, and followers of his work often seek it out as one of the nodes on a kind of pilgrimage.

I wasn’t sure what to expect prior to our visit and in planning the road trip with my now Geneva-resident stepdaughter, and I knew only that the house is still owned and used by Jung’s heirs, so it is not open to the public. But I had come to understand from other online accounts that one was free to visit, if only to see the structure from the outside. I presumed it was accessible, any exterior grounds perhaps maintained by the family, or the town of Bollingen. I guess I expected something park-like.  The structure is mapped on Google Maps.

Jung began to build the house in 1937, and continued to add on to it over the next few decades. His mother died that same year, and he called his initial effort part of attempt to come to terms with his grief and sense of loss. The Jung family resided in a large house in Zurich, where Jung and his wife, Emma worked and raised their children, and Jung consulted with his patients. The Bollingen house was a work of psyche or soul; a chance to put hands to earth, to work psychological issues through physical and creative pursuit.  

The stone house sits only a few hundred feet from a small dirt road, but is completely obscured from view by a thick bundle of tall trees and shrubs. At the entrance from the road is a small metal shed and a gate with a sign that reads, “Private Property – No Trespassing.” We’d driven from Geneva the day before, and the next morning arrived at the Tower, parked and got out of the car and discovered the simple gate latch to be unlocked. I equivocated for about 20 seconds.

My husband, my stepdaughter and her dog stayed behind while I followed the short path to the house on the shore. I passed several bicycles and a large store of cut firewood, and heard the laughter of a child and man off in the trees. The path leads to a heavy, arched door set in a cast concrete surround, then continues around the house to the lake shore and another arched doorway. I came upon a young woman carrying a red plastic bucket full of dishes. She didn’t see me at first, and a little guiltily I turned back. Then I paused for a moment.

I’d come a very long way, and trespassed this far. I would simply explain myself and apologize profusely and repeatedly. (We’d already had cause once on this trip to apologize for trespassing in Scotland, where Michael shot film of an old abandoned estate house that sits on private land. We came upon the owner as we were getting ready to walk back to our car. Owners get to used to this kind of thing as stewards of old structures that pique public curiosity, but it must come as a surprise all the same when they expect they’re alone and then they’re not!)

Resolved, I turned back around and approached the young woman, introducing myself with an apology. She did reiterate that the property was private, but admitted that it often happened that the family received well-meaning visitors while at the stone house. This was, as it happens, Jung’s great-great-granddaughter I was talking to, pleading my case. I let that fact sink in as she very generously offered to show us a bit of the interior of the house. She understood that while the house remains a private family retreat, that it also means a great deal to Jung’s followers, and she felt a responsibility to share it when people go to such lengths to see it.

I went back to the gate to fetch my companions, all of us a little incredulous. Our guide took us through that first big arched doorway into a small courtyard, where lines of laundry were drying in the sun. A raised and covered open room with a fireplace made a respectable dining room. She led us into the kitchen, a round room with windows that by Jung’s design, direct the revolving sunlight onto specific task areas around the room, as there has never been electricity at Bollingen Tower. A tool board stood to the side of the entryway, with outlines drawn around each tool for ease in replacing them by shape. I was for some reason reminded of Julia Child’s kitchen!

Up a stone stairway built away from a rounded wall – stairs that can’t be more than a foot wide – was Jung’s bedroom. A single bed against a wall with a great mandala painted by the doctor. Our guide led us back outside. The house is built right up to the water, making it difficult to stand far enough away from it to see it in its entirety. The best views are ideally from a boat on the lake. Under a tree sits a capstone, initially too big for its original purpose as a piece of the house, it’s now something more symbolic and ornamental, with inscriptions in Latin and Greek from various literary, philosophical and alchemical sources.

Other family members and small children milled about us. A toddler filled a bowl from a spigot for the dog. We chatted a little longer, but I was very conscious of intruding on their idyll, so we thanked them, wished them well and began to make our way back to the car. We took a few phone pictures, preserving the interior privacy, and Michael shot some black and white film of the exterior.

What struck all of us most about this short visit was how profoundly normal, how mundane it felt. I suppose I had anticipated that our visit would be private, quiet. Just the three of us contemplating the exterior stone façade, the details of the craftsmanship there; and that possibly the fact of the encounter with the structure might produce in us a heightened, visceral feeling of presence. That there would be something palpable, some residue left behind of the actual man that might be – I don’t know – transformational. And it was there – in this kind descendent and her family, in their relaxed vacation trappings, in the things of the kitchen, many of which sit exactly as Jung had used and placed them.  The blanket and pillow on the small bed upstairs, the piece of rope hanging from the ceiling that you must hold onto to climb those narrow stairs. The picnic table under the tree, and the wild overgrown stand of forest that hides the tower from the road.

I suppose in having done so much reading of and about Jung, long marveling at his extraordinary genius, it was at first startling to be confronted with the force of the physical evidence of his life as a simple man – a father, a householder, a great-great grandfather. The pater familias as it were, there alongside the scholar and the psychologist. In the run-up to our trip as we were deciding how to spend our Swiss days, I decided I could not go to Switzerland and not see the stone house by the lake. I may never know in what profound ways the encounter may have marked me – if at all. We had the good fortune to visit Jung’s house in the circumstances we did: humbled and intimate, rather than herded through with crowds of strangers, subject to someone else’s interpretations and stories. We are fortunate that the world still values, honors and contains such places. That they have not been commercialized and monetized lends them an air of the sacred. May we be inspired to build our own ancestral hearths, as homage to the sacredness of our families and intimates.

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Carl Jung's Bollingen Tower - Zurich Forum

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Carl Jung's Bollingen Tower

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Is it possible to visit the Bollingen Tower, former home of Carl Jung? If so what details can anyone offer me of how to go about it?

Hi, we went to Carl Yung's house a couple of years ago. Unfortunately we couldnt get in, I was hoping it would be open like a museum type set up but was all closed up. However it was fabulous to see though and is in a very beautiful part of the lake. You can go up as far as the gate ans is great to see, it's remarkable that he built it himself. We spent the day in the area, there's a restaurant down the road and some lovely places to sit near the lake to soak up the atmosphere.

I hope one day that they will open up the house for public to see inside. We went in February so maybe they open it in the summer?

Hi, we went to Carl Youngster house a couple of years ago. Unfortunately we could get in, I was hoping it would be open like a museum type set up but was all closed up. However it was fabulous to see though and is in a very beautiful part of the lake. You can go up as far as the gate ans is great to see, it's remarkable that he built it himself. We spent the day in the area, there's a restaurant down the road and some lovely places to sit near the lake to soak up the atmosphere.

Look here: http://goo.gl/maps/3Etvk

Or do a google maps search on Bollingen - and then look about 500m east on the lakeshore.

It is owned by a private trust and is closed to the public.

Hope this helps.

Many thanks. I'll try a boat trip too.

Definitely I need to go there.

Hey dieselek! I'm going to zurich soon and I plan to visit it too. Did you go there? Is it open to the public during summer? In case it's not, are there any other places in zurich you would recommend related to Jung?

Try this site: Jung Conference Seminars Einsiedeln. Try facebook too.

This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity.

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