Through my early years working in a Swiss hospital with psychotic patients and collaborating with Sigmund Freud and the burgeoning psychoanalytic community, I gained a closer look at the mysterious depths of the human unconscious. Fascinated by what I saw (and spurred on with even more passion by the experiences and questions of my personal life) I devoted my life to the exploration of the unconscious. However, I did not feel that experimental natural science was the best means to understand the human soul. For me, an empirical investigation of the world of dream, myth, and soul represented the most promising road to deeper understanding.
The overarching goal of my work was the reconciliation of the life of the individual with the world of the supra-personal archetypes. I came to see the individual's encounter with the unconscious as central to this process. The human experiences the unconscious through symbols encountered in all aspects of life: in dreams, art, religion, and the symbolic dramas we enact in our relationships and life pursuits. Essential to the encounter with the unconscious, and the reconciliation of the individual's consciousness with this broader world, is learning this symbolic language. Only through attention and openness to this world (which is quite foreign to the modern Western mind) is the individual able to harmonize his/her life with these suprapersonal archetypal forces.
