Jung on Men and Women: a Swiss travelogue

A misbegotten journey in Switzerland creates new encounters with Jung’s curious theories about feminine psychology – filtered through a revelatory conversation with one of his great-grandsons, and reflections on the triangle made up of the eminent Swiss psychologist, his wife Emma, and his closest female collaborator and lover, Toni Wolff.

A question frames this adventure: why did Swiss women fail to challenge Jung’s unflattering, sometimes contemptuous, pronouncements on the female half of the species? The answer encompasses the story few foreigners know of how Swiss democracy – rightly admired today for its near-perfection as a system of government – treated women as non-citizens of a successful, sophisticated country for most of the 20th century.

Jung put cultural conditioning at the centre of his psychology. Yet it is hard to find commentaries on Jungian thought that focus on what it owes to Swissness. In this personal narrative, the writer makes an informal and lively – but carefully researched – contribution to filling a fraction of that gap. History is spliced with strong sensory impressions of Jung’s homeland and its inhabitants.

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