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Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz and Christiana Morgan all dedicated time, soul and imagination to a peculiarly Jungian form of architecture: the stone tower.
This week host Deborah Stewart is joined by Dr Martin Gledhill, an architect, author and Jungian scholar, and filmmaker Hilary Morgan, the granddaughter of Christiana Morgan, an eminent American psychologist who collaborated with Jung on some of his most important work.
Deb, Martin and Hilary explore Jung’s Bollingen Tower and Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh, discussing the profound expressions of psyche through place. Both towers render psyche in art, carvings and stone. They are more than just physical places, they are architectural explorations of Self and soul. The two towers are what Martin calls “restless places”: dream-like in ambience, shaped through an ongoing, iterative process, and surrounded by differing, sometimes conflicting, accounts of their evolution.
“At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself” (Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections).
In the episode we touch on:
Küsnacht and Bollingen
Jung’s family home at Küsnacht and his Bollingen retreat can be understood as a psychological pair, corresponding to his number one and number two personalities. Küsnacht might symbolize his ego personality, while Bollingen represents another unconscious, archaic expression that was also a huge part of him.
Bollingen in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The description of Bollingen in Jung’s late-in-life autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, has much to tell us, but it differs from other accounts. It can be considered as part of a psychological process, in which the significance of the tower evolved in parallel to Jung’s changing work. Gledhill suggests that the narrative about the tower shared in the book might oversimplify a more complex, numinous reality, which is hard to put into words.
Jung’s House Dream and Bollingen’s Architecture
Jung’s famous dream of descending through the levels of a house, ending with him finding himself in a basement where “in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture,” may have influenced the development of his Bollingen Tower. You can read the text of this dream in the shownotes for our episode on What Does Your House Dream Mean? or learn more about its significance in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Christiana Morgan’s Vision and Inspiration
Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh in Massachusetts was a retreat and artistic testament to her visions and philosophy. It was also where she nurtured her 40 year love affair with Henry Murray and where they were committed, as part of their Jungian work, to creating an example of a supreme romantic love. The Tower is an important example of architectural Gesamthunstwerk (total work of art) in America.
The Tower incorporates architecture, sculpture, carving, landscape design, and literature into a unified, symbolic representation of how a psychologically aware individual could navigate through the world.
The Tower on the Marsh as an Expression of the Feminine
Morgan’s Tower of the Marsh was part of a process of differentiating from conventional culture, an undoing of the repression of the feminine. This is observable in its lightness of spirit, and in the extensive artwork that celebrates self-expression and romantic union. Morgan’s tower was designed as a space for reconnecting with the body, the natural world, and the feminine.
Retreat and Relationship
Both Morgan and Jung experienced tension around their respective visions for the towers’ construction. Jung envisaged Bollingen as a private retreat, but it frequently drew in visitors and family. Morgan’s vision for her tower was that it would be an expression of her 40-year relationship with Henry Murray, but in the end she spent much time there alone.
Spirits of Place
Uncanny discoveries accompanied the building of both towers. Jung famously uncovered the skeleton of a Napoleonic soldier at Bollingen, and held a funeral there for him. He also had mysterious experiences of unseen presences while working at the tower, including hearing the sound of singing when no one was present. During the dynamiting of Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh site, a builder’s son witnessed a writhing black snake in its foundations.
Architecture and Psyche
Just as the Jungian process of individuation unfolds across a lifetime, without ever being definitively finished, Morgan and Jung both felt that their Towers were incomplete, and constantly added and subtracted features.
It is also notable that neither tower is a pure expression of vision. The compromises made in construction are integral to understanding these buildings’ significance: it’s impossible in both architecture and in life to be solely symbolic.
Our Guests for This Episode
MARTIN GLEDHILL B.Sc. B.Arch. MA, is a qualified architect, having been a senior teaching fellow at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath. He also has an MA and Doctorate in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies from the University of Essex, having recently completed his thesis on exploring the symbolism and spiritual essence of Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower, bridging the gap between the physical and the psychological. In October 2025, he published his book, The Bollingen Tower: Constructing a Jungian Sense of Place.
HILARY MORGAN is a filmmaker, cinematographer and teacher, who has worked internationally on a wide variety of documentaries, as well as on films about dreams. She is the granddaughter of Christiana Morgan, and in 2019 produced The Tower of Dreams , a short documentary about her grandmother’s spiritual relationship with The Tower on the Marsh.
Resources Discussed In The Episode
- Martin Gledhill, The Bollingen Tower: Constructing a Jungian Sense of Place
- Tower of Dreams – a film by Hilary Morgan.
- Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circle
- C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
- Learn more about C.G. Jung’s house at Küsnacht here
- Learn more about Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh here.
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