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Both Jung and Yeats lived in towers, and the writer looks across their different disciplines: ‘Each was primarily a symbol maker, wedded to the primacy òf symbolic understanding.’
For Jung, his tower was a retreat, as the attic had been in his childhood. This stone tower was a place of concentration and regeneration and a place of retreat from the family. The building of the top storey in later years contained the secret stone of his childhood.
Yeats's tower in County Galway was a retreat for the family, and a sanctuary against the troubles of Home Rule. It was also a way of re-establishing his Irish roots, a monument as well as a home the passer-by would see as a symbol of Yeats's work: ‘a personal assertion, the continuity of the traditional need for solitude and exhilaration, and on the inevitable decay wrought by time’. The writer suggests that Yeats's dream-like state in his poems puts us in touch with timelessness, and can be compared to Jung's state of mind in building and living in Bollingen.
She sees Yeats's tower as a symbol of the phallic and of ego-consciousness which gives way to the feminine unconscious. Yet there is a tension between the tower as symbol of his active, striving masculinity and the wish for a less ego-driven passive acceptance that is never fully resolved.
His principle is not of greatness but of ‘the folly of man's pretensions’: ‘the half-dead tower, the half-dead nation’. What is built decays, what decays can bring forth new life. The body decays, but the poetic energy stays.
Jung's perception of the tower is of feminine creativity enclosed by the maternal hearth; a place where he could honour both the personal and collective dead.
Both Jung and Yeats are captivated by stone: ‘as much masons as alchemists of the human spirit’, although ultimately their shapings were in images and symbols. For both men it was necessary to hold together the myth, the work, and the life. Completeness would require work on themselves, leading to work on their w