A psychic blueprint
In Zurich, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung developed a theory that every human inherits a psychic blueprint, which he named the collective unconscious. This concept was a core reason for his professional split from Sigmund Freud. Freud attributed all psychic phenomena to personal, repressed experiences, whereas Jung argued that the human mind has a deeper, shared base containing universal structures. These inherited structures are called archetypes. They are not specific memories but rather predispositions to experience and perceive the world in certain ways. Examples include universal figures like the Hero, the Mother, the Trickster, and the Wise Old Man, which appear in myths, legends, and religions across unrelated cultures. Jung's work in Zurich, particularly after he resigned from the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in 1909, focused on finding evidence for this shared psychic layer. His 1912 book Symbols of Transformation was his first major work detailing these ideas, analyzing the fantasies of a patient to show their parallels with mythological motifs.
An archive of the mind
Jung's evidence was not physical but observational and literary, gathered from his private practice in Küsnacht near Zurich and his extensive research. He analyzed thousands of his patients' dreams, noting the appearance of symbols and figures that the individuals had no personal context for. He documented how patients with schizophrenia, for example, would spontaneously produce complex symbols in their speech and art that mirrored those found in ancient mythology.
To organize and discuss these findings, Jung and his colleagues founded the Psychological Club Zurich in 1916. The club's neo-Gothic building on Gemeindestrasse 27 became a primary forum where Jung presented his lectures and papers on archetypes before they were published. A significant portion of his evidence came from comparative mythology. Jung spent years in his library studying global folklore, religious texts, and alchemical manuscripts, identifying archetypal motifs that appeared independently all over the world. This cross-cultural research formed the basis of his assertion that a common psychic layer exists in every person.