Jungian Gothic: The Dark Romantic in Jung’s Early Life and Psychology

An otherworldly mother with two personalities. A cousin with a gift for spiritualist mediumship. Family secrets, peculiar relations, and eerie doublings. In an almost uncanny way, the events and figures of C. G. Jung’s early life echo the themes of Gothic literature. This article explores the motifs of the Gothic imagination and the real-life unfolding of these motifs in Jung’s life and work. After considering the often-eldritch historical details of the Preiswerk and Jung families, this paper turns to the question of how these elements unfolded in later theories of Jungian psychology. Finally, the text concludes with a consideration of what telos, or purpose, the Gothic itself may have had “in mind” when it settled so powerfully into the world of a young man who would become an explorer and teacher of the subtleties of psyche.