The Tower
Height, enclosure, and the danger of reaching too high.
The Tower: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
The tower rises and encloses: a refuge, a prison, a place of vigil, and a reach toward heaven that may be pride. Jung called the tower he built at Bollingen a confession of faith in stone, and lived there as in the house of his own psyche.
Jung began the tower at Bollingen in 1923, the year of his mother’s death, as a single round tower like an African hut, and added to it every four years: a second tower, a courtyard, and in 1955, after his wife died, an upper storey that stood, he said, for the extension of consciousness achieved in old age. “From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation, a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be.”
The Tower of the Tarot, struck by lightning with figures falling from it, is the opposite: the building of the ego thrown down when it has reached too high, Babel in a card.
The Tower: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
Babel, the Tarot’s Tower struck by lightning, Rapunzel, Hero’s tower at Sestos, the tower of ivory of the Song of Songs. Yeats’s tower at Thoor Ballylee and The Tower (1928); Montaigne’s library tower; Danaë in her brazen tower; the tower of Saint Barbara; Hölderlin’s tower at Tübingen.
From the Sources
Jung says that this self-presumption finds its striking mythological expression in the building of the heaven-high tower of Babel, which brings confusion to mankind.
“Mythologically, this self-presumption finds its striking expression in the building of the heaven-high tower of Babel, which brings confusion to mankind.”
Dr. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, Part I, Chapter IV, "The Song of the Moth". Authorized translation, with introduction, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.; New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916. The text, read in part
In the Grimms' tale the enchantress shuts the twelve-year-old Rapunzel in a tower in the forest with neither stairs nor door, only a little window at the top.
“When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window.”
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimms' Fairy Tales, "Rapunzel". Text based on translations from the Grimms' Kinder und Hausmärchen by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes. The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), “The Tower”
- Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), “The Tower”
- W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928)
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
Also among Vessels and Enclosures
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“The Tower.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/tower.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Toad: Earthbound and poisonous, with a jewel in its head. The Tomb: The grave that is also a womb. The Treasure Hard to Attain: What is guarded because it is worth the danger. The Tree: Growth, rootedness, and the axis of the world.