Are You Lonely? Carl Jung on His Life-Long Loneliness and the Hidden Purpose Behind It"

Carl Jung viewed loneliness as a profound and  paradoxical aspect of the human experience.

For him, it wasn’t merely the absence of  others but a deeper isolation that arises  

when one struggles to communicate what truly  matters to him, or holds views others cannot  

accept. If one can embrace this form  of loneliness, moments of significant  

inner growth and transformation can follow. Jung’s own life reflected this understanding.  

From an early age, he experienced solitude,  shaped by his sensitivity and introspection.  

His creative process often required isolation,  such as his time spent at his lakeside retreat,  

where he engaged with the unconscious.  These solitary periods, though painful,  

became essential for his exploration of the  psyche and his journey of individuation. 

Jung saw loneliness as a necessary trial  for those tasked with understanding and   integrating deeper aspects of the psyche.  It serves as both a burden and a gift,  

forcing individuals to confront  their uniqueness and inner depths. 

In his therapeutic work, Jung encouraged a  constructive view of loneliness. He believed  

it could reveal underlying imbalances, such as  neglecting parts of the psyche like our shadow,  

the anima or animus, and that enduring its  pain could lead to healing and self-discovery.

It can lead to an authentic relationship with our  inner world. Rather than pathologizing loneliness,  

he framed it as a step toward wholeness,  a state where the individual can integrate  

the conscious and unconscious. Jung also linked modern feelings   of isolation to the loss of shared living  symbols, which once provided meaning and  

connection to the archetypal reality, which we  are always connected to, consciously, or not.

He urged individuals to embrace the search for  symbols that would resonate  with their inner reality,

which often can be found in dreams - the never ending creation of the unconscious.  

In this sense, loneliness becomes not an endpoint   but a doorway to a deeper and  more meaningful way of being.

It can offer a chance to connect with the deepest aspects of our psyche and the greater collective unconscious.

Here's Jung, about his journey  with loneliness, in his own words.

1. Loneliness comes from knowing what others cannot see or understand

The difference between most people and myself is  that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent.  

That is my peculiarity. Others find these  walls so opaque that they see nothing behind  

them and therefore think nothing is there. To some  extent, I perceive the processes going on in the  

background, and that gives me an inner certainty.  People who see nothing have no certainties and  

can draw no conclusions—or do not trust them  even if they do. I do not know what started me  

off perceiving the stream of life. Probably the  unconscious itself. Or perhaps my early dreams.  

They determined my course from the beginning. Knowledge of processes in the background early  

shaped my relationship to the world.  Basically, that relationship was the   same in my childhood as it is to this day. As a  child, I felt myself to be alone, and I am still,  

because I know things and must hint at things  which others apparently know nothing of, and for  

the most part do not want to know. Loneliness  does not come from having no people about one,  

but from being unable to communicate the things  that seem important to oneself, or from holding  

certain views which others find inadmissible. The  loneliness began with the experiences of my early  

dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was  working on the unconscious. If a man knows more  

than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness  is not necessarily inimical to companionship,  

for no one is more sensitive to companionship than  the lonely man, and companionship thrives only  

when each individual remembers his individuality  and does not identify himself with others. 

It is important to have a secret, a premonition  of things unknown. It fills life with something  

impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never  experienced that has missed something important.  

He must sense that he lives in a world which in  some respects is mysterious; that things happen  

and can be experienced which remain inexplicable;  that not everything which happens can be  

anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible  belong in this world. Only then is life whole.  

For me, the world has from the  beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

2. Healing begins when we reconcile with our nature and embrace loneliness

Healing may be called a religious problem. In  the sphere of social or national relations,  

the state of suffering may be civil war, and this  state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of  

forgiveness for those who hate us. That which  we try with the conviction of good Christians  

to apply to external situations, we must also  apply to the inner state in the treatment of  

neurosis. This is why modern man has heard enough  about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by  

his own bad conscience, and wants rather  to learn how he is to reconcile himself  

with his own nature—how he is to love the enemy  in his own heart and call the wolf his brother. 

The modern man, moreover, is not eager to  know in what way he can imitate Christ,  

but in what way he can live his own individual  life, however meagre and uninteresting it may  

be. It is because every form of imitation  seems to him deadening and sterile that he  

rebels against the force of tradition that would  hold him to well-trodden ways. All such roads,  

for him, lead in the wrong direction. He may  not know it, but he behaves as if his own  

individual life were instinct with the will  of God which must at all costs be fulfilled.  

This is the source of his egoism, which  is one of the most tangible evils of the  

neurotic state. But the person who tells him  he is too egoistic has lost his confidence,  

and rightly so, for that person has driven  him still further into his neurosis. 

If I wish to effect a cure for my patients  I am forced to acknowledge the deep  

significance of their egoism. I should be blind,  indeed, if I did not recognize in it the true  

will of God. I must even help the patient to  prevail in his egoism; if he succeeds in this,  

he estranges himself from other people. He drives  them away, and they come to themselves—as they  

should, for they were seeking to rob him of  his “sacred” egoism. This must be left to him,  

for it is his strongest and healthiest power;  it is, as I have said, a true will of God,  

which sometimes drives him into complete  isolation. However wretched this state may be,  

it also stands him in good stead, for in this  way alone can he take his own measure and learn  

what an invaluable treasure is the love of his  fellow-beings. It is, moreover, only in the state  

of complete abandonment and loneliness that we  experience the helpful powers of our own natures.

3. Loneliness, the unconscious, and the mandala: Jung’s path to the self

The consequence of my resolve, and my involvement  with things which neither I nor anyone else could  

understand, was an extreme loneliness. I was  going about laden with thoughts of which I  

could speak to no one: they would only have  been misunderstood. I felt the gulf between  

the external world and the interior world of  images in its most painful form. I could not  

yet see that interaction of both worlds which  I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable  

contradiction between “inner” and “outer.” However, it was clear to me from the start  

that I could find contact with the outer world  and with people only if I succeeded in showing—and  

this would demand the most intensive effort—that  the contents of psychic experience are real,  

and real not only as my own personal experiences,  but as collective experiences which others also  

have. Later I tried to demonstrate this  in my scientific work, and I did all in my  

power to convey to my intimates a new way of  seeing things. I knew that if I did not succeed,  

I would be condemned to absolute isolation. It was only toward the end of the First World  

War that I gradually began to emerge from the  darkness. Two events contributed to this. The  

first was that I broke with the woman who was  determined to convince me that my fantasies  

had artistic value; the second and principal event  was that I began to understand mandala drawings.  

This happened in 1918–19. I had painted the first  mandala in 1916 after writing the Septem Sermones;  

naturally, I had not, then, understood it. In 1918–19 I was in Château d’Oex as Commandant  

de la Région Anglaise des Internés de Guerre.  While I was there, I sketched every morning in  

a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala,  which seemed to correspond to my inner situation  

at the time. With the help of these drawings,  I could observe my psychic transformations from  

day to day. One day, for example, I received  a letter from that aesthetic lady in which she  

again stubbornly maintained that the fantasies  arising from my unconscious had artistic value  

and should be considered art. The letter got on  my nerves. It was far from stupid, and therefore  

dangerously persuasive. The modern artist, after  all, seeks to create art out of the unconscious.  

The utilitarianism and self-importance concealed  behind this thesis touched a doubt in myself,  

namely, my uncertainty as to whether the fantasies  I was producing were really spontaneous and  

natural, and not ultimately my own arbitrary  inventions. I was by no means free from the  

bigotry and hubris of consciousness which wants  to believe that any halfway decent inspiration is  

due to one’s own merit, whereas inferior reactions  come merely by chance, or even derive from alien  

sources. Out of this irritation and disharmony  within myself, there proceeded, the following day,  

a changed mandala: part of the periphery had  burst open and the symmetry was destroyed. 

Only gradually did I discover what the  mandala really is: “Formation, Transformation,  

Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation.” And that  is the self, the wholeness of the personality,  

which, if all goes well, is harmonious,  but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. 

My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state  of the self which were presented to me anew each  

day. In them, I saw the self—that is, my whole  being—actively at work. To be sure, at first,  

I could only dimly understand them; but they  seemed to me highly significant, and I guarded  

them like precious pearls. I had the distinct  feeling that they were something central,  

and in time I acquired through them a living  conception of the self. The self, I thought, was  

like the monad which I am, and which is my world.  The mandala represents this monad and corresponds  

to the microcosmic nature of the psyche. I no longer know how many mandalas I drew at this  

time. There were a great many. While I was working  on them, the question arose repeatedly: What is  

this process leading to? Where is its goal? From  my own experience, I knew by now that I could  

not presume to choose a goal which would seem  trustworthy to me. It had been proved to me that  

I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate  position of the ego. After all, I had been brought  

up short when I had attempted to maintain it. I  had wanted to go on with the scientific analysis  

of myths which I had begun in “Symbols of  Transformation”. That was still my goal—but  

I must not think of that! I was being compelled  to go through this process of the unconscious. I  

had to let myself be carried along by the current,  without a notion of where it would lead me. When I  

began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that  everything, all the paths I had been following,  

all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a  single point—namely, to the mid-point. It became  

increasingly plain to me that the mandala is  the center. It is the exponent of all paths.  

It is the path to the center, to individuation. During those years, between 1918 and 1920, I began  

to understand that the goal of psychic development  is the self. There is no linear evolution;  

there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most,  

only at the beginning; later, everything points  toward the center. This insight gave me stability,  

and gradually my inner peace returned. I knew that  in finding the mandala as an expression of the  

self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.  Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I. 

Some years later (in 1927) I obtained confirmation  of my ideas about the center and the self by way  

of a dream. I represented its essence in a mandala  which I called “Window on Eternity.” The picture  

is reproduced in The Secret of the Golden Flower  (Fig. 3). A year later I painted a second picture,  

likewise a mandala, with a golden castle in the  center. When it was finished, I asked myself,  

“Why is this so Chinese?” I was impressed by  the form and choice of colors, which seemed to  

me Chinese, although there was nothing outwardly  Chinese about it. Yet that was how it affected  

me. It was a strange coincidence that shortly  afterward I received a letter from Richard Wilhelm  

enclosing the manuscript of a Taoist-alchemical  treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower,  

with a request that I write a commentary  on it. I devoured the manuscript at once,  

for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation  of my ideas about the mandala and the  

circumambulation of the center. That was the  first event which broke through my isolation.  

I became aware of an affinity; I could  establish ties with something and someone.

4. The power of a secret: individuation, isolation, and the struggle for true identity

There is no better means of intensifying the  treasured feeling of individuality than the  

possession of a secret which the individual  is pledged to guard. The very beginnings of  

societal structures reveal the craving for secret  organizations. When no valid secrets really exist,  

mysteries are invented or contrived to which  privileged initiates are admitted. Such was  

the case with the Rosicrucians and many  other societies. Among these pseudo-secrets  

there are—ironically—real secrets of which the  initiates are entirely unaware—as, for example,  

in those societies which borrowed their “secret”  primarily from the alchemical tradition. 

The need for ostentatious secrecy is of vital  importance on the primitive level, for the  

shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe  together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute  

a helpful compensation for lack of cohesion in  the individual personality, which is constantly  

relapsing into the original unconscious identity  with other members of the group. Attainment of  

the human goal—an individual who is conscious  of his own peculiar nature—thus becomes a long,  

almost hopeless process of education.  For even the individuals whose initiation  

into certain secrets has marked them out  in some way are fundamentally obeying the  

laws of group identity, though in their case  the group is a socially differentiated one. 

The secret society is an intermediary stage on  the way to individuation. The individual is still  

relying on a collective organization to effect his  differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet  

recognized that it is really the individual’s task  to differentiate himself from all the others and  

stand on his own feet. All collective identities,  such as membership in organizations, support of  

“isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment  of this task. Such collective identities are  

crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds  for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible;  

but they are equally shelters for the poor  and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked,  

the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of  promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary  

pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep,  and a mother providing nourishment and growth. 

Nevertheless, it may be that for sufficient  reasons a man feels he must set out on his  

own feet along the road to wider realms. It may  be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes,  

and manners of life offered to him he does not  find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He  

will go alone and be his own company. He will  serve as his own group, consisting of a variety of  

opinions and tendencies—which need not necessarily  be marching in the same direction. In fact,  

he will be at odds with himself, and will find  great difficulty in uniting his own multiplicity  

for purposes of common action. Even if he is  outwardly protected by the social forms of the  

intermediary stage, he will have no defense  against his inner multiplicity. The disunion  

within himself may cause him to give up, to  lapse into identity with his surroundings. 

Like the initiate of a secret society who  has broken free from the undifferentiated  

collectivity, the individual on his lonely  path needs a secret which for various  

reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret  reinforces him in the isolation of his individual  

aims. A great many individuals cannot bear  this isolation. They are the neurotics,  

who necessarily play hide-and-seek with others  as well as with themselves, without being able  

to take the game really seriously. As a rule they  end by surrendering their individual goal to their  

craving for collective conformity—a procedure  which all the opinions, beliefs, and ideals of  

their environment encourage. Moreover, no rational  arguments prevail against the environment. Only  

a secret which the individual cannot betray—one  which he fears to give away, or which he cannot  

formulate in words, and which therefore seems  to belong to the category of crazy ideas—can  

prevent the otherwise inevitable retrogression. The need for such a secret is in many cases  

so compelling that the individual finds himself  involved in ideas and actions for which he is no  

longer responsible. He is being motivated neither  by caprice nor arrogance, but by a dira necessitas  

which he himself cannot comprehend. This necessity  comes down upon him with savage fatefulness,  

and perhaps for the first time in his life  demonstrates to him ad oculos the presence  

of something alien and more powerful than himself  in his own most personal domain, where he thought  

himself the master. A vivid example is the story  of Jacob, who wrestled with the angel and came  

away with a dislocated hip, but by his struggle  prevented a murder. In those fortunate days,  

Jacob’s story was believed without question.  A contemporary Jacob, telling such a tale,  

would be treated to meaningful smiles. He would  prefer not to speak of such matters, especially if  

he were inclined to have his private views about  the nature of Yahweh’s messenger. Thus he would  

find himself willy-nilly in possession of a secret  that could not be discussed, and would become  

a deviant from the collectivity. Naturally, his  mental reservation would ultimately come to light,  

unless he succeeded in playing the hypocrite all  his life. But anyone who attempts to do both,  

to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue  his individual goal, becomes neurotic. Our modern  

Jacob would be concealing from himself the fact  that the angel was after all the stronger of the  

two—as he certainly was, for no claims were ever  made that the angel, too, came away with a limp.

5. A child set apart: early loneliness, secret revelations, and the inner world of play

Soon after I was six my father began giving me  Latin lessons, and I also went to school. I did  

not mind school; it was easy for me, since  I was always ahead of the others and had  

learned to read before I went there. However,  I remember a time when I could not yet read,  

but pestered my mother to read aloud to me out  of the Orbis Pictus, an old, richly illustrated  

children’s book, which contained an account of  exotic religions, especially that of the Hindus.  

There were illustrations of Brahma, Vishnu, and  Shiva which I found an inexhaustible source of  

interest. My mother later told me that I always  returned to these pictures. Whenever I did so,  

I had an obscure feeling of their affinity with  my “original revelation”—which I never spoke of  

to anyone. It was a secret I must never betray.  Indirectly, my mother confirmed this feeling, for  

the faint tone of contempt with which she spoke  of “heathens” did not escape me. I knew that she  

would reject my “revelation” with horror, and I  did not want to expose myself to any such injury. 

This unchildlike behavior was connected on  the one hand with an intense sensitivity and  

vulnerability, on the other hand—and this  especially—with the loneliness of my early  

youth. (My sister was born nine years after me.)  I played alone, and in my own way. Unfortunately  

I cannot remember what I played; I recall only  that I did not want to be disturbed. I was deeply  

absorbed in my games and could not endure  being watched or judged while I played them. 

My first concrete memory of games dates from my  seventh or eighth year. I was passionately fond  

of playing with bricks, and built towers which  I then rapturously destroyed by an “earthquake.”  

Between my eighth and eleventh years I drew  endlessly—battle pictures, sieges, bombardments,  

naval engagements. Then I filled a whole  exercise book with ink blots and amused myself  

giving them fantastic interpretations.  One of my reasons for liking school   was that there I found at last the  playmates I had lacked for so long.

6. The two selves: Jung’s lifelong dialogue between the outer man and the inner knower

Somewhere deep in the background I always  knew that I was two persons. One was the  

son of my parents, who went to school and was less  intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and  

clean than many other boys. The other was grown  up—old, in fact—skeptical, mistrustful, remote  

from the world of men, but close to nature, the  earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living  

creatures, and above all close to the night, to  dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly  

in him. I put “God” in quotation marks here. For  nature seemed, like myself, to have been set aside  

by God as non-divine, although created by Him as  an expression of Himself. Nothing could persuade  

me that “in the image of God” applied only to man.  In fact it seemed to me that the high mountains,  

the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals  far better exemplified the essence of God than men  

with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness,  vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism—all  

qualities with which I was only too familiar  from myself, that is, from personality No. 1, the  

schoolboy of 1890. Besides his world there existed  another realm, like a temple in which anyone who  

entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered  by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could  

only marvel and admire, forgetful of himself.  Here lived the “Other,” who knew God as a hidden,  

personal, and at the same time suprapersonal  secret. Here nothing separated man from God;  

indeed, it was as though the human mind looked  down upon Creation simultaneously with God. 

What I am here unfolding, sentence by sentence,  is something I was then not conscious of in  

any articulate way, though I sensed it with an  overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling.  

At such times I knew I was worthy of myself,  that I was my true self. As soon as I was alone,  

I could pass over into this state.  I therefore sought the peace and   solitude of this “Other,” personality No. 2. The play and counterplay between personalities No.  

1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life,  has nothing to do with a “split” or dissociation  

in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it  is played out in every individual. In my life No.  

2 has been of prime importance, and I have always  tried to make room for anything that wanted to  

come to me from within. He is a typical figure,  but he is perceived only by the very few. Most  

people’s conscious understanding is not sufficient  to realize that he is also what they are.