Day and Night

When Hans Schmid-Guisan published Tag und Nacht in 1931, C.G. Jung recognized at once that it was no ordinary book. In his foreword, Jung warned readers not to approach it with "humorless literalism," but to "take the head and not touch the body" - to grasp its meaning rather than reduce its strange images to mere plot. Nearly a century later, Day and Night returns as a remarkable allegory of the divided modern soul.
The story unfolds on an island split by a massive wall. On one side is Collectivopolis, a city of order, law, collective responsibility, institutional morality, and social clarity. On the other is Individien, the realm of dreams, eros, solitude, inner crisis, symbolic guidance, and the dangerous path toward the mountain of individuation. The narrator, a pastor visiting for twelve days, is drawn back and forth across the wall, discovering that neither side can save the human being alone. Collective life without inner truth becomes sterile and oppressive; inwardness without form becomes chaotic, inflated, and destructive.
Through encounters with lovers, artists, physicians, women's communities, suicidal men, jealous husbands, spiritual guides, and seekers of the soul, Schmid-Guisan creates a psychological map of the tension between law and desire, masculine and feminine, spirit and body, society and the Self. Read today through Jungian psychology, the Eranos I Ching, and contemporary clinical practice, Day and Night becomes more than a historical curiosity. It is a living guide to the "both-and" a work about boundaries, projections, love, symbolic life, and the courage required to cross consciously between Day and Night.