Loneliness Does Not Come From Having

From Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 356, in the chapter recounting Jung's late-life reflections. Jung, who spent much of his adult life in intense inner solitude and whose ideas isolated him from the mainstream psychological community — including his rupture with Sigmund Freud around 1912 — was speaking from direct experience. The passage distinguishes two kinds of aloneness: the merely physical, which company can relieve, and the existential, which arises when one's deepest concerns have no interlocutor. The latter, Jung suggests, is the condition of anyone whose inner life is richer or stranger than what social convention can accommodate.