The clock, within the depth-psychology corpus, functions as far more than a utilitarian instrument of measurement; it occupies a charged symbolic position at the intersection of temporality, selfhood, and the sacred. Jung’s extended analysis of Pauli’s ‘world clock’ vision—a three-dimensional mandala of intersecting vertical and horizontal discs, each with its own rhythmic pulse—establishes the clock as an image of the Self in its most architecturally complete form, a figure of ‘sublime harmony’ that reconciles the temporal with the eternal. Von Franz elaborates this reading systematically, distinguishing the clock as an archetypal symbol of time-consciousness from mere chronometric utility: broken clocks in dreams presage death; the circular clock-face encodes a cosmological intuition about cyclical time rooted in celestial observation. Hillman, by contrast, reads the wristwatch as a concrete emblem of the Western mind’s captivity to chronological determinism—what he terms the ‘time-bound mind.’ McGilchrist frames the opposition as ‘clock time vs. lived time,’ invoking hemisphere theory to argue that abstract, quantified clock-time is a left-hemisphere artefact alienated from embodied temporal experience. Heidegger, finally, situates clock-use within Dasein’s primordial temporality, showing that consulting a clock is never mere observation but an act of ‘taking our time’ rooted in existential concern. The term thus traverses mandala symbolism, phenomenological ontology, archetypal psychology, and neurological critique.
In modern dreams the clock or watch sometimes has the meaning of a reminder of our temporality. Sometime before death people dream, for instance, that their watch is broken beyond repair.
Von Franz argues that the clock in modern dreams operates on two symbolic registers: as a reminder of mortal temporality (the broken watch presaging death) and, in other dream contexts, as a symbol of the Self representing a time-bound yet transcendent world order.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The world clock may well be the ‘severe image’ which is identical with the Cabiri, i.e., the four children or four little men with the pendulums. It is a three-dimensional mandala—a mandala in bodily form signifying realization.
Jung identifies Pauli’s world-clock vision as a three-dimensional mandala and associates it with the Cabiri, interpreting it as an image of psychic realization rather than a mechanical device.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
The harmony of world and mind, resolving doubt and death, brings us to Wolfgang Pauli’s dream vision of the world clock, a centerpiece of Jung’s 1935 Eranos Lecture.
Hillman recapitulates the world-clock dream as the pivotal image in which temporal and extratemporal dimensions of existence are harmonized, with Pauli himself testifying that the vision revealed layers of being beyond conventional time and individual death.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
clock which Jung published in Psychology and Alchemy. Jung suggests that this world clock might represent the essence of the time-space Jungian or rather its origin, a point to which we will return.
Von Franz situates the world-clock vision within a lineage of double-structured cosmological models traced to Plato’s Timaeus, arguing it encodes the origin-structure of time-space itself.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
It is certainly not for rational reasons, but on account of the archetypal intuition of a cyclical time (as distinct from the flux aspect) that our invention of clocks made them circular. The faces of clocks today are still mostly fashioned in a circle in order to simulate the heavens.
Von Franz contends that the circular design of clock faces is not a rational engineering choice but an archetypal expression of cyclical time, rooting the instrument in cosmological and mythological intuition.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The Western mind has trouble stopping its clock. It conceives its inmost life as a biological clock and its heart as a ticker. The electronic gadget on the wrist encloses in a concrete symbol the Western time-bound mind.
Hillman reads the wristwatch as a cultural symbol concretizing the Western psyche’s compulsive subjection to chronological time, linking it to a broader critique of progress-oriented, biologically determined selfhood.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
CLOCK TIME VS LIVED TIME Lee Smolin makes an observation that is interesting in the light of the hemisphere hypothesis… a specified time implies the existence of a clock outside the system measuring the time.
McGilchrist uses physics to argue that clock time is a methodological abstraction requiring a fixed external standpoint, contrasting it with the lived, participatory temporality associated with right-hemisphere experience.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
CLOCK TIME VS LIVED TIME… a specified time implies the existence of a clock outside the system measuring the time… The division of the world into
This parallel passage reinforces McGilchrist’s central argument that clock time presupposes an artificial bifurcation of observer and observed, making it an artefact of left-hemisphere abstraction rather than a feature of reality.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Looking at the clock is based on taking our time, and is guided by it… even the use of clocks as equipment is based upon Dasein’s temporality.
Heidegger argues that consulting a clock is never a neutral observation of pointer-positions but is ontologically grounded in Dasein’s primordial temporality and existential concern.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
It takes the form, for instance, of a serpent, which describes a circle round the dreamer. It appears in later dreams as a clock, a circle with a central point, a round target for shooting practice, a clock that is a perpetuum mobile, a ball, a globe, a round table.
Jung documents the clock appearing in a dream series as one among multiple circular symbols—all expressions of the mandala—demonstrating its archetypal equivalence with the circle and its association with the Self’s structuring dynamism.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
To the three great archetypal symbols and time, the river (or snake), the procession (or train), and the wheel (or clock), we could add one more archetypal image, the God of Death.
Von Franz classifies the clock alongside the river and the wheel as one of three primary archetypal symbols of time, connecting it to the mythological figure of Father Time and ultimately to a dark aspect of the God-image.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Our clock-time, however, as I said before, is a specific achievement of our civilization, just as is the parameter t in modern physics. It is in contrast to all more original archetypal ideas of time a mere concept of me
Von Franz locates clock-time at the outermost, most ego-bound ring of psychic reality, contrasting it with deeper archetypal and eternal modes of time accessible as one approaches the Self.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
She picked up her watch from the floor and saw that it was broken completely in two. Her associations to the dream were that the race track was like a sundial, and also like the circle of the zodiac. It thus represented a year clock, a measure of time by years.
Harding presents clinical dream material in which a broken watch signals existential rupture, while the dreamer’s own associations link the timepiece to the zodiac and cosmic cycles, confirming the clock’s dual personal and archetypal symbolic range.
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
The voice of this objective time was the implacable ‘tick-tock’ of the clock’s internal mechanism, which lent auditory force to the Aristotelian sense of time as a countable series of discrete now-points.
Abram argues that the clock’s audible mechanism became the sonic embodiment of quantitative, Aristotelian time, reinforcing an abstracted and disembodied temporal experience disconnected from local and seasonal rhythms.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
used as a cosmic clock, ‘whose hand is the sun. The sun’s course and the horizon-sector actually coincide only when viewed from the Pole.’
This passage traces the gnomon and the horizon as proto-clock instruments, framing the impulse to measure cosmic time as rooted in both observational necessity and an archetypal compulsion to divide and organize circular space.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
This public dating, in which everyone assigns himself his time, is one which everyone can ‘reckon’ on simultaneously.
Heidegger describes public time-reckoning as a social structure grounded in shared environmental nature, providing the ontological context within which clock-use becomes possible and meaningful.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
Lowered temperatures (for plants differences of only 5°C–10°C) slow down the biological clocks.
Von Franz introduces biological clocks in living organisms as evidence that rhythmic temporal organization is an archetypal property of life itself, not merely a human cultural invention.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside