Circumambulation of the self

The circumambulation of the Self is Jung's name for the actual shape of psychological development — not a line moving forward but a spiral orbit around a center that was always already there. The formulation arrived not as theory but as discovery, and Jung was precise about when and how it came to him.

Between 1918 and 1920, stationed at Château d'Oex as commandant of a British internment region, he sketched a small circular drawing each morning in a notebook. He noticed that the drawings changed with his inner state — when he was "outside himself," the symmetry broke. Over time the mandalas became diagnostic instruments, and through them he arrived at a conviction he recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

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.

The word circumambulatio carries its meaning in its roots: circum, around, and ambulare, to walk. It names a ritual walking around a sacred precinct — the temenos — that marks and concentrates the center without entering it directly. Jung borrowed the term from his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, where the Chinese text's "circulation" described not mere circular motion but "the marking off of the sacred precinct and, on the other, fixation and concentration" — a movement that activates "all the light and dark forces of human nature, and together with them all psychological opposites of whatever kind they may be." The circumambulation is self-knowledge by means of what the Sanskrit calls tapas, self-brooding: the heat generated by sustained attention to the center.

What makes the concept precise rather than merely poetic is what it refuses. It refuses linearity — the idea that development moves from point A to point B, that earlier stages are left behind, that progress accumulates. Von Franz, working through the alchemical parallel, describes how the same problems recur across a lifetime, apparently settled and then reappearing. The temptation is discouragement — "here it is again." But looked at more carefully, the recurrence is the circulatio: "it has simply reappeared on another level. For instance, it may now have become a feeling problem." The spiral returns to the same material, but the angle of approach has changed. The intellectual-intuitive type who ran quickly past feeling in the first pass must circle back and meet it again, this time without the escape route.

Edinger maps the structural logic underneath this: psychological development proceeds through an alternating cycle of inflation and alienation, ego-Self identity and ego-Self separation, repeating throughout a lifetime. The cycle is not a failure of development but its mechanism. What changes across the repetitions is not the content but the consciousness brought to it — the ego-Self axis gradually emerging into awareness, the ego learning that it is not the author of the whole show.

The Liverpool dream of 1927 confirmed what the mandala drawings had been teaching. Jung found himself in a dark, rainy city, walking with companions who saw nothing remarkable. At the center of a radially arranged city was a small island blazing with sunlight, a magnolia tree in flower, "as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light." His companions did not see it. He understood afterward: "The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center. Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning."

The pneumatic reading of this material — and it is a persistent temptation — is to hear "center" as destination, as a place one arrives at and inhabits, a higher self achieved through sufficient spiritual work. Jung's own formulation resists this. "One could not go beyond the center" is not an invitation to rest there; it is a statement about the structure of the orbit. The center is what the circumambulation circles, not what it reaches. The mandala is the path to the center, not the center itself. After the Liverpool dream, Jung stopped drawing mandalas — not because he had arrived but because the insight had done its work and further drawing would have been a different kind of circling, one that mistook the map for the territory.

Hillman parts company with Jung here, and the divergence is worth naming. Where Jung's circumambulation tends toward the Self as ordering center — a unifying principle that the ego-Self axis gradually makes conscious — Hillman refuses the centering function altogether, reading the psyche as irreducibly polytheistic, "stars or sparks or luminous fish eyes" rather than a mandala with a single center. For Hillman, the circumambulation risks becoming what he calls a "fading Christianity come back in the guise of a theology of the Self," with wholeness replacing salvation as the pneumatic promise. The orbit, in his reading, has no fixed center — or rather, it has many, each god its own.

The disagreement is real and should not be dissolved. What both share is the refusal of linearity, the insistence that the psyche moves by return and repetition rather than by progress. Where they divide is on whether those returns orbit a single ordering principle or a plurality that resists unification.

The Self — the archetype of wholeness and the ordering center of the total psyche
Mandala — the circular symbol Jung used to track the state of the Self
Individuation — the lifelong process the circumambulation enacts
James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose polytheistic reading challenges the centering function

Sources Cited

Jung, C.G., 1963, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Jung, C.G., 1967, Alchemical Studies
von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1980, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
Edinger, Edward F., 1972, Ego and Archetype
Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman
Wilhelm, Richard, 1931, The Secret of the Golden Flower