In the autumn of 1913, a successful Swiss psychiatrist, a family man with a lakeside house and a growing reputation, deliberately let himself sink into his own waking visions, not knowing if he would be able to climb back out. For the next several years he half-feared he was going insane. What he brought back up became one of the strangest and most influential ideas about the human mind: that you can walk into your imagination on purpose, meet what lives there, and be changed by the meeting.

The doctor was Carl Jung. By 1913 he was in his late thirties, an established figure, and he had just detonated the most important professional relationship of his life, his intense friendship and collaboration with Sigmund Freud. The break left him unmoored in a way he described as a period of profound inner uncertainty, a disorientation deep enough that he stepped back from some of his ambitions and turned his attention inward, toward something rising up in him that he didn't understand and couldn't stop.

What was rising was images. Fantasies, visions, waking dreams, coming with a force and vividness that frightened him. A lesser-known and more honest fact about this period is how genuinely destabilizing it was; Jung, a psychiatrist who diagnosed psychosis for a living, was not at all sure that what was happening to him was not psychosis. He saw floods and fields of corpses in his mind's eye. He heard voices. He felt the pressure of an inner world pressing hard against the walls of the ordinary one.

Here is the decision that makes him the founder of this season, and I want to be careful to mark it as a choice rather than a mere symptom. Faced with this eruption, he could have fought it, medicated it, gritted his teeth and waited for it to pass. Instead he did something almost reckless: he decided to go toward it. He would lower himself, on purpose, into the visions, and instead of being swept away, he would stay present, watch, participate, and remember. He described sitting at his desk and letting himself drop, as if down a shaft, into the imagined scene, and then walking around in it, talking to the figures he found there, and afterward writing down everything that happened.

I'll flag the record, because this is a story that gets both mythologized and pathologized. What we know comes largely from Jung's own later accounts and from the private notebooks he kept during these years, the small black journals in which he recorded the visions as they came, and the large red-bound volume, illuminated like a medieval manuscript, into which he later transcribed and elaborated them. That red book stayed mostly private for decades and was only published long after his death, so for most of the twentieth century people knew this descent only through Jung's retellings. Take the specific visions as his report of his own inner experience, not as events with outside witnesses. What is not in doubt is that he did this, systematically, for years, and that his entire later psychology grew out of it.

And what he concluded from the descent is the seed of everything ahead. He came to believe that the images arising in him were not just personal debris, not merely leftover feelings or repressed memories in disguise. He believed they had a kind of autonomy, that the figures he met in the visions behaved like independent beings with their own knowledge, saying things he didn't expect and didn't consciously know. One figure in particular, an old man with the wings of a kingfisher whom he called Philemon, seemed to Jung to teach him things, to say things Jung felt he could not have thought up himself. Jung took from this the conviction that the psyche has depths that produce meaning on their own, and that a person can enter into a real relationship with those depths, not by analyzing them from a safe distance, but by meeting them face to face in the imagination.

That is a genuinely radical claim, and we'll spend the season testing how much of it holds and where it gets dangerous. But notice first what it is not. It is not daydreaming, drifting off into pleasant nothing. And it is not being overwhelmed, swept away and lost in fantasy like the psychosis Jung feared. It's a third thing, a disciplined, deliberate, wide-awake descent into the image, where you keep your own standpoint and your own will even as you let the imagination move on its own. Holding both of those at once, the letting-go and the staying-present, is the entire skill, and it's a narrow ridge with a fall on either side.

Jung nearly fell. He came out the other end intact, and spent the rest of his life turning what he'd learned into a method other people could use more safely than he had. He gave it a plain, almost disappointing name.

Next episode: the method he named, the exact discipline that separates a healing descent from simply coming apart, and the winged old man who talked back.