By Hans Schmid-Guisan
Foreword By C.G. Jung
A Translation With Commentaries
First published in Zurich in 1931 as Tag und Nacht, Hans Schmid-Guisan’s Day and Night is a rare and visionary work from the early world of analytical psychology. Introduced by C.G. Jung, who recognized its kinship with medieval and Renaissance traditions of symbolic love, the book asks to be read not as a literal social program, but as an imaginal map of the psyche. Jung’s warning remains essential: the reader must “take the head and not touch the body.” The meaning lies in the symbol.
The narrative begins when a pastor arrives on a mysterious island divided by a great wall. On one side stands Collectivopolis, the city of collective order, law, duty, public morality, marriage, institutions, and visible achievement. On the other side lies Individien, the nocturnal country of inwardness, dream, Eros, solitude, breakdown, symbolic guidance, and spiritual ascent. Between them stands the wall: barrier, wound, threshold, and psychic membrane. Across twelve days and twelve nights, the narrator moves between these worlds, discovering that human life cannot flourish by abolishing either side. The collective without the soul becomes mechanical and deadening; the individual without form becomes chaotic and dangerous. Individuation requires the difficult art of crossing.
Schmid-Guisan’s island is populated by figures who still speak directly to contemporary psychology: the guide in the blue cloak, the despairing man who cannot serve two masters, the artist caught between image and inflation, the woman seeking her own sacred ground, the jealous husband, the lovers who must reclaim their projections, the physicians who medicalize psychic suffering, and the seekers who climb toward the mountain only by first entering the dark country. What emerges is a deep meditation on Eros and Spirit, masculine and feminine, clinical containment and symbolic freedom, the dangers of literalism, and the possibility of a conscious union of opposites.
This edition also opens the work to a wider contemporary conversation. Read through the Eranos I Ching, the island map becomes a living mandala of psychological transformation. Read from China, it becomes a bridge between ancient collective walls and the modern struggle for individual symbolic life. Read clinically, it becomes a manual for the consulting room: how to create containers, withdraw projections, respect thresholds, and help the soul move between order and wilderness without being destroyed.
At a time when inherited myths are collapsing and culture itself feels divided, Day and Night offers no ideology and no simple cure. It offers something more difficult and more enduring: a symbolic path for living the tension between Day and Night.