Richard Barwell (English 1958) was facing a midlife crisis following his mother’s death, when a chance encounter with the work of Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, changed his life for the better. A new path of self-discovery ultimately led Richard to co-found the Cambridge Jungian Circle, a charity dedicated to promoting engagement with Jung’s work and ideas.

Richard first discovered Jung when he had moved from the UK to Ohio. There he and his wife had set up a business subsidiary to the Barwell family firm, manufacturing equipment for tyre retreading and the rubber industry.

“My business career was a means of earning a living to survive. Part of my questioning after my mother died was, ‘Is this all there is to life?’” says Richard. “I think that’s a real question for so many people.

“I went into the public library, and on the very top shelf I found a book with the title Boundaries of the Soul by June Singer, a Jungian analyst in Chicago. It was the word ‘soul’ which drew my attention.

“The thing that made the greatest impression on me was a description of one of Singer’s long-term patients who felt she was trapped behind bars; there was an image of her staring out between the bars. And one day Singer said to her, ‘What is behind you?’ The woman looked, and there were no bars. That sense of growing into a kind of freedom has remained with me ever since.”

Richard next turned to Jung’s own works and developed a deeper interest in his ideas exploring the deep layers of the unconscious mind. In particular, the notion of a collective unconscious – the idea that essential human activities are regulated by archetypes or symbols understood innately by all humans – has been a source of peace and comfort to him ever since.

“For me, the most important thing to realise was that there is some structure to our inner world, to the psyche, which consists of the ego consciousness and the unconscious,” says Richard.

“The key word in Jung is ‘individuation’, which is about working towards a greater understanding of the unconscious. But we all have to remember that individuation is a lifelong journey because the collective unconscious is such a huge topic.”

Inspired by his new learning, Richard undertook training as a psychological counsellor in Cambridge and began practising therapy. The receptiveness of many of his patients to the Jungian ideas he taught them sparked the idea to establish what would become the Cambridge Jungian Circle, which Richard co-founded in 1992 alongside University of Cambridge Philosophy alumnus Roland Hindmarsh.

The charity is still active and hosts regular talks, with over 100 members both in Cambridge and overseas. This July, they celebrated 150 years since Jung’s birth with a summer conference, which saw speakers from 16 different countries visit to deliver papers.

Richard’s work in establishing the Circle has left him with some unforgettable experiences – not least travelling to Küsnacht, Switzerland to meet Jung’s son Franz, and Jungian psychologist and scholar Marie Louise von Franz. Recordings of these meetings are stored in the Circle’s library.

Now aged 87, Richard remains involved in the Circle as the Editor of its biannual journal, The Chronicle.

When Richard reflects on his time at Gonville & Caius College, he finds that even as a student he was searching for his sense of meaning and purpose. Having matriculated as an Economics student in 1958, he discovered quickly that this was not the subject for him and for his second and third years changed to the English Tripos, which he found a much more fascinating and stimulating contribution to his personal development.

“English gave me a depth of understanding of human functioning, and I really enjoyed it,” says Richard. “I’m no first-class intellect; I’m just a bloke going through life, and I found Cambridge so enlivening and exciting. It was another huge step in my maturing.”

After decades of engaging with Jungian psychology, Richard is now satisfied that the right answers are not always easy to find, but that Jung’s work offers an attractive approach to thinking about the meaning of existence.

“It continues to give me joy about the whole mystery of living,” he says. “Anybody who can tell you what life itself is, doesn’t really know.”