There it is, an old book I have found again…

A book that once belonged to my father, and that I had rescued during one of his attempts to « reduce the library, » as the books continued to accumulate despite the finite space available. A book that remained forgotten for years, first in a cardboard box, then in a cellar, and later in the trunk of my car. A book published more than twenty years ago by a friend of my father’s; together they would walk the Camino de Santiago. My father used to say that they spoke very little during those walks.

Books sometimes follow paths as unpredictable as those of human beings.

In my hands I hold the fourteenth volume of La Vouivre, a journal of analytical psychology published in Switzerland. Independent of the official Jungian societies, this editorial venture sought to create an open space for reflection around the work of Carl Gustav Jung, bringing together analysts and writers from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Its very name invites adventure. The Vouivre is a legendary creature of Franco-Swiss folklore, a fantastic serpent with bat-like wings that, like every dragon, bridges earth and sky. Guardian of a hidden treasure, it bears upon its brow a third eye, a radiant crimson jewel.

It also evokes the familiar landscapes of my childhood. Its image appears on the coat of arms of one of the villages in the canton of Neuchâtel, the Swiss canton where I grew up.

There is always a story lying just beneath the surface of our lives, quietly supporting our everyday existence, orienting our impulses and motivations, and sometimes giving meaning to what might otherwise appear to be nothing more than a succession of events.

Could we already dare to believe that books, like roads, preserve the memory of the encounters they have made possible?

I found neither a digital archive nor an official bibliography devoted to this journal, and this volume is in all likelihood the last one ever published. Economic realities eventually caught up with the project, which had remained only marginally, if at all, financially viable since its creation in 1990.

Among the various contributors, each of whom had drawn inspiration, in their own singular way, from the writings of Carl Gustav Jung, I discover, or perhaps rediscover, an article by Jean-François Vézina. Its pages remain untouched by the underlinings that mark so many others in the volume, traces of my reading from more than twenty years ago. Perhaps I simply did not yet have the words to hear what he had to say.

Paragraph after paragraph, I immerse myself in the writing of the clinical psychologist from Québec, who now also introduces himself as a musician. From the very first lines, something within me resonates. I wish to make this text my own, to allow it to continue resonating within me, to let it work upon me, to let it affect me.

We sometimes enter stories to escape ourselves, but perhaps, more deeply still, to encounter our self, both at the heart of the world and beyond ourselves.

Today, this intuition seems no less relevant than it did then. As Jean-François Vézina reminds us, quoting Albert Einstein on page 51, ours is an age characterised by the perfection of means and the confusion of ends. We know how to do so many things, ever more efficiently and ever more quickly, without always knowing why we do them in the first place.

From childhood onward, however, we possess a unique resource for making sense of what happens to us: curiosity. It is curiosity that urges us to question the world, reaching as far as the limits allowed by our own originality.

Children ask why without end, until adults, often animated by the best of intentions but so constrained by time, gradually lose touch with their own impulse to wonder. Questions are slowly replaced by reassuring explanations and mysteries by pragmatic solutions.

This is what Jean-François Vézina was already writing in 2004. My own questioning was undoubtedly sharper then than it is today, more chaotic, more anxious as well. The reader has grown older.

A little further on, Jean-François Vézina writes that the soul projects itself through stories in order to become conscious of itself. He turns to The Matrix to illustrate his point, perhaps also out of sheer pleasure in sharing his love of cinema. The film had already been released five years earlier.

Time passes, yet certain stories seem to continue living within us, as though they had remained untouched, preserved from both the restlessness of our imagination and the erosion of memory, leaving us with the comforting illusion that the passing years have had no effect upon them.

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.

Jean-François Vézina chose these two sentences from Carl Gustav Jung’s autobiography as the epigraph to his article, and I find it deeply satisfying to encounter them here once again. Even before reading the article itself, I am already comforted by the sense of being on the right path, among kindred spirits who have travelled this way before.

The autobiography of Jung, woven from memories, dreams, and reflections, is itself, perhaps, an attempt to answer the very question life had put to him.

Rather than turning our gaze inward, another way of searching for meaning, Jean-François Vézina suggests (not knowing him personally, I shall refrain from simply calling him Jean-François), is to question the stories themselves.

Most of us have probably experienced that magical feeling, if we dare use the word, of closing a novel or leaving a cinema with the profound sense of being intensely, genuinely alive. Immersed in the story, as if intoxicated by it, we feel something begin to stir within us again, the narrative seeming to grant us permission to take up once more the thread of our own singular existence.

We can fall in love with a story just as we fall in love with a person, writes Jean-François Vézina. He seems to have no doubt about it. I read the sentence several times, as though it first needed to be experienced before it could be understood.

The works that leave a lasting mark on us are probably not chosen by chance. The stories that accompany us throughout our lives quietly trace the contours of what questions us, unsettles us, calls to us, and is still seeking to come into being. They give structure to our inner experience and soothe the anxiety that arises from the indefinable texture of everyday life, where memory intertwines with our imagination of possible futures.

Beyond our physical existence, it is stories that provide the framework of our lived experience. They sustain our commitments, help us live more peacefully with our remorse, and allow us to believe that, despite our defeats, even our regrets may ultimately find meaning.

If we pay attention, our most profound aesthetic encounters become landmarks, guiding us toward discovering who we are still becoming.

Our own life is itself a story, one in which we are called, more or less consciously, to play a role that truly resembles us, inhabiting in our own way a narrative that began long before we were born, whose opening chapters remain unknown to us, and which we shall inevitably leave before witnessing its conclusion.

I barely paraphrase Jean-François Vézina. Instead, I immerse myself in his writing, trusting that it will inspire my own reflections. In carrying selected passages of his original French text into English, sometimes closely, sometimes more freely, I hope that something of its voice may find new life.

An ancient legend (Jean-François Vézina does not mention its source, though I choose to trust the legend) tells us that every human being enters the world carrying within them a question entrusted by the gods. We are here, it says, to rediscover that question and to stage our own responses to it.

It is a beautiful story. Not because it claims to explain the world, but because it reminds us that living may consist less in accumulating certainties than in embodying a question that precedes us, one whose echo continues to resonate within us.

Between the lines of the stories that leave traces in the emotional labyrinth of our memory and continue to populate our imagination, invisible threads are quietly woven beneath appearances. At the threshold of consciousness, they give shape to us, linking our personal history to that of our family, our ancestors, our communities, and, more broadly, to the history of humanity itself.

Despite missed encounters and interrupted journeys, we meet countless characters throughout our lives, weaving relationships that endure for longer or shorter spans, despite absence and beyond physical presence. Hopefully, we eventually succeed in opening ourselves to otherness. Imperfectly and hesitantly, we learn to enter into relationship and, through trial and error, to inhabit the world from within.

When we simply surrender ourselves to inherited « programmes, » when we stop questioning the scripts that shape our choices and abandon ourselves entirely to fate, we run the risk, without even realising it, of becoming Agent Smith, one copy among countless others, anonymous within an alienating network. What follows is dissolution into the mass, with only one objective remaining: to stay afloat for as long as possible.

Through his cinematic references, Jean-François Vézina connects images that illuminate one another, reminding us that confusing adaptation with conformity, belonging with the loss of one’s uniqueness, through a gradual erasure of the self, is anything but fiction.

Before bringing his article to a close, he offers an expression that resonates so strongly with the present moment that the rediscovery of this text today almost seems inevitable: to reconcile the infinitely ordinary with the infinitely essential.

Is this not, after all, a beautiful definition of analytical work?

To venture behind the scenes of our stories and to approach what lies within their atmospheres is to dare to enter vast and mysterious territories. There, perhaps, we may at once approach humanity’s greatest existential questions while exploring the intimate landscape of our own uniqueness. In aspiring to reconcile some apparent opposites, without denying that brutality and cruelty coexist alongside gentleness and beauty, we gradually learn to stitch together the thread of the infinitely ordinary with that of the infinitely essential.

Eventually, we learn to welcome a feeling that carries its own truth, requiring neither proof nor demonstration, but recognised through the quiet evidence of inner conviction.

Through the pretext of writing these reflections, what mattered above all was taking time, in good company, within a language in which the living presence of Carl Gustav Jung can still be felt.

Perhaps, too, it was an attempt to connect with the singularity of a piece of writing that, more than twenty years ago, had already spoken to the spirit of a close friend of my father.

Perhaps that is what an encounter truly is: a moment at once deeply personal and profoundly universal.

Geneva, 22 July 2026

Source : Vézina, J.-F. (2004). Les oracles de l’écran : Le cinéma comme lieu d’individuation et de synchronicité culturelle. In Divinités d’aujourd’hui (La Vouivre, vol. 14, pp. 45-59). Genève: Georg.