What we have come to call “Western” consciousness is in truth northern consciousness. And we falsify the psychological situation by imagining the basic opposition in the soul to be between East and West. Because this pairing is horizontal it tends to project its oppositions outward into the literal geography of external space, catching us in identifications with Orient or Occident and in fantasies of uniting our souls by a meeting of East and West. The other pairing in our souls is that of North and South, light and shadow, conscious and unconscious, a vertical division between what is above and what is below, a reflection in imaginal geography of our cultural history.
Venturing South is a journey for explorers. It is the direction down into depth, different from the Eastern trip, and from the Western rush of golden boys and girls to pacific harmonies, and from the Northern ascents to cool objective observation. Going South means leaving our psychological territory at the risk of archetypal disorientation. Once when Jung tried to venture beyond his psychic borders toward Rome, he fainted at the railroad station. A similar pathologizing event happened to Freud in Athens. “Rome” and “Athens” were beyond the tolerable limits of depth psychology’s founders. Venturing South may mean departing from all we have come to consider “psychology.”
— Between the Failure of Psychology and a Renaissance of Psychology: Psychology Re-visioned, Re-Visioning Psychology, ch 4