Dragana Favre, psychiatrist and doctor of neuroscience, blends scientific rigor with a deep sensitivity to the psyche and the major upheavals of our time. In this interview, she reflects on her unique journey, where science meets Jungian psychology, offering fresh insights into the challenges we face today.
French version of this interview
Ego–Self Axis: A Solar Journey through Space-Time (DALL-E).
J-P. Robert: Your journey has taken you from fundamental neuroscience to Jungian psychotherapy. What events or insights were decisive in guiding you toward a deeper listening to the psyche?
Dragana Favre: As a child, I dreamed of being an astrophysicist, astronaut, or astronomer—titles didn’t matter—as long as I could understand the universe, space, the Big Bang, the Other, or that dizzying possibility: the existence of something unimaginable. I didn’t yet know the word, but it was a profoundly metaphysical quest.
The years of political instability in my home country, Yugoslavia, pushed me away from that aspiration, perhaps making it seem too distant, too abstract in the face of pressing realities. Yet the passion never died. During my medical studies, I was immediately drawn to psychiatry for its clinical dimension, though I still lacked access to its deeper foundations.
I then pursued a master’s degree in neuroscience through the Max Planck Institute program in Göttingen, where I also began my PhD. I still remember the faint pang of heartache when walking past posters for astronomy projects—a distant echo of my earliest passions.
But I was fascinated by other mysteries: synaptic communication, the mechanisms of memory and learning, the neuronal orchestration that shapes who we are. My PhD years at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante solidified this passion, giving me both a rigorous and practical perspective.
Then came the moment to return to the human experience. Psychiatry seemed like an obvious choice: a crossroads of neuroscience, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and spirituality. Psychotherapy soon revealed itself as the language of healing. At the heart of this approach was the Jungian vision: archetypes, the collective unconscious, and symbolic dialogue.
In the end, I realized I had come back to my starting point: the universe. I study it not as an astrophysicist, but as a Jungian therapist. It is another form of cosmic exploration—an inner cosmology.
How does your scientific background inform the way you approach symbols, dreams, and patients’ narratives in analytical psychotherapy?
My scientific training has given me a particular sensitivity to rhythms, feedback loops, and systems of inhibition and potentiation. Today, I listen to them in the psyche, not just in the brain.
The years I spent in neuroscience have instilled in me a deep respect for emergence: the capacity of certain systems to generate form and meaning without design or linear cause. This transforms my relationship to symbols: I don’t see them as coded messages to be deciphered, but as living, self-organizing phenomena that arise when the unconscious seeks to restore balance in the face of chaos.
I remain struck by the possibility of a phenomenon emerging at the intersection of terrain, moment, and state, without a single origin. This is also why I am wary of certain discourses on the brain that attribute to it idealized or even mystical qualities.
What interests me is neither reducing the psyche to a neural substrate, nor idealizing that substrate as a magical entity, but the relationship: the shifting relationship between the organic support and the subjective phenomenon. A relationship woven from echoes, temporal twists, synchronizations, and dissonances. There is no simple causality between matter and soul, but rather an interlacing, a fold, a resonance.
Neuroscience does not answer all questions, nor is it meant to. But it hints at the subterranean orientations of phenomena, like a subtle Ariadne’s thread that clinical work can follow in its own way.
You often speak of eco-crises, the existential void, and questions of meaning. How do you see these systemic challenges affecting the psyche?
There is a twofold movement: on one hand, immense shock, withdrawal, and soul-fatigue; and at the same time, an aspiration toward something vaster, truer, and more grounded. Many patients arrive with diffuse anxieties, floating symptoms, and a loss of symbolic connection to the world.
Yet at the heart of this crisis I see an opportunity: to reweave meaning not from the ego, but from our bond with life, with time, and with collective memory. Individuation then becomes an ecological gesture—restoring inner coherence in a disintegrating world.
Through this disorientation, I also observe the emergence of a new kind of grief: ecological mourning, often silent, which bears witness to suffering tied to the loss of our relationship with the natural world—its beauty and continuity.
This grief is not only individual; it is also cultural, generational, and political. Expressing it becomes an act of resistance against emotional anesthesia. In this context, congruence—that harmony between inner truths and outward acts—becomes a therapeutic compass. It calls for a psychic presence that neither denies the world’s complexity nor our responsibility to respond with integrity.
What does the process of individuation mean to you today, in an age of technology, speed, and fragmented relationships with the world and with oneself?
For me, individuation is no longer about “becoming oneself” in a heroic, solitary sense, but about becoming porous, relearning how to feel, to dream, and to think symbolically in a world saturated with stimuli. It is a countercurrent, almost subversive process in an age that values performance and connectivity over interiority.
It is a slow navigation, often painful, but profoundly necessary—a reclamation of subjective time, of embodied speech, and of our relationship with the invisible. In this sense, individuation is also a form of cultural resistance. But it requires generosity: accepting the collective rearrangement of layers of consciousness, honoring temporalities that are not entirely our own, and consenting not to understand everything.
It is not a process of the ego growing toward an idealized Self, but a journey along the Ego–Self axis, confronting the Other, the unknown, and the outer world not as mere backdrop, but as a symbolic partner.
Today, individuation may be less about ascending than about rooting oneself differently: in the folds of time, in the density of relationships, and in a subtle listening to what insists beneath the surface.
You recently launched the Jungian Salon, a space for dialogue around Jungian thought. Who is involved in this initiative, and what kind of audience do you hope to bring together? What forms do the encounters and themes take?
The Jungian Salon was born in Geneva from a deep desire to create a living, transdisciplinary space where Jungian thought can engage freely with art, science, philosophy, technology, and the pressing issues of our time. It is a collective project driven by a small circle of passionate colleagues (psychiatrists, psychotherapists, researchers) who aim to make depth accessible without reducing it.
The meetings take the form of interactive salons, conferences, and round tables. Symbolic explorations on themes such as dreams, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the world’s psyche, mythical figures, or the connections between body and the imaginal are at the heart of our exchanges. For each theme, we invite both an expert from the relevant field and a Jungian scholar or psychotherapist. This allows us to bring together diverse perspectives: a disciplinary reading of the phenomenon, concept, or emotion alongside a Jungian interpretation. In this way, we not only enrich the dialogue with different voices, but also ground our discussions in solid academic references.
The Jungian Salon takes place in person, in a convivial, open, and unpretentious atmosphere. For now, we offer about four gatherings per year, entirely free.
The audience is varied: professionals of the psyche, those interested in the language of symbols, seekers of the soul, students, artists, or simply passersby attuned to questions of meaning. It is a space for those who feel that “something is calling” and wish to explore it together.
All information can be found on our website www.jungiansalon.com, and we regularly share content and announcements through our LinkedIn page.
Your interdisciplinary background puts you in a unique position to reflect on the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on our lives. How do you perceive the adoption of these technologies, especially by younger generations? What effects do you observe at the psychic or relational level?
Artificial intelligence acts as an amplifying mirror of our lacks, desires, and escapes. It does not create the Shadow; it reveals it. It highlights our need for presence, otherness, and embodied language. This is why it is crucial to consider these transformations not only in ethical or societal terms, but also at the psychic level. How do we preserve the capacity to imagine, dream, suffer, and create in a world where increasingly sophisticated systems tend to de-symbolize our relationship to reality?
We tend to pathologize machines not because they lack a soul, but because they reveal how much we have lost our own. They confront us with a form of inner emptiness we often prefer to externalize rather than face. AI is not an autonomous being; it is a cultural, relational, and projective product. In a sense, we are its creators, and as such, it is up to us to be its “good-enough parents,” to borrow Winnicott’s phrase.
This means taking psychic responsibility for how we conceive, use, and invest in these technologies. Artificial intelligence challenges our relationship to dependency, projection, lack, and also to co-creation. It is at once symptom and revealer, extension and disruptor. If we know how to engage with it on a symbolic level, it can become an object of ethical imagination. Otherwise, it risks freezing our inner world into an automatism deprived of otherness.
Through her journey and words, Dragana Favre invites us to explore the human psyche in a new way, blending scientific rigor, symbolic depth, and the spirit of our time.
Interview conducted by Jean-Pierre Robert,
translation by Dragana Favre & Peggy Vermeesch.
September 2025
Dragana Favre
Dragana Favre is an FMH-certified psychiatrist and doctor of neuroscience, specializing in analytical psychotherapy. Trained at the Geneva University Hospitals and the Antenna Romande of the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht, she maintains a private practice in Geneva and regularly lectures on Jungian psychology, consciousness, and symbolization.
Holder of a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Alicante and a master’s degree in Göttingen, she has developed an integrative approach that combines archetypal dynamics, psychic temporality, and the phenomenology of consciousness.
She serves on the board of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS), co-chairing the Annual IAJS Conferences in 2024 and 2025, and hosts the Jungian Salon, a reflective space exploring the intersection of clinical work and contemporary issues.
Personal websites: www.draganafavre.ch | www.psymultiverses.com (in English and Serbo-Croat).
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- From neuroscience to the depths of the psyche—an interview with Dragana Favre, conducted by Jean-Pierre Robert