The existence according to Fernando Pessoa:

"No one sees but the soul where he all alone dwells"

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate the existing parallel between Jungian ideas of oneself, religious function and the numinous, and the existential anguish in Fernando Pessoa writing. Within this scope, an aspect in the work and life of Pessoa deserves analytic regard: the confrontation of the existential void - the profound fear in front of the idea of death and the total absence of intrinsic meaning the natural world presents, there included, for the poet, the human social world where he feels eternally displaced. This is the biggest motivation of his life and the universal mark of his work: the existential anguish present in all his literary personalities and heteronyms, mainly Pessoa "himself" or orthonym, resulting in Poetry, considered as supreme value and the image of God. In fact, terror and fascination characterize all image, idea or experience of God, foundation of the religious function described by Jung in his theory of the unconscious, phenomenon he calls numinous. In Jungian theory, this function is psychologically represented by the archetype of Self or oneself,  center and totality of human psychological experience, responsible both for the generation and restraint of the existential anguish that strikes when we confront our fundamental narrative dilemmas: life and death, existence and non-existence, materiality and immateriality, determinism and indeterminism, chance and purpose. The factor Self is responsible for all the myths and religions since we started to bury our dead. Individually, in Pessoa's imaginative work, the Self occupied the place of the sacred under the form of Poetry.