Your cognitive dissonance framing is particularly strong. Jung described something similar in Psychology and Alchemy: the psyche reaches a point where the tension between conscious attitude and unconscious content becomes unsustainable. The system has to restructure. The Tower is not random chaos — it is the psyche’s homeostatic mechanism for dealing with a contradiction that has been papered over too long.

The crown falling off the tower is worth lingering on. In alchemical symbolism, the corona represents the achieved state — the ego-constructed identity at its most polished. When it falls, what is exposed is the nigredo — the raw, unprocessed material that was always underneath the construction. In your case, the job loss stripped away an identity built on external validation, and what remained was you. Without the props.

Campbell’s observation that the hero returns “with the boon” applies here too. The Tower’s destruction is not the end of the story. It is the moment the real story becomes possible. You cannot find out what is genuinely yours until the borrowed structure comes down.

"I think what's really happening psychologically is something close to cognitive dissonance reaching critical mass."

This is where I'd push back. Cognitive dissonance implies you had two competing beliefs and the Tower resolves the conflict by forcing a choice. That's clean. That's legible. In my experience — and I've journaled through enough of these moments at 3am to know — the Tower doesn't feel like resolution. It feels like the ground disappearing before you even knew you were standing on it. There was no dissonance because you didn't know the second belief system existed. It was operating in the dark.

Your job loss example actually illustrates my concern better than you might intend. You say the identity was "constructed on external validation" — but could you have named that before the fall? Because in my own similar moment, I absolutely could not. I would have sworn the identity was authentic, grounded, mine. The Tower didn't expose a bug I was dimly aware of. It exposed architecture I didn't know I was living inside.

The Jung angle holds up better, I think, because Jung was honest about the unconscious being fundamentally opaque to the conscious mind. Shadow integration isn't a tidy software patch. It's more like realizing you've been a character in someone else's dream and the dreamer just woke up.

So yeah — liberation, not disaster, I'm with you. But I'd resist the impulse to make it coherent too quickly. Sometimes the tower falls and the only honest thing you can say is "I don't know what that was yet." And sitting in that not-knowing is harder than any Campbell diagram makes it look.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: The Major Arcana: 22 Cards, the Fool's Journey | Mystic Wiki.)