Jung on Christianity (Encountering Jung)

by C.G. Jung

From the standpoint of analytical psychology, religious experience is seen as an eruption of the unconscious and an expression of latent psychic structures and dynamics. Theological doctrines and rituals, on the contrary, are products of the ego’s understanding and represent, largely, rationalizations of those experiences. For Jung, the raw data from the unconscious—in the form of dreams, visions, and synchronicities—was a much more reliable guide to truth about the God image than theology ever could be.

Perspectiva anaalitic asupra religiei

In the perspective offered by analytical psychology, an entire religious tradition can be considered a gigantic collective psyche. It displays evidence of primary experience of the unconscious (the “revelation”), the conscious elaboration in its thinking about these experiences (the “theology”), and various ritualistic recreations of these primary experience of the unconscious (the “rites”). The declared heresies represent the repressed thoughts and images of this psyche and make up its shadow and its “personal unconscious.” The dominant institutions and their leaders are its ego. The emphasized doctrines, elaborated as absolute dogmas, express its one-sidedness and defensiveness against the threat of the unconscious and against further influence from it (i.e., new revelations). The rites and rituals both reconnect the present worshippers to the original primal experience of the unconscious “in illo tempore” (Eliade’s expression) and also defend them from the threatening eruption of new contents from the unconscious.

Because of the human propensity toward narcissistic self-centeredness, features of the natural world such as earthquakes and floods are called “evil,” while other features such as lush landscapes and abundant harvests are called “good.”

There is the splitting—spirit vs. body, good vs. evil, masculine vs. feminine—and there is the repression of the second of each of these pairs from the dominant center of consciousness, the prevailing God image.

And just as the wounder wounds himself, so the healer heals himself.

The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process.

Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites.