Jung on Christianity (Encountering Jung)

by C.G. Jung

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.