Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology

by Vladislav Šolc

Both a theonemesis and a theocalypsis are equally symptomatic of a lack of (or hindered) individuation—they could be considered as two sides of the same coin.

warning signs, such as compensatory dreams,

Thus there is seldom bodily ailment that does not show psychic complications, even if it is not psychically caused.

The numinosum that is not engaged by (reflective) consciousness becomes enacted, and [part of] the Self becomes dark and dangerous.

a highly elaborated system (self-care system) of inner fantasies serves the purpose of protecting the ego from re-experiencing anything that resembles the initial trauma in order to preserve the personal spirit and to prevent re-exposure to trauma affect.

These attacks serve to undermine the hope in real object-relations and

to

drive the patient more deeply i...

which turns the inner world into a nightmare of persecution and self-attack

Reactivity leads to conflicts and isolation, self-righteousness is arrogance, moral Manichaeism is ethical emptiness, onesidedness brings about emotional flatness. All these symptoms sooner or later create pain, cut one off from the world, from people, and from the Self. The shadow of a theocalypsis is theonemesis. Inhibited individuation is one of the commonplace consequences of a theocalypsis. It is psychic death, the death of the soul

Psychic death does not mean death in the physical sense but a lack of change and progression.

Theonemesis attempts to reestablish a more adequate Imago Dei by attempting to kill the identification with the Self.

Theonemesis attempts to radically transform the illusory attachments the ego develops.

If the soul does not listen to Nemesis’ attempt to restore equilibrium terrible consequences may follow,

Applying the ego’s perspective, theonemesis appears as a tool for a higher morality; this is nothing more than a necessary compensatory phenomenon. Theonemesis attempts to connect suppressed or unrecognized parts of the Coniunctio Oppositorum of the Self. It creates conditions for expanding the conscious field allowing it to take into account a fuller

The more Sarah clung to her false, religiously ridden persona, the more she overlooked the destructive aspect of her idealized attachment.

The trauma caused by Sarah’s abandonment when she was a child left a deep scar on her ego that was soothed by a superhuman archetypal ideal. She never transformed this to a level where she was able to successfully bear the pain and accept love with all its paradoxical features.

she did not have enough ego-strength to deal with her father’s abandonment, but now she accepted an Imago Dei, suffused with promise and protection.

She lacked the courage to face the signals, so her body started to exhibit symptoms.

disowned material is not psychically represented but has been banished to the body or relegated to discrete psychical fragments between which amnesia barriers have been erected.

theonemesis should not be understood in terms of morality (i.e., punishment) based on a moral order, but rather as a consequence of excessive possession by the Self with a corresponding lack of conscious adaptation.

We speak of theonemesis in the strict sense only in cases where a theocalypsis is present. It should be considered a consequence of unreflected possession by the Self or a consequence of hubris, a result of identification with the Self.

The birth of the Self results not in displacement of previous psychological center but in complete alteration of one’s attitude towards life accompanied by psychological freedom. (Jacobi, 1942)

Although most sacred texts

provide templates for individual growth that serve as containers and conduits for spiritual progress, many religious establishments have gradually and selectively adhered to dogmas that perpetuate defensives toward the numinosum. Instead of a gradual and persistent leveling of the fortresses that prevent an ongoing ego-Self axis that would lead to greater spiritual freedom and contentment, the reliance on dogma becomes a hindrance to individuation. We have attempted to answer the question of why and how the ego transits from development to stagnation, and vice versa. Splitting off archetypal affect, leads to the exclusion of, or misuse of logic and critical reasoning which are essential tools for integrating the irrational contents of the archetypal realms into consciousness.

Narcissistic difficulties contribute to fundamentalist attitude when dogma about eternal verities is used to buttress areas of personal fragility, either it would be intolerable to face the experience of the numinosum, even modified by ritual or symbol, or because dogma is used to defend against problems within the personality (…) For the fragile self, fixed dogmatic assertions help to maintain a degree of narcissistic equilibrium (see Kohut, 1972) by reducing uncertainty

It is important to stress here that the theocalypse is maintained and adhered to with stronger effort as more energy is invested into the one-sided understanding of the numinosum.

Whitehead (1991) famously stated that order and novelty are both elements of progress that must be held together. At the core of resistance to change are the fears of deregulation and the loss of order.

The dissolution of the old king was designed to produce a new, more suitable and superior king.

The fear of not possessing a psychological apparatus strong enough to withstand the encounter with the numinosum leads to the exclusion of the Self and its natural, transformational work.

He argued against literal interpretation and advocated for critical thinking as an indispensable facility for achieving salvation. It was absolutely necessary, he taught, to read scriptures allegorically because the real meaning was to be found “under the surface” of the text.

the symbolic had a primary innate role in giving birth to consciousness from the collective unconscious.

Beginning with the Axial Age and continuing through the early Middle Ages, early struggles to integrate the

numinosum, at times, turned in the direction of literalism, which tended to exclude the wider symbolic nature of the encounter with the numinosum. Only the liberated function of consciousness pushed this role to a secondary position, which subsequently meant that literalism and the tendency to exclude the wider symbolic nature of any life-concerning phenomena arose as a natural inclination in the early religious minds struggling with the integration of the numinosum;

symbol | ˈsimbəl | noun 1 a mark or character used as a conventional representation of an object, function, or process

One can be—and is—just as dependent on words as on the unconscious. Man’s advance towards the Logos was a great achievement, but he must pay for it with loss of instinct and loss of reality to the degree that he remains in primitive dependence on mere words. Because words are substitutes for things, which of course they cannot be in reality, they take on intensified forms

…This rupture of the link with the unconscious and our submission to the tyranny of words have one great disadvantage: the conscious mind becomes more and more the victim of its own discriminating activity, the picture we have of the world gets broken down into countless particulars, and the original feeling of unity, which was integrally connected with the unity of the unconscious psyche, is lost (1954c, [CW 11, para. 442]).

When the numinosum ceases to be a subject of honest exploration, the omitted function may turn nearly anything into an idol. Science, philosophy, or political ideas can then be worshipped with religious devotion.

“Isms” are constituted as ideological castles erected behind strong ideological fortifications. They are defined by the tendency toward unification of ideas and hostile intentions toward anything that seems to threaten their unit.

When our collective religion weakens or loses its symbolic power to reveal the sacred, our soul has to find its own symbolic and religious orientation in the depths of one’s own being.

Regardless of what the Church or society may think one is required to make peace with the demands of one’s own soul.

began listening, a bit differently, to the stirrings of my soul, my unlived life, my dreams, and the musings of the unconscious.

That is, my worldview was completely Christian, however, I quickly learned that my unconscious was not so Christian. In fact, I realized that one couldn’t Christianize the unconscious. It must be respected for what it is and how it presents itself.

I discovered that religious work was about wholeness not perfection!

If one’s authentic spirituality is undeveloped, suppressed (e.g., by traditional religious structures) or not related to their own personality, it will usually reveal itself in dreams, symptoms, moods or acting out, (“sin”).

The containment of my analytical work allowed me to question my beliefs while opening to idiosyncratic encounters with my soul’s God-image, all without worrying about the approval of the Church and its foundational system of orienting beliefs.

trying to “fit their psyche into the Catholic institutional system,”

one cannot simply prescribe what the right myth is for each individual without danger to one’s very being.

leadership or dominance

The institutional and hierarchical church no longer mediated the divine nor carried the numinosum for me as it once did.

In working with the psyche, in the new dispensation, one cannot prescribe what myth is the “right myth” for the other.