Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 4: Freud & Psychoanalysis
[Carl Jung’s attitude towards Religion and Biology.]
My attitude to all religions is therefore a positive one.
In their symbolism I recognize those figures which I have met with in the dreams and fantasies of my patients.
In their moral teachings I see efforts that are the same as or similar to those made by my patients when, guided by their own insight or inspiration, they seek the right way to deal with the forces of psychic life.
Ceremonial ritual, initiation rites, and ascetic practices, in all their forms and variations, interest me profoundly as so many techniques for bringing about a proper relation to these forces.
My attitude to biology is equally positive, and to the empiricism of natural science in general, in which I see a herculean attempt to understand the psyche by approaching it from the outside world, just as religious gnosis is a prodigious attempt of the human mind to derive knowledge of the cosmos from within.
In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man, facing now one and now the other, and, according to temperament and disposition, taking the one for the absolute truth by denying or sacrificing the other. ~Carl Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Paragraph 777.