The Church means serving the community, therapy serves the individual.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Pastor Fritz Pfafflin
Dear Pastor Pfafflin, 30 August 1937
A real grounding as a psychotherapist requires systematic study, above all a training analysis.
I don’t think occasional consultations can replace the continuity of the analytical process.
Of course you can learn all sorts of useful things from them, but that is not a professional grounding.
I think you would do better to acquire as much knowledge within your own field of work as you reasonably and possibly can, and so gain sufficient understanding from daily life.
In this way you will build up over the years a procedure that is peculiarly your own.
After all, there must be not only psychotherapists but also theologians with psychological knowledge, otherwise it would be better to turn the whole Church into a psychological clinic.
But the task of the Church is not the same as that of psychotherapy.
The Church means serving the community, therapy serves the individual.
There are plenty of people who can only be reached collectively.
Best thanks for your interesting review.
Your honest words will be a thorn in the flesh for many.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 235
Carl Jung on the Church Anthology
Now that the Catholic Church has taken the momentous step of the assumption, Protestantism is really and truly nailed fast to the Patriarchal line of the Old Testament and way behindhand in the matter of dogmatic development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 9-10.
The Church stands on two feet, Protestantism only on sola fide, therefore faith is so important to it but not to the Catholic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 111-112.
Perhaps this comes from their having to preach down from the pulpit, with nobody allowed to answer back. This attitude, which I met practically everywhere, has shooed me out of the Church like so many others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 113-114.
To my terror I was forced into a pulpit, which gave me such a shock that I have never spoken in a church again. I hadn’t realized how much a sacred and hallowed precinct meant to me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.
The profane use Protestants make of their churches I regard as a grave error. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.
The Protestant is not even granted a quiet, pious place where he can withdraw from the turmoil of the world. And nowhere does there exist for God a sanctified temenos which serves only one and a sacred purpose. No wonder so few people attend church. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 128-129.
Anybody going ahead is alone or thinks he is lonely at times, no matter whether he is in the church or in the world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138
The Midrashim are quite aware of it, and the Christian church had to invent that awful syllogism, the privatio boni, in order to annihilate the original ambivalence of the Jewish God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
The old popes and bishops succeeded in getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI, no auto-da-tes, no thumbscrews and racks anymore, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
That is one of the reasons why the Church attracts quite a number of intelligent and responsible men in the secret (or unconscious?) hope that they will be strong enough to carry its meaning and not its words into the future. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
It is quite understandable that the ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to the extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
Since the world is largely sub principatu diaboli, it is unavoidable that there is just as much evil in the Church as everywhere else, and as everywhere else you have got to be careful. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
In the two Christian churches, the importance and the psychological significance of rites are not generally appreciated; to some people they are acts of faith or of habit; to others, acts of magic. But in reality there is a third aspect: the aspect of the rite as a symbolic act, giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
Analytical psychology unfortunately just touches the vulnerable spot of the church, viz. the untenable concretism of its beliefs, and the syllogistic character of Thomistic philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 227-229
You are quite right; with the dogma of the Assumptio the unconscious “wells into the Church,” since Woman is its (the unconscious) representative on earth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.
The apostles and the early Fathers of the Church had no easy life and moreover no Christian is meant to go to sleep in a safe pew. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.
We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man’s death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.
The idea that I convert people, as it were, to the new denomination Jungianism” or better “Jungian Church” is sheer defamation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 334-335.
If the Reformation is a heresy, I am certainly a heretic too. It is of course a thorn in the flesh of the churches that I do not belong to any of the recognized sects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 334-335.
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