There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience.
They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.
Remark: I would not deny the efficacy of prayer when I and God work together, but that involves not just myself and God but also people with whom I live, my family and what have you, in relation to God, the Holy Spirit.
Dr. von Franz: There you mention the main thing but the Holy Spirit bloweth where it listeth, where it will. You, the theologian, identify with a conscious position and take that as absolute.
From that standpoint you can talk about everything, but you don’t notice your unconscious identification.
If you question your conscious standpoint long enough, I am sure the Holy Ghost will one day whisper something to you about it.
For us, there is always only the individual and his or her experience of God and all the rest is secondary.
In therapy it is not we who connect the individual with God, even that would be a megalomanic presumption of the psychotherapist-though many do presume to do so, and by that they have already become hidden theologians again.
If you are with an analysand the only way you may perhaps help is by always saying: “I don’t know, but let us ask God.”
By that you prevent the analysand from drawing rash conscious conclusions or seducing you into making them, and therefore every religious experience becomes a unique event.
God in every experience is experienced in a specific and unique form and that includes even the red sulphur, which means that if you put the question of the red sulphur before God, God will give His unique answer in each case. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, Page 141
