C.A. Meier – Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Religion
Psychology and Religion [Excerpt]
It may be out of place for me to apologize for dealing with this subject but there are one or two reasons for doing so. William James dealt with the Variety of Religious Experience as a psychologist and was a pioneer in the subject.
C. G. Jung dealt with the same topic some thirty-five years later in his Terry lectures.
Thus two of the most competent people have dealt with this theme and I expect that their work is well-known. I am not able to speak as competendy as they did.
Another reason for making my apologies is that I am a dilettante in one of the two parts of the theme, the theological.
On the other hand there are grounds which give me some assurance as I proceed. In analysis and particularly in Jungian analysis, religious problems appear very clearly.
Then for nearly twenty years I had been dealing with the institute of incubation as it was practised in Greek and Roman times so that I have been highly preoccupied with the irrational or the religious aspect of healing.
When I studied the records of this incubation rite I came across the fact that in the Hellenistic period and later on in Christian times people who have devoted themselves to the cult of a certain deity were called “therapeutes”; which is our modern word therapist.
Today analysts are called “psychotherapists” which would mean people devoted to the cult of the psyche. Although the psyche is no longer a goddess in our day, the Latin equivalent of the Greek word, “anima”, meaning soul, is considered to be of a semi-divine nature.
When Tertullian spoke of the “anima naturaliter Christiana” there is reason to doubt that he was sure the human soul is naturally Christian.
If human nature was said to be Christian, the statement would logically lead
to pantheism which is not Christian.
Jung in his work discovered what he calls a religious factor in nature. He found it in dreams and dreams are products of nature.
On this basis it appears that there is such a thing as a religious instinct.
Now theologians may be deeply disappointed or scandalised by such a statement since it appears to be a new version of the old medical materialism of William James.
But William James in 1901 and 1902 showed that the idea that various religious phenomena are “nothing but” the effects of certain chemical changes in a person was in no way satisfactory.
And such is certainly not Jung’s idea.
When he says that there is a religious instinct innate in man he is not speaking in terms of medical materialism.
Since 1912 when he published his book, “Symbols and Transformation of the Libido” and more particularly since 1937 [64
when he gave the Terry lectures at Yale, he has provided evidence for the fact that religious factor is something sui generis; that it exists in the same way as other instincts exist which means that they cannot be reduced to anything more elementary.
In Greek Antiquity there was the belief that dreams are somnia a deo missa, that is, dreams sent by God.
The idea that man’s soul or his unconscious serves under certain conditions as the door through which the divine or religious element is capable of reaching his conscious mind has always been believed.
If man’s soul has a divine spark in it, or in other words, if it participates in any way in the realm which transcends the conscious self it is a ready made instrument for that purpose.
There are certainly other channels to the transcendent realm; records from the past are full of instances and ways in which man has participated in this realm.
Aldous Huxley’s book “The Perennial Philosophy” and William James’ book, “Varieties of Religious Experience” give many examples of the ways such phenomena take place.
To deny the possibility of a variety of ways by which man is related to the
transcendant is either to place a limitation on the religious factor or a
limitation on the functions of the human soul or psyche, in particular
the unconscious psyche.
This suggests why in the Freudian system there is no room for an autonomous religious function.
In Freud’s system the unconscious and its products are looked upon as being only a facade so that they always have to be reduced to more basic roots or elements.
Consequently, the Freudian system has to be understood as an impressive
yet effective method for doing away with the unconscious.
Unconscious products have to be unmasked because they never mean what
they appear to mean, and a person who has undergone such a treatment,
will feel liberated from many useless, silly and superstitious preoccupations.
Jung has said that he has never really cured a patient in the second half of life unless, in the course of the treatment, that person found access to the religious function. As this statement was made as a result of Jung’s vast experience, we simply are compelled to believe it.
The difficulty is that the two concepts, the healing of the patient and the
religious factor sui generis, are not clearly defined. For this reason, if we
are to advance our understanding of our subject, we shall need to make some further investigation.
The concept of the healing or the cure is complicated. In order to illustrate how complicated it may be I use the case of a neurosis with a simple, clear-cut symptom with which I was involved during the early years of my private practice.
During the second year of my practice as a psychotherapist I was consulted by a man who suffered from impotence.
The man bored me intensely. When he told his story I discovered that he was absolutely uneducated and completely stupid.
I realized that it would be impossible for me to have a decent discussion
with him; I let him talk on and at the end of an hour’s interview I dismissed him with a few palliative words.
I never saw him again. But from that time on, in regular intervals of one year, five other men came to consult me for the same complaint.
When the last one came, I decided that I was going to find out what the strange coincidence was all about. So I asked this man how he happened to have come to me.
He replied that when he told a friend of his physical disability the friend suggested that he see Dr. Meier in Zurich since he cured him of the same thing in one session and subsequendy did the same for four other men whom he knew.
Such an experience presents quite a problem.
It might be said that the cures which took place in five of those men were due to suggestion, that my fame as a miracle-working doctor was really the cause. But that would not account for the cure of the first man.
Or, as another illustration of the complexity of a cure we may be reminded that many patients who consult a doctor for this or that neurotic symptom and are cured sooner or later begin to develop what is called a transference; that is, for those patients the analyst begins to represent the “Healer” with a capital H.
The doctor may be tempted to make it clear to his patient that he is not the healer and that the idea that he is is an illusion, but such a dealing with the matter will not work.
It absolutely is essential for the doctor to take the projection very seriously and actually make it a major issue in his subsequent work.
The point here is that in mental illness it is practically impossible to do, what I would call, combating the sickness.
Instead, the analyst, by going along with the sickness engages in the process which is at work in the patient.
The doctor learns that the sickness is something of what the Ancients called a “divine sickness”.
But this appears to suggest the age-old belief that sickness not only is a punishment but if it is approached in the right way it can lead to a change of the old being or to an entirely different existence.
However, a neurosis can no longer be explained causally, resulting from a lack of the religious factor. If that were the case, pious people would never be neurotic; which is not true.
This theoretical conclusion, confirmed by practical experience shows that the religious factor cannot be introduced by medical means in such a way as to do away with the neurosis.
Freud is right in many cases in assuming that a neurosis can be causally traced to conflicts of early childhood, and that shows that there is no religious problem involved.
If it were possible to proceed by introducing the religious factor as a substitution for the illness, the implication would be that a whole neurotic or psychotic condition had actually developed from the beginning in order to compel the patient to accept the religious demand.
This would be to declare that the sickness as such was unreal and only a neurotic arrangement in Adler’s sense.
Not only would the sickness in this way be degraded to something completely wrong thus devoid of any deeper meaning, but it would also suggest that all sickness is only a neurotic arrangement imposed on a person; and that is a contradiction in fact.
From this contradiction alone the conclusion that what is hidden actually behind the sickness, the neurosis as an unknown complex, must follow.
This is further shown by Jung’s assertion that a real cure is reached only after the religious factor has been assimilated for this takes place only after a long period of work.
Since such a long time and so much effort are involved in order to bring about the realization of the existence of the religious factor, the factor itself must be then unconscious. !~C.A. Meier – Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Religion, Page 64-67
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