Ann Ulanov, Spirit in Jung
Psychology of Religion
Jung viewed the function of his psychology for religion as a means to help persons see direct connections between their own personal experiences and the archetypal symbols contained in religious tradition.
The forging of these connections is crucial for psychic hygiene. Much of the anxiety, restlessness, and destructiveness of twentieth-century persons, Jung believed, results from the fact that their psychic energy no longer flows into religious symbols that can give them a picture of their place in the universe.
Instead, traditional symbols are for many people obscure anachronisms that no longer command any quickening of spirit.
Thus psychic energy often has nowhere to go and either falls back abjectly into the psyche, creating psychological problems there, or it is projected onto substitutes for a value system, such as political causes, that dangerously inflate them out of all proportion.
In such a situation, Jung says, we do not need new symbols or new religions as much as we need to find fresh personal connections to the old ones.
Jung is opposed to people raised in Western culture who seek in Eastern religions the ultimate answers to their psychic dilemma.
Jung studied Eastern religious thought, as his work on the I Ching, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and the Tibetan Book of
Liberation and Book of the Dead indicate, but he did not think we can simply incorporate into a personality conditioned by one set of traditions a religion developed out of an entirely different cultural set.
Religion is not a substitute for life but rather the symbolic expression of the process of integrating the Self into a life lived in relation to the unconscious and to others.
We must pay close attention to what our individual unconscious experience says to us through dreams, “God-images,” and even neurotic symptoms.
Neurosis, Jung wrote, often results from our direct refusal or inability to find the right direction for our religious instincts.
The religious instinct presents itself as a drive for significant relation of the personal self to the “numinosum.” If this instinct is frustrated or repressed, we fall ill just as surely as we do when other basic instincts are obstructed.
For Jung, neurosis is the suffering of human beings who have not yet discovered what life means for them. Jung described the human soul as the capacity for relation to God.
Failure to develop that capacity means loss of soul, in the sense that meaning goes out of life; we lose the center.
Jung used his own vocabulary interchangeably with traditional religious terms. He stressed, however, that he confined himself to the examination of what is empirically observable in the human psyche.
Thus “God-images” are clusters of emotion-laden symbols that operate within the psyche as the unifying centers of psychic life. Inherent in any of these is the Self archetype – the principle of “orientation and meaning.”
Jung stated that God is not the Self and cannot be reduced to the Self archetype, but we can study the psychic effects of belief in God by means of such terms.
Of his personal conviction about God’s existence, he said emphatically, “I do not believe; I know.” In this archetypal world our personal religious symbols increasingly appear as clues to collective human experience, suggesting a personal coming to terms with human problems that contribute to collective value systems, ritualized worship, and all the other primary materials of religion.
Religious Experience
To come to terms with the impersonal world of the objective psyche, our egos must be strong enough to withstand the emotional impact of archetypal imagery. We must not get lost in our own private religious experience.
We must also understand, according to Jung, how puny our own experience is in comparison with the range and depth of meaning contained in religious dogma.
Thus we must connect our own insight with the accumulated religious experience of the human family. Jung himself organized his own experience of the numinous power of the unconscious into his theory of individuation.
He saw parallels between the concept of individuation and seventeen centuries of alchemical studies.
Through a complicated series of chemical and psychological operations the alchemists sought to turn lead into gold.
By taking the basic materia prima and subjecting it to various transforming procedures, alchemists projected into their physical material the stages of psychological transformation.
In contrast to the descending direction of Christian revelation which proceeds from the divine down to the human, Jung saw in the upward direction of both ancient alchemical procedures and modern psychological rites of transformation attempts to build up from the human, whether releasing the spirit contained in matter or in the human unconscious.
Both represent efforts to construct an indivisible wholeness, whether of metal or of the human personality.
Jung did not offer the psychological process as a substitute for the revelations of grace, but said that we have lost the means to receive grace.
We need to ready ourselves for its reception by moving towards it from our human side as it moves us from its own otherness.
Jung talked about living the Christian myth fully and participating in the ongoing process of the incarnation of the divine in the human.
As his own particular contribution, Jung offers individuation, a life-long process involving the differentiating of the ego from the unconscious Self archetype and the crafting of a conscious relation of ego to Self.
It is precisely here that Jung collides with Christian theology. Jung observed that at certain points traditional Christian symbols seem to leave out central and unavoidable elements of human experience.
The two upon which Jung concentrated, the feminine and evil, emerge vigorously out of the life of the instincts. In the symbolism of the dogma of the Trinity, for example, Jung noted the absence of a feminine element in the Godhead.
To deal with this, he formulates a feminine principle called Eros.
This is the principle of relatedness, the human tendency pronounced in the consciousness of women and usually present more unconsciously in men – to go down into the intensity of experience and to participate in it directly.
The opposite masculine principle of Logos describes the tendency to stand aside from experience and abstract from it salient points which then can be generalized into universal truths to be applied to experience, which is a way of imposing ego-purposes on the flow
of life.
This masculine principle is overemphasized in Western culture which stresses the rational ego-consciousness to the neglect of a more feminine style of ego-consciousness. ~Ann Ulanov, Spirit in Jung, Page 16-19
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