God and the Unconscious by Victor White.
FOREWORD by Carl Jung
It is now many years since I expressed a desire for cooperation with the theologian, but I little knew or even dreamt how or to what extent my wish was to be fulfilled.
This book, to which I have the honour of writing an introduction, is the third major publication on the theological side which has been written in a spirit of collaboration and mutual effort.
In the fifty years of pioneer work which now lie behind me I have experienced criticism, just and unjust, in such abundance, that I know how to value every attempt at positive co-operation.
Criticism from this side is constructive and therefore welcome.
Psychopathology and medical psychotherapy are, when viewed superficially, far removed from the theologian’s particular field of interest; therefore it is to be expected that no small amount of preliminary effort will be required to establish a terminology comprehensible to both parties.
To make this possible certain fundamental realizations are required on either side.
Most important among these is the appreciation of the fact that the object of mutual concern is the psychically sick and suffering human being, who is as much in need of consideration from the somatic or biological side as from the spiritual or religious.
The problem of neurosis extends from the disturbed sphere of the instincts to the ultimate questions and decisions of our whole Weltanschauung. Neurosis is no isolated, sharply defined phenomenon, it Is a reaction of the whole human being.
Here a purely symptomatic therapy is obviously even more definitely prohibited than In the case of purely somatic illnesses, although these also invariably have a psychic component or syndrome, even though they are not psychogenetic.
Modern medicine has just begun to take account ofthis fact which the
psychotherapists have been emphasizing for a long time.
In the same way, long years of experience have again and again taught me that a therapy along purely biologicaUines does not suffice, but requires a spiritual completion.
This becomes especially clear to the medical psychologist where the question of dreams is concerned, which, being statements of the unconscious, play no small part in the therapy.
Whoever goes to work with an honest and critical attitude is bound to admit that the task of rightly understanding the dream is no small matter, but calls for careful reflection, kading far beyond purely biological points of view.
The indubitable occurrence of archetypal motifs iri dreams makes a thorough
knowledge of the spiritual history of man indispensable for anyone making a serious attempt to understand dreams.
The likeness between certain dream-motifs and mythologems is so striking that they may be regarded not merely as similar but even as identical.
With this knowledge, however, not only is the dream raised to the higher level of the mythologem, but simultaneously the problems with which mythology confronts us are brought into connection with the psychical life of the individual.
From the mythologem to the religious statement is only a step.
But whereas the mythological figures appear as pale phantoms and relics of a long past age which has become strange to us, the religious statement represents an immediate ‘numinous’ experience.
It is a living mythologem.
Here the empiricist’s way of thinking and expressing himself gets him into difficulties with the theologian.
The latter when he is either making a dogma of the Gospel or ‘demythologizing’ it rejects the idea of the myth, because it seems to him a depreciation of the religious testimonies, in whose supreme truth he believes.
The empiricist, on the other hand, whose orientation is that of natural science,
does not connect any idea of values with the concept ‘myth’.
He sees the myth as an ‘expression of certain processes in the unconscious’, which applies equally to the religious texts.
He has no means of deciding whether the latter are ‘truer3 than the mythologem; for between the two he sees only one difference: the difference in living intensity.
The so-called religious testimony is still ‘numinous’, a quality which the myth, on the other hand, has already lost to a great extent.
The empiricist knows that rites and figures once ‘sacred’ have become obsolete and that new figures have become ‘numinous’.
The theologian can reproach the empiricist and say that he does possess a means of deciding the question of truth, he merely does not wish to make use of it referring to the truth of revelation.
In all humility, the empiricist will then ask:
Which? and where is the proof that one interpretation holds greater truth than another?,
Christians themselves do not appear to be at one on this point.
While the latter are busy wrangling, the doctor is concerned with an urgent case and cannot wait for age-long schisms to be settled, but will unhesitatingly seize upon what is vital to the patient and therefore efficacious.
He naturally cannot prescribe for his patient just any Weltanschauung assumed to be a living system; but, by dint of careful and persevering investigation, he must
endeavour to discover where the sick person feels a healing, living quality, which can make him ‘whole’.
He cannot be concerned at first as to whether this so-called truth bears the
official stamp of validity.
If, however, the patient is thus able to rediscover himself and get on his feet again, then the question of consciously reconciling his individual realization or whatever one may choose to call the new insight or life-giving experience with the collectively valid opinions and convictions becomes a matter of vital importance.
That which is only individual isolates, and the sick person will never be healed by becoming a mere individualist.
He would still be neurotic, unrelated and estranged from his social group.
Even Freud’s exclusively ‘personalistic’ psychology of drives was obliged to come to terms, at least negatively, with the generally valid truths, the primordial representations collectives of human society.
Scientific materialism is by no means a private religious or philosophical concern, but a matter of collective importance, as we might well have realized from contemporary history.
In view of the extraordinary significance of so-called general truths, a coming to terms between individual realizations and the social convictions becomes an urgent necessity.
Just as the sick person in his individual distinctiveness must find a modus vivendi with society, it will be his urgent task to compare the views which he has acquired through exploring the unconscious with the general truths and to bring them into a mutual relation.
A great part of my life has been devoted to this work.
Therefore it was clear to me from the outset that I should never be equal to this task alone.
Although I ana able to testify to the reality of the psychological facts, it is quite
beyond my power to promote the necessary processes of assimilation which coming to terms with the representations collectives requires.
This calls for the co-operation of many, and above all of those who are the exponents of the general truths, namely the theologians.
Apart from doctors, they are the only people who are professionally concerned with
the human soul, with the exception perhaps of teachers.
But the latter confine themselves to children, who as a rule only suffer from the problems of the age indirectly, via their parents or masters.
Surely it would be valuable for the theologian to know what is happening in the psyche of the adult; and it must gradually be dawning on any responsible doctor
what an incredibly important role the spiritual atmosphere plays in the psychic economy.
I must acknowledge with gratitude that the co-operation I had so long wished and hoped for has now become a reality.
The present book bears witness to this, for it meets the preoccupation of medical psychology half-way, not only with intellectual understanding, but also with good will.
Only an uncritical optimism could expect such an encounter to be love at first sight.
The points de depart are too far apart for this and the road to the meeting-place too long as well as too hard to hope for agreement as a matter of course.
I do not presume to know what the theologian misunderstands or fails to undepstand in the empirical standpoint, for it is as much as I can do to learn to estimate his theological premises correctly.
If I am not mistaken, however, one of the main difficulties lies in the fact that both appear to speak the same language, but that this language calls up in their minds two totally different fields of associations.
Both can apparently use the same concept and are then bound to acknowledge, to their amazement, that they are speaking of two different things.
Take, for example, the word ‘God’.
The theologian will naturally assume that the metaphysical Ens Absolutum is meant.
The empiricist, on the contrary, does not dream of such a far-reaching assumption, which strikes him as downright impossible, but when he uses this word he just as naturally means a mere statement, at most an archetypal motif which preforms such statements.
For him, ‘God’ can just as well mean Jahwe, Allah, Zeus, Shiva or Huizilopochtli.
The divine attributes of almightiness, omniscience, eternity, etc., are to him statements which, symptomatically or as syndromes, more or less regularly
accompany the archetype.
He grants the divine image ‘numinosity
, a deeply stirring, emotional effect, which he accepts in the first place as a fact and sometimes tries to explain rationally in a more or less unsatisfactory way.
As a psychiatrist, he is sufficiently hard-boiled to be deeply convinced of the relative character of such statements.
As a scientist, his primary interest is the verification of actual psychic facts and their regular occurrence, to which he attaches incomparably greater importance than to abstract possibilities.
His religio consists in establishing facts which can be observed and proved.
He describes and circumscribes these in the same way as the mineralogist his mineral samples and the botanist his plants.
He is aware that beyond provable facts he can know nothing and at best can only dream, and he considers it immoral to confuse a dream with knowledge.
He does not deny what he has not experienced and cannot experience, but he will on no account assert anything which he does not think he can prove with facts.
It is true that I have often been accused of merely dreaming of archetypes.
I must, however, remind these too hasty critics that a comparative study of motifs existed long before I ever mentioned archetypes.
The fact that archetypal motifs occur in the psyche of people who have never heard of mythology is common knowledge to anyone who has investigated the
structure of schizophrenic delusions, if his eyes have not already been opened in this respect by the universal dissemination of certain mythologems.
Ignorance and narrowmindedness, even when the latter is political, have never
been conclusive scientific arguments.
I must be content to describe the standpoint, the faith, the struggle, hope and devotion of the empiricist, which together culminate in the discovery and verification of provable facts and their hypothetical interpretation.
For the theological standpoint I refer you to the competent expose by the author of this book.
When standpoints differ so widely, it is understandable that in concrete many and various clashes should occur, both of an important and unimportant nature.
They are important above all where an encroachment on the part of one realm threatens the other.
My criticism of the doctrine of the privatio boni is such a case.
Here the theologian has a certain right to fear an intrusion on the part of the empiricist.
This discussion has left its mark on the book, as the reader will see for himself.
Therefore I feel at liberty to avail myself here of the right of free criticism, so generously offered me by the author, and to lay my standpoint before the reader.
I should never have dreamt of coming up against such an apparently remote problem as that of the privatio boni in my practical work.
Fate would have it, however, that I had to treat a patient, a scholarly man, who had become involved in all manner of dubious and morally questionable practices.
He turned out to be a fervent adherent of the privatio boni, because it fitted in admirably with his scheme: evil in itself is nothing, a mere shadow, a trifling and fleeting diminution ofgood, like a cloud passing over the sun.
This man professed to be a believing Protestant and would therefore have had no
reason to appeal to a sententia communis of the Catholic
Church, had it not proved a welcome sedative for his peace of mind. This case originally induced me to come to terms with the privatio boni and its psychological aspect.
To the empiricist, it is self-evident that the metaphysical aspect of such a doctrine does not come into question for himself, for he knows that he is only dealing with moral judgments and not with substances.
We call a thing, from a certain point of view> good or bad, above or below, right or left, light or dark, etc.
The thesis is then just as actual or real as the antithesis, It would never occur to anyone except under very special circumstances and for a definite purpose to define cold as reduced heat, depth as reduced height, right as diminished left.
With this kind of logic one could just as well call good a diminution of evil.
The psychologist would, it is true, find this way of expressing it rather too pessimistic, but from a logical point of view he would have nothing to say against
it.
Instead of ninety-nine one mightjust as well say a hundred minus one, if it didn’t seem too complicated.
But should he, as a moral man, catch himself glossing over an immoral act by
regarding it optimistically as a certain diminution of good, which alone is real, or as an ‘accidental lack of perfection’, he would immediately have to call himself to order.
His better judgment would tell him: If your evil is actually only an unreal shadow of your good, then your so-called good is nothing but an unreal shadow of your real evil.
If he does not reflect in this way he deceives himself and self-deception of this kind has dissociating effects which breed neurosis, such as for example feelings of inferiority, with all their well-known attendant phenomena.
For these reasons I have felt compelled to contest the validity of the privatio boni as far as concerns the empirical realm.
On the same grounds I also criticize the dictum which is derived from the privatio boni, ‘Qmm bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homing , for then on the one hand man is deprived of the possibility of doing anything good, and on the other he is given the seductive power of doing evil.
The only dignity which is left him is that of the fallen angel.
The reader will see that I take this dictum literally.
Criticism can only be applied to psychic phenomena, i.e.., to ideas and concepts, but not to metaphysical entities.
The latter can only be confronted with each other.
Hence my criticism is valid only within the empirical realm; in the metaphysical
realm, on the other hand, good can be a substance and evil a p^ 6v.
I know of no empirical fact which would come anywhere near such an assertion.
Therefore at this point the empiricist must remain silent.
Nevertheless, it is possible that there are as is the case with other metaphysical
statements, particularly the dogmas archetypal factors in the background here, which have existed for an infinitely long time as psychically effective, pre-forming
factors; and these would be accessible to empirical research.
In other words, there might be a pre-conscious psychic tendency which, independently of time and place, continually causes similar statements, as in the case of mythologems, folklore motifs and the individual production of symbols.
But apparently the existing empirical material at least as far as I am concerned with it permits no decisive conclusion which would point to an archetypal conditioning of the privatio boni.
Clear-cut moral distinctions are unless I am mistaken recent acquisitions of civilized man.
Therefore they are still frequently so misty and uncertain; unlike other pairs of
opposites which are indubitably of an archetypal nature and represent essential conditions for conscious realization, such as the platonic ravrov-Oarepov.
Like every empirical science, psychology also requires auxiliary concepts, hypotheses and models.
But the theologian, as well as the philosopher, is apt to make the mistake
of taking them for metaphysical a priori assertions.
The atom of which the physicist speaks is no metaphysical hypothesis, it is a model. Similarly, my concept of the archetype or of psychic energy is only an auxiliary idea, which can be exchanged at any time for a better formula.
Seen from a philosophical standpoint, my empirical concepts would be
logical monsters, and as a philosopher I should cut a sorry figure.
Regarded theologically, my concept of the anima, for example, is pure gnosticism; therefore I am often classed among the gnostics.
Moreover, the Individuation process develops a symbolism, whose nearest parallels are to be found in folklore, gnostic, alchemistic and other ‘mystical conceptions and last, but not least in those of shamanism.
When materials of this kind are used for comparison, the reader is confronted with such a flood of ‘exotic’, Tarfetched’ proofs, that if he merely skims through a book
instead of reading it, he can easily be overcome by the illusion that he is faced with a gnostic system.
In reality, however, the Individuation process is a biological fact simple or complicated according to circumstances by means of which every living thing becomes that which it was destined to become from the very beginning.
This process naturally expresses itself in man just as much psychically as somatically.
On the psychic side it produces, for example, the well-known quaternity phenomena, whose parallels are to be found in mental asylums as well as in gnosticism and other exoticis and, last, but not least, in Christian allegory.
Hence it is by no means a case of mystical speculations, but of clinical
observations and their interpretation by means ofcomparison with analogous phenomena in other realms.
It is not the daring phantasy of the expert in comparative anatomy that can be held responsible when he throws light on the fact that the human skeleton is closely related to that of certain African anthropoids, of which the layman has never even
heard.
It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few exceptions, ignore the fact that, as a scientist, I proceed from empirical facts which every one is at liberty to verify.
On the other hand, they criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a gnostic who claims supernatural knowledge.
As a philosopher and speculating heretic I am naturally easy prey.
This is probably the reason why people prefer to ignore the facts which I have discovered and proved, or to deny them without scruple.
But it is the facts that are of primary importance to me and not a provisional terminology or attempts at theoretical reflections.
The fact that archetypes exist is not dismissed by saying that there are no inborn
representations.
I have never maintained that the archetype in itself is an image, but have expressly pointed out that I regard it as a modus without definite content.
In view of these many and various misunderstandings, I set a particularly high value on the real understanding shown by the author, whose point de depart is diametrically opposed to that of natural science.
He has successfully endeavoured to feel his way into the empiricist’s way of
thinking as far as possible, and if he has not always entirely succeeded in his attempt, I am the last person to blame him, for I am convinced that, involuntarily, I am guilty of many an offence against the theological way of thinking.
Discrepancies of this kind can only be settled by means of lengthy discussions, but they have a good side: not only do two apparently incompatible spheres come into contact, but they also mutually animate and fertilize each other.
This requires a great deal of good will on either side.
Here I can give the author unstinted praise.
He has dealt with the opposite standpoint with the utmost fairness, which is most
valuable to me, and at the same time he has illustrated the theological standpoint in a highly instructive way.
The medical psychotherapist cannot in the long run afford to overlook the existence of religious systems of healing if one may so describe religion in a certain respect any more than the theologian, in so far as he has the cura animarum at heart, can afford to ignore the experience of medical psychology. ~Carl Jung, Foreword God and the Unconscious, Page xiio – xxii
