2E - Jung PDF

**Theme 2E -- Religious belief as a product of the human mind -- Carl Jung:** Religion necessary for personal growth with reference to: collective unconscious; individuation; archetypes; the God within. Supportive evidence including recognition of religion as a source of comfort and promotion of p...

**Theme 2E -- Religious belief as a product of the human mind -- Carl Jung:** Religion necessary for personal growth with reference to: collective unconscious; individuation; archetypes; the God within. Supportive evidence including recognition of religion as a source of comfort and promotion of positive personal and social mindsets arising from religious belief. Challenges including lack of empirical evidence for Jungian concepts and reductionist views regarding religious belief arising from acceptance of Jung's ideas. Possible b questions: - The extent to which Jung was more positive than Freud about the idea of God. - The effectiveness of empirical approaches as critiques of Jungian views on religion. There is a lot of information here, but it does reward slow and repeated reading! **Carl Jung (1875 -- 1961)** Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist. His father and uncles were Christian ministers and his grandfather was a GP. His mother suffered from depression and spent periods in hospital, so Jung grew up being closer to his father. He studied psychology for his degree when it was still a nascent science (Freud only published his first book in 1901) and for his PhD Jung chose the abnormal psychology of occult phenomena (his cousin considered herself a medium, able to talk to the dead). It is relevant that Jung had interests in 'left field' ideas, as perhaps it gave him the imagination required to develop new forms of psychology. In particular, he wrote to Freud that "most of my evenings are taken up with astrology," but failed to convince Freud of its worth. Although Jung was reluctant to be too open publicly about this interest, it clearly took up a lot of his time and appears here and there throughout his work, the astrological elements in a birth chart for example forming the basis of his theory of psychological types (Earth = Sensation, Air = Thinking, Fire = Intuition, Water = Feeling), while the masculine and feminine constellations led him to coin the terms Extroversion and Introversion. Jung also used astrology as evidence for his theory of synchronicity. While working at the Bergholzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich, Jung set up his own private practice where he was free to develop his own techniques and treatments in the field of analytical psychology. He began to correspond with Freud and the two men bonded very quickly. Freud was nearly 20 years older than Jung and saw himself as a mentor and Jung as his protégé, who would take on his mantle after he died. At the end of the 19^th^ century the concept of the unconscious was very new and these two men were at the forefront of using it in medical practice. Freud had already discovered the value of dreams as doorways into the unconscious; word association was another door that became a regular feature of psychoanalysis and became known as 'the talking cure'. However, after a few years Jung began to consider Freud very rigid and fixed in both practice and understanding of the mind; Jung was developing his own ideas about the structure and function of the human psyche and could not accept Freud's reduction of all behaviour to sex. In his autobiography "*Memories, Dreams, Reflections*" (posthumously published 1963), Jung offered an account of a single event which, to him, signalled the end of his co-operation with Freud. They were in Freud's study and Jung was becoming exasperated with Freud's refusal to accept 'psi phenomena' (e.g. telepathy, psychokinesis etc.) as legitimate objects of study, when all of a sudden there was a loud bang from Freud's bookcase. "There," said Jung, "is an example of so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomena" (i.e. mental states impact on the external world; in this case, Jung's exasperation resulted in the noise). Freud's reply was that this was "sheer bosh," whereupon Jung replied: "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. To prove my point, I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud retort!" And there was. Although both men gave slightly different accounts, they did both acknowledge that this happened. For Jung, it was the ultimate conviction of how limited Freud was in his understanding of the mind and in his unwillingness to admit to any shortcomings. The friendship never recovered, and Jung began to go his own way. **Jung's understanding of the mind.** You need to remember Freud's structure of the psyche: id (personal unconscious), ego (sense of oneself) and superego (influence upon the ego from society, parents, peers, culture etc. etc.) Jung was not concerned with the superego. He accepted the term 'ego' as referring to that in ourselves which we are consciously aware of. He did not use the term id, referring instead simply to the 'personal unconscious'. So, Jung has adopted the ego and personal unconscious. To this he added a deeper layer of the unconscious which is *transpersonal*, and has been likened to a kind of 'world soul' or 'group mind'. He called it the [collective unconscious] because it is not personal but shared by all. From a transpersonal perspective, the collective psyche (mind) is not in us -- we are in the collective psyche. Jung himself used the analogy of fish in the sea to illustrate his structure of the psyche - all of us, with our egos and personal unconsciousnesses, are like fish, and the collective unconscious is the ocean. The thing is, the personal unconscious is in a sense porous -- so it is open to and can receive contents from the collective, and also deposit its own contents into the collective. The collective unconscious predates humans, but arose simultaneously with the earliest and most primitive forms of conscious life. The symbiotic nature of the relationship between the personal and the collective unconscious allowed for both to become progressively more complex as human life evolved. The collective is certainly a repository of human experience, but simultaneously a source of human experience also. Imagine: several early humans experience falling in love. The experience of falling in love is instantly received by the collective unconscious, where different experiences of the same thing coalesce and... *form a life of their own*. Being 'in love' becomes a 'thing' (more precisely an 'archetype') which (if you like) 'swims into' the personal unconscious of other human beings and, hey presto, falling in love becomes a universal -- or collective -- experience. The more people experience a thing, the stronger the archetype becomes. **Contents of the collective unconscious -- the archetypes.** Jung derived the term 'archetype' from the Greek 'arche', meaning 'original' and 'archetypos' meaning 'first moulded' or 'pattern' (i.e. for other things to be based on). So, when we say above "being in love becomes a thing" we mean it becomes a pattern of experience to be repeated in the human world. Jung defined archetypes as "complexes of psychic energy" (when he says 'psychic', he means 'mental'). So the archetypes are like the biggest fish in the ocean, and have a life of their own. Jung was proficient in Latin and Greek and refers frequently to scholars of those ancient worlds. It is highly likely Jung's theory of the archetypes was suggested by his reading of Plato's World of Forms. Plato's World of Forms is populated by what he called *eidos* -- ideas. For everything that exists in our world there is an original idea of that thing in the World of Forms. The original idea is best understood as an essence of what we know -- for example, in our world there are horses; in the World of Forms there is an 'essence' of 'horseness', which is the pattern for all horses to be based on. There are many kinds of horse in our world, from racing stallions to Dartmoor ponies, but they all have 'horseness' in common and all in some sense have emanated from that 'first mould' of horseness. So, for Plato, the World of Forms is the source of our world. Now, for World of Forms read the collective unconscious, except for one big difference: Plato's World of Forms is physical, not mental (for Plato, knowledge of the World of Forms was gained by walking through it on the way to rebirth); Jung's collective unconscious is mental, not physical. However, for Jung the collective unconscious is still the highest reality because it is also the source of everything, so in a sense it is *more* real than our physical world. A quote from Jung that "the penis is only a phallic symbol" (*Memories, Dreams, Reflections*, 1963) illustrates perfectly how the archetypes have a higher reality than their forms of expression in this world. Because the collective unconscious and its archetypes are alive and organic, interaction with our physical world and personal unconscious is easier to explain. Let's just pause here and become aware that Jung saw all life as emerging out of the collective unconscious, with which there is two-way interaction. The urge of the collective unconscious is towards growth and complexity. We can see this with evolution, where conscious life begins with the amoeba and escalates upwards towards humans. As we become aware of the archetypes within us, the collective unconscious is urging us towards personal growth. Let's look at a number of archetypes to see how this works. When archetypes 'swim into' (or more dramatically 'irrupt into') our personal unconscious, we experience them in a variety of forms which initially take over or displace the ego, becoming a lens through which we now see the world. For example, the Lover is an archetype already mentioned. When we initially fall in love, everything we look at reminds us of our beloved; we begin to act (usually to the annoyance of our friends) as if the world is one big poem about roses or tulips and nothing else really matters. Eventually, we learn how to integrate the experience into a more wise or mature (and certainly more sensible) form of conscious loving. In this way, the archetype of the Lover has been integrated into the psyche and no longer dominates it uncontrollably, and the collective unconscious, through the archetype of the Lover, has enabled us to grow as a person. Other archetypes include the Shadow. The Shadow is a more awkward archetype because it comprises the negative elements of ourselves and has little regard for morality. Sex, when one is in the grip of the Lover archetype may (hopefully) be great, but when a kind of 'sex maniac' type Shadow displaces the ego and takes charge, a person becomes a danger to themselves as well as to others and may at best end up in an addiction clinic or at worst become like Weinstein or Saville. Such a person will have missed the opportunity for growth by not recognising the Shadow for what it is and attempting to regulate or integrate it. For sex read also political power, money, controlling others, whatever. Prisons are full of unintegrated Shadows their owners have done nothing to come to terms with. In both examples above you can see how the experience can feel like being possessed. In a sense it is, because the ego is displaced and the archetype has taken its place in the driving seat. That said, please don't worry that you may wake up tomorrow morning as an axe murderer. People do, but only if they have not given themselves an ego-strengthening strong moral sense of duty to others. If they had, the Shadow would not find it so easy to get a grip. In any case, not all archetypes are so dramatic. Jung identified one called the 'Jewish Mother', who micro-manages her children's lives to the n^th^ degree; not so good to have a parent so controlling! Another is the *puer aeternus* or eternal youth -- the little boy who never grows up and is still immature at 50. Then there is the Wise Old Man -- For those of us who consciously pursue wisdom, archetypes like this may be a driving force as someone we might like to become or 'turn into'. They are not necessarily gender-restricted, but do indicate how the archetypes can be thought of as acting like 'people' in the unconscious! A similar female one is the Witch, which of course represents a more particular kind of wisdom, involving nature, herbalism and perhaps a bit of magic! Some archetypes, like the Lover and the Shadow, are more powerful than others. Here are the other really important ones: The Hero - found in people who like to overcome challenges (mountaineers? soldiers?) and be seen as deserving of glory. However, the great Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell (*The Hero with a Thousand Faces*) has deftly illustrated how we all experience the hero archetype in our own lives, just by facing up to life's serial challenges. The Persona -- interestingly the word 'persona' is the Greek word for 'mask' and, obviously, we get the word 'personality' from it. The Persona is a pretend self; this archetype is found in people who 'put on performances' in social situations which do not really reflect them -- like acting posh, for example. However, all of us behave differently with different people and in different situations -- we all have a variety of personas (masks). The Anima and Animus -- 'Anima' is one of several Greek words for the soul (which 'animates' the body) and is the word used by Aristotle. For Jung, men have a feminine soul (anima) and women have a masculine one (animus); as you develop yourself, you integrate the opposite side into yourself, becoming well balanced, less one-sided and, in a sense, psychologically androgynous. Typically, this may read as women becoming comfortably assertive, men more comfortably gentle. (We are talking in archetypal terms here!) God - All the gods that were ever believed in, are or have been archetypes. Krishna, Rama, Thoth, Odin, Hermes, Yahweh, Allah and the Christian God too. The god/God archetypes manifest in different ways which can be seen in how they are believed in. Taking the Christian God archetype, it is a powerful, personal figure which seeks to increase our capacity for love or agape, but it is an archetype in the collective unconscious and does not necessarily exist outside it. (I would suspect that for Jung it doesn't, but he was deliberately unclear and refused to say if he believed in a greater God or not, probably not wishing to offend and, in any case, he considered belief in a personal God to be a healthy thing he didn't wish to discourage.) You can see how, by encouraging devotion to something higher than ourselves, the God archetype draws us towards spiritual growth. The Self -- This is an interesting one. Your textbook says Jung wrote about it "in quite an obscure manner." I'm not sure I agree! The Self is [the whole of us] - what we are now AND what we could become. The Jungian scholar James Hillman (*The Soul's Code*) used the analogy of an acorn. An acorn is a seed, but it can become a mighty oak. The acorn contains the 'code' to realising its full potential. So it is with the Self -- we are born with [potentials] and realising our potentials is what it's all about for Jung. It is what he means when he talks about personal growth and **individuation** -- the Self is like an acorn, and we must use our lives to make it grow beautifully, or 'flourish' (to use a word from Aristotle -- *eudaimonia*). The collective unconscious, the archetypes and life experiences they send our way, are all the nourishment we need to achieve individuation. In understanding the Self it is helpful to see how Jung related it to the ego. The ego (how we see ourselves) is just one archetype amongst many that the ego attracts to itself in the local 'sea' (to continue that analogy). The Self archetype is kind of our 'greater self', encompassing conscious and unconscious, good and evil, male and female. What Jung understood as the individuation process is our expanding our awareness from the little self (ego) to the greater Self. The Self gets more interesting when we read that Jung said it is very close to the God archetype and can be hard to tell apart. He also referred to the Self as "the God within". There is a clue here to what Jung believed about God, i.e. as a model of fulfilment or completion of the individuation process. It is helpful to remember Irenaeus here and how he explained we have to [grow] from being 'in the image' of God to being 'in his likeness'. Irenaeus' idea was taken up by neo-Platonism when Greek thought merged with Christianity; Jung was *very* influenced by neo-Platonism and referred to neo-Platonist texts in their original Greek, so it is very likely that Jung's concepts of the Self and the individuation process were modelled on these ancient ideas of spiritual growth and becoming God-like. Hillman's acorn analogy is also helpful here. "The Self," said Jung, "compels man towards wholeness, towards integration of the unconscious, which is rightly conceived to be 'God's will.'" Which sounds very Irenaean! Your textbook refers to Martin Palmer who said Jung took a similar position as Kant on the objective existence of God (it is true Jung was to a small extent influenced by Kant). Kant said (a bit like Descartes) that we need an objective God from which to receive our morality. Jung noted that the archetype of God (and gods) in all places was linked with morality. However, whereas Kant very much believed in an objective God, Jung was always reluctant to be drawn on the question of whether there is a God outside the process. In his last interview before he died, he was asked: "Do you believe in God?" He avoided it by replying: "I don't believe, I *know*." He then complained bitterly that this reply had been a terrible mistake and had given people completely the wrong impression! So, by recognising the archetypes within us, we are 'making the unconscious conscious', not unlike lifting a trap door into a cellar and shining a light to see what is there. We avoid doing this at our peril -- when archetypes are not 'tamed' by being made known, they can make themselves known with devastating effects on the mind, even developing into psychoses such as schizophrenia. Accessing the unconscious is what Jung called the **\'transcendent function\'**. The unconscious can be accessed by interpreting one\'s dreams, identifying one\'s situation in life with myth or fairy tale, or simply by being religious. The common factor in all of these is perceiving or working with symbols, and **symbols are, in fact, the language of the unconscious while the unconscious, in fact, is the realm of the sacred**. Religions are seen as having emerged from the collective unconscious -- religions are 'humanity dreaming' and their characters, like actors in a play, are archetypes which symbolise facets of human experience. Religion, for Jung, is healthy because it involves 'the transcendent function' -- engaging with one's own unconscious via identification with religious symbolism. **Pictorial symbols can be archetypes too.** This is where Tillich comes in. You may remember how Tillich said symbols are natural forces that live and die. He was very influenced by Jung and could equally well have said archetypes. The thing is, everything and every idea that we produce is deposited in the collective. Of course, symbols that are little used will not have much power to return, but greater use gives greater power -- the Nazi swastika, of course, is taking a long time to disappear in a political sense, although it was first found 2-3,000 years BC in the Indus Valley and has always been prominent as a religious symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism. Jung also talked about how the archetype of fascism took over national mindsets in the 1930s and caused a collective psychosis (Nazism). Jung used Tibetan mandalas as evidence for the collective unconscious. We have seen he would always give his patients art work to do; when painting, Jung noticed a number of his patients drew mandala-style pictures -- typically a square in a circle but a symbol of wholeness or the Self in the centre. Jung published a number of examples of these and they do, indeed, look very like mandalas. He argued that, as his mentally troubled patients in 1940s' Zurich were unlikely to have ever seen a mandala, the mandala archetype must have arisen in their minds from the collective unconscious. **Individuation** As the word implies, Jung used this word to describe the process of becoming a complete person. No religious beliefs have been specified, and yet this is seen by most Jungians as a spiritual path towards 'wholeness'. Jung used the word 'wholeness' a lot, believing we are 'complete' when we have integrated different facets of our psyche. A man needs to integrate his anima (female side), a woman her animus; we all need to integrate our personal unconscious along with our conscious -- a life-long task of shining a light under the trap door of the ego and into the unconscious, seeing our dominant archetypes and assimilating them. Jung dedicated three volumes of his Collected Works to the study of alchemy, which he saw as an attempt to integrate opposing parts of the psyche, and identifies the alchemical 'philosopher's stone' as a marriage of opposites (*mysterium coniunctionis*) in the form of a diagram of a man within a circle within a square (the same basis as a mandala). Jung quotes the 14^th^ century alchemist Gerhard Dorn: "You wilt never make from (your alchemical practice) the One that thou seekest, except first there be made one thing of thyself." He would also have identified with this quote from the Gnostic *Gospel of Thomas*: *When you make the two one, when you make the inner as the outer* *and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and you* *make the male and the female into a single being, then you shall* *enter the kingdom.* In short, individuation is a process of spiritual/psychological growth which is all about reconciling the different parts of our psyche, integrating our archetypes and making of ourselves a harmonious whole. Individuation for Jung is the goal of life, as also recognised in Gnostic Christianity, medieval alchemy, Neo-Platonism and Tibetan Buddhism. **Jung's positive view of religion** Some Jungians see the individuation process as religious, some do not, but here we come to Jung's understanding of religion and the stark difference from Freud's. For Freud religion is a neurosis, an unhealthy reaction to an ego caught between the demands of one's own unconscious and the demands of the superego -- unable to contain the two forces, the ego cracks and mental illness is a result. Religion is a common form that mental illness takes. For Jung, religion is a sign of mental health because, when we are being religious, we are engaging with our unconscious. Religious figures -- Jesus, Mary etc., indeed the entire cast of all myths (religious stories) are all archetypes for us to interact with. For Jung, mental illness is what comes when we do [not] engage with our unconscious -- it can then make itself known quite unpleasantly, even in the form of psychosis. Your textbook says: "When people have religious experiences, they feel they are connecting with something greater than themselves." This is true of prayer, which Jung would see as contacting the God archetype within you and nurturing the Self. The unconscious is greater than ourselves because the personal unconscious is greater than the ego, and the collective unconscious is as old as the universe. That said, there are non-religious ways of engaging with the unconscious too, such as dream analysis, art, creative writing, meditation and undergoing psychoanalysis. Jung also recognised that religion is a source of comfort in times when we feel troubled. As he placed a high value on dreams, dreams can be interpreted as messages from the unconscious to the conscious. A famous quote from Jung is that "a dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened." A religious person, of course, may interpret their dreams as a message from God; they might not be wrong if God is seen as the God archetype! A non-religious person may seek help or clarification about their inner or outer life from a Jungian analyst. A religious person may seek help from a priest. Jung made the point that priest can function as symbols of wisdom and the individuated Self, and perform the same role as an analyst. A priest can reach more people, too, by leading prayer and meditation groups and giving inspiring sermons. Jung was very clear that religious people had a greater sense of well-being than non-religious people and were less likely to present with depression or anxiety disorders, an observation borne out by seeing the effects of two world wars, economic depression and a rapidly changing world. Religion offered a place of mental or spiritual sanctuary, of access to the timeless, as well as reassurance that death is not the end. Religion also gave people a moral code to live by, and an optimistic outlook that good will eventually prevail. Many modern psychologists will say the same thing. Of course, non-religious people may cope just as well, but here we come to an interesting point: Jung criticised Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs' -- even though it had Self-Actualisation at the top! (The rest were Esteem, Love and Belonging, Safety and Physiological needs). It's very good, said Jung, but Maslow had left something out -- the human need for meaning. Meaning can be found in religion, but also in other places, and the quest for meaning requires the kind of introspection that involves accessing the unconscious. Non-religious people are just as good as religious people at doing that. More than that, being kind, honest and compassionate seems to follow from living a meaningful life, while those who lack kindness, honesty and compassion do tend to be people who are not engaged with a search for meaning. **Challenges to Jung -- Lack of Evidence** Jung considered himself an empiricist, but it is hard to provide evidence for things like archetypes! Archetypes provide an explanation for patterns of behaviour, but you can't point at them or take photos. A Jungian could say the unconscious is no different, it works as a model of explanation for where memories are stored when we're not conscious of them, but you can't dissect a brain and say "Look, there's the unconscious." But we all use the word in conversation and know what we mean. The American psychologist Murphy accused Jung of being too quick to jump to conclusions. For example, in creation myths Jung may consider creation by light ("Let there be light!") an archetype in the collective unconscious, but it could just be an obvious choice of storytelling. The counter to this could be Murphy's inability to think symbolically -- light is an excellent symbol for conscious awareness and knowledge, which is why we draw light bulbs to show an idea, or say 'I'm in the dark' when we're ignorant of something. Neumann drew comparisons between the serpent in the Adam and Eve story and Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans -- both are stories about the origins of consciousness. This is supported by the name of Lucifer -- literally 'light-bringer'. A frequent criticism of Jung regards his theory of synchronicity, which many reject as chance on the grounds that, as Dawkins said, "a one in a million chance is going to happen one in a million times" (*The God Delusion*). Synchronicity's defenders argue a) you can't always calculate chances and b) Dawkins totally misses the element of [meaning], which distinguishes synchronicity from chance (Jung's defined synchronicity as "two events connected by meaning but not by cause"). Jung offered astrology amongst other evidence for synchronicity, but not many people accept astrology either! Perhaps the best one can do is refer to John Wisdom's 'picture preference' -- Jung is not entirely without evidence, and if it resonates with someone they may relate to it, if not, they won't. On the whole, to understand Jung it is really necessary to be able to think symbolically, as his is a symbolic system. Not everyone can do this, as some people are very literal-minded (think Dawkins, who said 'we should not read fairy tales to children in case they grow up thinking frogs can turn into princes.') Clearly, there is an inability to grasp metaphor here. The same applies to the Logical Positivists (Box 4B) who insisted all religious language had to be taken literally. Jung has been accused (with Freud) of **reductionism** in 'reducing' religion to 'no more than a product of the human mind'. While remembering people such as Dawkins are equally reductionist for saying the same thing, **there is an important difference between Jung and Freud in that Jung saw religion as a product of the universal mind (collective unconscious), not of the individual mind**. Could one draw an analogy between belief in a personal God and what Tillich called 'the God beyond God', or even Brahman? In other words, is the collective unconscious God? Jung did not say so, but it is possible that he thought that. After all, he conceived of the collective unconscious as pushing us towards universal, spiritual growth. Jung was fascinated by religion, but always held back from specifying his personal beliefs. With regard to a personal God, he did see the God archetype as one archetype among many. Believers in a personal God will not be happy with that, but a great many Christians see God as a transpersonal, compassionate spirit or power -- which could be identified with the collective unconscious itself.