Jung and Religion
Note: This is part of a larger work on psychological type, religion, and spirituality being developed for the Journal of Psychological Type.
In contrast to
Freud, who was openly disdainful of religion on the grounds that it was
irrational and unscientific (in fact, most of his critique in The Future of
an Illusion is highly derivative of Feuerbach, including the notion that
faith in God is a form of unconscious projection), Jung had what appears at
least on the surface to be a positive and affirming view of religion and
spirituality. His early theological roots were in the evangelical
Protestant tradition, and he uses many examples drawn from church history and
theology in his writings, including Psychological Types. As opposed
to Freud's strident atheism, Jung is famous for his response when asked if he
believed in God: "I don't need to believe; I know".
And certainly Jung was not the reductionistic thinker that Freud was; he
once wrote that while Freud tried "to turn everything back [i.e., reduce
everything] ... to instinctual processes conditioned by the body, I start with
the assumption of the sovereignty of the psyche". Yet, for all that,
a deeper look at Jung's ideas will show how unconventional his understandings of
spirituality were from the standpoint of classical theism, and his autobiography
clearly indicates that by early adulthood, Jung had sharply distanced himself
from Christianity and viewed Jesus as a merely human, fallible figure (Jung,
1983). In this respect, it is surprising that so many within the Christian
tradition have embraced Jung without making a distinction between elements of
his theory that can easily be recast into an orthodox (classically theistic)
theological framework and those that are inimical to such a framework.
As Strohmer (1989)
and Giannini (2004) note, Jung's ideas were as influenced by Eastern as by
Western religious thought, although Spoto (1989) rather strenuously disagrees
with this assessment. While his ideas are difficult to pigeonhole, his
underlying theology probably fits best within what today is known as
perennialism or panentheism. As summarized by a contemporary proponent (Beauregard,
cited in Beuregard and O’Leary, 2007), perennialism is the belief that:
"Individual minds
and selves arise from and are linked together by a divine Ground of Being (or
primordial matrix). That is the spaceless, timeless, and infinite Spirit,
which is the ever-present source of the cosmic order, the matrix of the whole
universe, including both physis (material nature) and psyche
(spiritual nature). Mind and consciousness represent a fundamental and
irreducible property of the Ground of Being." (pp.
293-294)
In other words, the
individual self is part of God, and God is in all things including all human
selves. This view, while opposed to the reductionistic materialism of much
of mainstream science in our day (which, in the extreme form promulgated by the
likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, follows Feuerbach in denying the
existence and relevance of God altogether), is also quite distinct from
classical theism, which views God as distinct from the human soul or spirit.
In classical theism, human souls or spirits are direct creations of God, but
they remain distinct from God; we are not part of God, and God does not
automatically or inherently reside within us. To find God within a
framework of classical theism, we first look outward (to the God who is
beyond), not inward (to a god who is within). Nor is God associated
with the physical world as such in the sense that there is any parallelism or
identity relation between the two; God made the world, but the world is
not in any sense God. Finally, panentheists and classical
theists have differing ideas about whether and how God might be knowable, though
here the boundaries are fuzzier and are colored by the ongoing debate among
classical theists between apophatic and kataphatic strains of theology.
For instance, Clouser (2005), a classical theist, approvingly cites Luther:
"Now God in His
own nature and majesty is to be left alone; in this respect we have
nothing to do with Him, nor does He wish us to deal with Him. We have to
do with him [only] as clothed by His Word... When He is clothed with the
voice of a man, when He accommodates Himself to our capacity to understand, then
I can approach Him." (p. 221)
Jung speaks much
more obliquely about these issues, but his seminal concept of the Self or Soul
(which is frequently capitalized in the writings of Jungian thinkers, implicitly
suggesting that it takes the place of the Deity of classical theism) can be seen
as a fundamentally panentheistic concept. Individual selves are like
"bubbles" that rise from the well of the universal collective
unconscious (Giannini, 2004). As such, they are connected at a deeper
level, in part by means of the archetypes, the universal forms of thought.
In fact, Giannini (a Jungian analyst) draws explicit links between Jung's
thought and the philosophy of Taoism, approvingly quoting Lao Tzu:
"The Tao is like
a well, used but never used up. It is like the eternal void, filled with
infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don't
know who give birth to it; it is older than God." (p.
56)
Clearly this is
light-years apart from the classical theist conception of God, who is
beginningless and endless and entirely noncontigent (dependent on nothing and no
one else for His existence and attributes).
Giannini also
remarks in a footnote that Jung quotes Meister Eckhart in Psychological Types
in a manner that appears to affirm a similar theology: "God is
begotten of the Soul, and his Godhead he has of himself. God comes into
being and passes away. Godhead is All, neither knowing nor possessing
itself, whereas God is a function of the Soul." Giannini's paraphrase
is that "God is a human way of understanding the Divinity, that is,
Godhead, which is total mystery, total incomprehension" (p. 64). This
is very different from the classical Christian conception that God has made
Himself known (objectively, relationally, and propositionally). The
closest link between Jung's conception and that of classical theism is the
notion that God has both an unrevealed essence and revealed energies, as in the
theology of the Cappadocian Fathers (which, according to Clouser, may have
influenced Luther and Calvin in their break from medieval scholasticism).
But in that theology, the initiative of self-revelation lies with God (whose
revelations are objective and trustworthy), not with the human psyche (who, in
Jung's thought, encounter the Absolute in mostly subjective and relativistic
ways).
In my view, this
analysis helps to explain the skepticism that many mainstream psychologists have
about Jung; the ambivalence felt in orthodox Christian circles about
Jung's ideas about type; and (as Giannini notes at length) the cleavage
between the psychological type community and the Jungian analytical community.
Jung's views are
often treated dismissively or with extreme brevity in many contemporary
treatments of personality psychology. One way to explain this fact -
surprising given the scope and depth of Jung's thought, characteristic of his
profound Introverted orientation - is to note, as does Giannini, that empirical
psychology is strongly oriented towards a Sensing-Thinking approach
(observational, operational data treated by means of technical, statistical
analysis). While psychologists do make frequent use of hypothetical
constructs in their work, the history of the field generates skepticism about
unwarranted reification of such constructs, and most social scientists are
socialized to be "professional undergeneralizers" (Holland, 1996).
Jung, in contrast, utilized subjective data (the analysis of dreams, myths,
clinical anecdotes, and other intangibles) heavily in his work, and readily drew
sweeping generalizations about such data - suggestive of a typologically
opposite (iNtuitive-Feeling) orientation within his writing. This
"left-brain/right-brain" (or ST/NF) polarity may underlie a
considerable amount of mainstream psychology's disenchantment with Jung's ideas
as being "insufficiently empirical". (Incidentally, this same
orientation may be responsible for an appreciable proportion of the
much-vaunted science-religion divide. Evolutionary psychologists, for
instance, have a strong tendency to "explain away" religious faith as
an artifact -- technically, a so-called spandrel -- of how the brain developed
during the early Neolithic period. However, to some unknown extent,
the reductionistic component of this explanation, if not the technicalities, may
itself be an artifact - of the Sensing-Thinking propensity to dismiss the
possibility that nonsensory realities may exist and have explanatory relevance.)
On the other side
of the coin, classical theists frequently recognize in Jung both an ally and an
adversary. Jung is relatively unique among early psychologists (though
some other figures - James, Allport, Frankl - also come to mind) in being
supportive of religion and spirituality, not only as pragmatically useful human
endeavors, but as reflective of a genuine insight into the fundamental reality
of the human condition. Yet, as argued above, Jung's underlying
theological framework is generally inimical to classical theism and really
belongs in a setting of panentheistic thought such as found in contemporary
process theology. As a result, classical theists typically must regard
Jung's typology as distinct from, and logically separable from, the wider
framework of his ideas. While this can be done in a logically consistent
and coherent way (God may have created human typological diversity for reasons
of His own), in the minds of some critics it is cherry-picking Jung's theory for
compatible elements in a manner that may or may not be fully justified. In
addition, Jung's tendency to borrow standard theological terms such as
"salvation" and use them as metaphors for something different (in this
case, the process of psychological individuation) has caused some
misunderstanding and some conflict. For instance, in a psychological
analysis of the historic theological debate between Augustinian and Pelagian
views of salvation, Jung appears to evince considerable support for the latter,
and his related remark that "salvation must originate from within" has
often been construed as advocating a synergistic theology of salvation (as
opposed to the sola gratia monergism of the Protestant Reformers).
However, this may well be a confusion between two different levels of discourse
since Jung was probably speaking metaphorically of the process of individuation.
Among contemporary advocates of Jungian thought, typologists (represented by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, the Association of Psychological Type, and related groups) and analysts (who are, by definition, professionally trained clinicians) often view themselves in surprisingly adversarial terms. In Giannini's analysis, this results primarily from Jung's failure to link the concepts of "type" and "archetype" explicitly in his work. Thus, typologists emphasize the observable, empirical existence of type differences and their practical applications in career management, relationship counseling, communication, business leadership, team building, and the like, applications which strike many analysts as superficial and lacking in depth, ignoring as they do the role of the unconscious and thus, in Spoto’s (1989) memorable phrase, behaving somewhat like a “fisherman calmly fishing for minnows from atop the back of a whale”. Conversely, analysts emphasize hypothetical constructs such as individuation and the archetypes, which are notoriously difficult if not impossible to treat empirically or operationally and which seem (at least on the surface) to have few if any practical applications. Despite the fact that both communities are strongly dominated by NF types (which are rather rare in the general population, suggesting a powerful form of self-selection that operates similarly in both groups), this polarity between the groups appears quite pronounced. To some extent it may simply reflect the divide between theory and application that plagues all scientific communities, but another possibility is that the first group's emphasis on outwardly observable diversity (with a goal of affirming and developing one's distinct, unique type) is at odds with the second group's emphasis on inward similarity or unity (with a goal of accessing and developing all sides of the self to become a balanced, whole person). For Giannini, a recognition of the fact that "the types are also archetypes" provides a possible conceptual bridge between these two perspectives.
-- Marlowe C.
Embree, Ph.D. (Copyright 2009, All Rights Reserved)
References
Beauregard,
M., and O’Leary, D. (2007).
The spiritual brain:
A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul.
New York: Harper One.
Clouser,
R.A. (2005).
The myth of religious neutrality:
An essay on the hidden role of religious belief in theories.
Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Giannini,
J.L. (2004).
Compass of
the soul: Archetypal guides to a
fuller life. Gainesville, FL:
Center for Applications of Psychological Type.
Holland, J.L. (1996). Exploring careers with a typology: What we have learned and some new directions. American Psychologist, 51(4), 397-406.
Jung, C. G. (1923). Psychological types. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Spoto, A. (1989). Jung's typology in perspective. Boston: SIGO Press.
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