Reflections on Jung, God and the human condition

Reflections on Jung, God and the human condition

The psychology of religion is a fascinating subject that can be understood from a range of perspectives. R. E. Lee examines the contribution made by Jung to the debate

R. E. Lee

When, a year or so before Jung’s death in 1961, the celebrated BBC interviewer John Freeman came to visit Jung at his home in Küsnacht,

Switzerland, he asked him, almost as a coup de théâtre, ‘And do you believe in God?’ Much speculation has been made about the seeming enigma of Jung’s reply. After a momentary pause,

Jung responded, ‘Difficult to answer; I don’t need to believe, I know.’ This conclusion is of central interest, for Jung’s concern with religion has divided adherents and critics alike. Is Jung’s declaration an embarrassment to the modern atheistic understanding of human nature? Is he supporting the existence of an actual God? Or is the word ‘God’ tantamount to an idea within a theorem of the human psyche’s health?

This question has tantalised Jungians and philosophers of religion alike, and not without good reason, for Jung’s methodology rejects scientific objectivity as the sole judge of what may be credited, preferring to acknowledge the mind’s inner states of awareness as partner in any discussion of human identity and existence. This is partly the result of formative psychic experiences in childhood, and partly an informed philosophical interest in Kantian epistemology. In the latter, recognition of the limitations of attempts to know the phenomenon of the world through reason tacitly admits the need for attention to be given to inner mental states —a point that may compare with John Locke’s call to attend to the ‘inner eye’ of reflection. Jung also develops a concern that focusing simply on the objective phenomena of the patient may constitute part of the problem. This is a point that occurred to him while he was at the Burghölzli Institute where, to his dismay, he declared:

‘it is astounding to me that no-one looked into the content of psychoses, nor the meaning of fantasies. Such questions seemed altogether uninteresting to doctors of those days… [being] lumped together under some generic name such as ‘ideas of persecution’.

Jung 19 95

Jung’s impatience with objective classification rather than empathetic encounter and cure is palpable.

Positivism

But this tradition of empathetic analytical psychology for which Jung is responsible stands in contrast to the historical context of the rise of positivism and subsequently in logical positivist thought, which regards metaphysical and ethical statements as having no meaning except in being ‘translated out’ into statements of the empirical sciences (e.g. neural structures and so on). Equally, evolutionary psychology considers all existential human enthusiasms, moral convictions and interactions to be sufficiently understood as the products of a deterministic process in which notions of human identity and purpose become matters of the mechanistic explanation of substance and process.

The roots of this paradigm can be found in the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte saw human thought in three stages:

■ the theological stage, which thinks in terms of superstitious explanations of man’s experience of the world

■ the metaphysical stage (typified by mediaeval scholasticism), in which superstitious notions gained structure philosophically

■ the positive stage, in which the statements about the world and man’s beliefs that can be maintained are only those that are supported by material evidence

COMTE SAW HUMAN THOUGHT IN THREE STAGES

Coupled with Feuerbach’s wish-fulfilment projection theory of belief in God, it was natural for Freud, who was to become Jung’s sometime mentor and father-figure associate, to have already dispensed with the need to think in anything other than atheist terms by the time he worked with Jung. Certainly, Freud felt he could ill afford the adoption of theorems that involved any element of subjectivity, as Jung’s later notion of synchronicity was to invite.

The patient

It is interesting to note how this plays out in Freud’s objective client–doctor relationship. He attempts a detachment from the patient in having him lie on a couch out of sight and away from visible interaction from the therapist. But the sense of detachment the patient feels perhaps exacerbates their condition, not least in yearning for interpersonal recognition by the therapist.

Intriguingly, Jung adopted a polar opposite position in his own consultations. As his family have observed, this is not just because in early days Jung had no practice ‘in town’ and so had to rely on the private study in his own home, but more because the patient’s own inner state of mind must be recognised as being just as valid as that of the inescapably subjective reflections of the psychoanalyst himself — therefore they must meet face to face.

But, as John MacQuarrie observes:

‘Freud’s confidence in deterministic causal laws produces a construction of the inner mental life of the patient which imposes a quasimechanistic relationship between the Id, Ego and Superego such that human attitudes are explained in terms of the past that has shaped them. ’

MacQuarrie 2009

Therapy therefore attempts to adjust the patient to the societal status quo, to the presiding paradigm that is applied to the human condition — man as machine. Tellingly, creativity in respect of the patient’s own mental apparatus occurs but little in Freud’s writings, whereas creative freedom for Jung is central to the patient’s need to discover for himself the path that he may choose — the path towards his own individuation.

Religion and health

So, from a Jungian perspective, it is the very scientism of Freud’s position that is the problem, not the cure, for if the existential concerns of the human are essentially confined to an analysis of the human as animal, then the purpose of life is seen in terms of the biological drives, the economy of the emotions and their sublimation in the functional roles the individual plays in society. If, by extension, the only life-satisfaction is seen in terms of physical health and potency, then as the awareness of mortality and the loss of function become undeniable, there develops a particular morbid sense of futility and despair. In view of all this, it might now be realised why Jung reported the following observation:

‘Among all my patients in the second half of life over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook’

Jung 2001

There is another side to the Freud–Jung religious divide. Freud accepted uncritically a Darwinian paradigm of biological instinctual drives, the basic force of which is an egoism modulated by intelligent compromise. To be whole is to entertain a kind of enlightened self-interest. Yet for Jung, self-fulfilment is of quite a different stamp. In Jung’s apparatus, finding wholeness involves the reconciliation of the various forces within the psyche that hold us in tension. The path to ‘individuation’ requires a reconciliation between the ego (who we think we are) and the shadow (unacknowledged aspects of ourselves that we deny), between the conscious and the personal and collective unconscious. It involves an accommodation of the four functions of consciousness — intuition, sensing, feeling and thinking — in which the individual discovers how to be truly themselves. It also invites a withdrawal from the pressure of a materialistic perspective — one that Jung found at his retreat at Bollingen by the waters of Lake Zurich — where the inner voices of the collective unconscious are not disturbed by the mindset that technology imposes.

The voyage

Joseph Campbell has described this voyage as incorporating a transition from the monadic state of self-concern to the duadic state of unconditional self-sacrifice of an individual’s own ego to another. In personal relations, this psychological transformation is a profound change from egoism to altruism. However, this is not a moral disposition, for morality is a system of judgement and obligation under threat of penalty or desire for reward. For Campbell, as a Jungian mythologist, the individuated state of duadic altruism is a transformation of consciousness: it is, he says, like being in love. We may see an echo of this in the Jungian motifs of the modern classic film The Matrix, where the hero Neo, faced with the Oracle, is forced to confront a self-sacrificial Delphic dilemma: whether to save Morpheus or himself. The individuated person acts out of their heart, out of their psychic nature.

THE INDIVIDUATED PERSON ACTS OUT OF THEIR HEART, OUT OF THEIR PSYCHIC NATURE.

Similarly, in the Christian tradition, we might recognise it in the gnomic utterance of Jesus, ‘He who would save his life will lose it; but he who loses his life will save it.’ It is important to notice that the question of such a transformation is not confined to any one culture, time or religion. For both Campbell and Jung, the theme is universal even if its form and expression is local. It is true that Jung, in his study, had a stained-glass window depicting the crucifixion.

But it should be noted that Jung did not hold this icon in deepest regard out of some assent to a theological dogma or formula to do with sacrificial theology that remains on the level of an intellectual notion of atonement. The image instead expresses the dedication of being true to the ultimate identity of an individual’s nature.

When Jung declared that he ‘knew God’ and did not need to ‘believe’, he meant that God is not a theoretical possibility (in that sense a ‘belief’) which the mind might entertain as an intellectual hypothesis. But he also meant that he ‘knew’ God as an encounter with what truly it is to be — there is no virtue in holding this awareness at arm’s length, and indeed it cannot be known at arm’s length for it becomes the stuff of our being, inviting as it does a transformation of consciousness.

God

However, the question persists of whether Jung saw God as ‘real’ or God as an emblem. The matter is not clear. He writes on the one hand that the idea of God has nothing whatever to do with the question of his existence. This might seem to deny the view that Jung had a realist belief in God — and he continues with the warning that it is wiser to acknowledge the idea of God for ‘if one does not, something stupid and inappropriate will take its place, such as only an Enlightened intellect can hatch forth’. This sounds as if God is just an idea within the psychic scheme of things. But on the other hand, Jung declares that:

‘If we speak of ‘God’ as an archetype, we are saying nothing about his real nature but are letting it be known that ‘God’ already has a place in that part of our psyche which is preexistent to consciousness and that therefore he cannot be considered as an invention of consciousness. We neither make him more remote nor eliminate him but bring him closer to the possibility of being experienced. ’

Jung 1995

So, is Jung an eccentric thinker whose work is superseded by materialist evolutionary psychology? Are critics who complain of the lack of systematic objectivity in his writings correct — or is it simply that for Jung the old arguments of objective scrutiny for and against the existence of God are a snare? They treat God as if he were an object, the demonstration of whose existence or non-existence would give the theist or atheist an idolatrous position of control.

If this be the case, then Jung may have much in common with Kierkegaard’s notion that the matter of God is beyond such reductive scrutiny, that to be involved in the question of God is to be confronted by the mystery of whether to subscribe to animal materialism or to an encounter with what it is to be in love. As to the issue of which estate to adopt, there can be no proof and in this estate the human being is faced with an exquisite mystery. Jung’s writings draw to the forefront of human thought the choice between determinism or free will. You may wish to reflect on what these alternatives, if they are valid, may mean for the modern age.

R. E. Lee is head of religious studies at Trinity School, Croydon.