jung

1. CARL JUNG
Psychology and Religion in the
Search for Personal Wholeness
Johann Maree
Summer School, UCT, Jan. 2012

2. INTRODUCTION: A FORMIDABLE TASK
 It is not easy to provide a clear exposition of Jung’s
analytical psychology because he changed his
mind as he went along.
 In the foreword of Frieda Fordham’s book on Jung,
he wrote: “As I cannot claim to have reached any
definite theory my work consists of a series of
different approaches, or one might call it, a
circumambulation of unknown factors. This makes it
rather difficult to give a clear-cut and simple
account of my ideas.”
 It is even harder to do it in 45 minutes as Freud
also needs to make a guest appearance.
 So, without any further delay, here goes.

3. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
 Carl Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland and
brought up in or near the historic city of Basel.
 His father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed
Church. He was continually racked by doubts about
his beliefs.
 His mother was a highly intuitive woman, possibly
with psychic abilities and sensitivities.
 Jung’s childhood experiences and memories of
religion were quite negative: crowds of dark-clothed
men and weeping women; a hole in the ground into
which a box was put; told Jesus had taken
someone to himself.

4. DOCTOR JUNG AND DOCTOR FREUD
 Jung trained as a doctor and began working in the
famous Burghoelzli psychiatric hospital linked to
University of Zurich.
 Jung was Freud’s junior by 19 years and was one
of first psychiatrists to support Freud’s controversial
theories, but he was also one of the first to break
away from Freud.
 To understand why Jung broke away from Freud it
is necessary to review a few relevant concepts and
theories of Freud first.

5. SIGMUND FREUD
 Freud went to a medical school in Vienna and
initially did research for many years in
neuropsychology.
 He then went to Paris to study with the great
psychiatrist, Charcot.
 He returned to Vienna and set up a practice in
neuropsychiatry with the help of his mentor and
friend, Joseph Breuer.
 They treated young women suffering from
hysterical symptoms.
 Freud was struck by how many of them were
related to repressed traumatic sexual experiences
in childhood.

6. THE SEXUAL INSTINCT AND LIBIDO
 Freud claimed that there was a repression of the
sexual instinct and from this he developed the idea
that sexual instinct provided psychic energy for the
psyche which, in its sublimated form, gave rise to
human achievements.
 He called this psychic energy the libido. This
energy was primarily derived from a sexual drive.
 Freud linked the libido closely with the id, one of the
three components that make up the mind or psyche
in Freud’s model.

7. THE ID, EGO AND SUPEREGO
 The id is the primitive, animalistic, instinctual
element, libidinous energy demanding immediate
satisfaction. “I want it and I want it now!”
 The sole governing device here is the pleasure
principle.
 The ego is a cluster of cognitive and perceptual
processes including memory, reality-testing,
problem-solving that are conscious and serve to
mediate between the demands of the id and
prohibitions of the superego. It serves like an
executive to maintain psychic balance.
 The superego dictates ethical and moral conduct.

8. THE UNCONSCIOUS
 One of Freud’s greatest contributions to psychology
was his scientific study of the unconscious.
 According to Freud, the unconscious is a domain of
the psyche encompassing the repressed id
functions, the memories, images and wishes that
are too anxiety-provoking to be accepted into
consciousness.
 Freud found that there are powerful ideas in the
unconscious, but they cannot become conscious
due to a force that represses them and resists
bringing them out into the open.

9. JUNG’S SEPARATION FROM FREUD
 Jung met Freud for the first time in Vienna in
February 1907. They talked virtually non-stop for 13
hours and Jung vividly describes in Memories,
Dreams, Reflections how the foundations were laid
for their eventual separation.
 Jung subsequently proposes that sexuality is not
the sole source of psychic energy, but that ‘libido’ is
a general psychic energy which may flow in
channels serving a range of instincts.
 For Jung the ego is the centre of consciousness
and, as such, does not encompass or understand
the whole person or self.

10. THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
 From treating psychotic patients at Burghoelzli and
wide reading Jung came to the conclusion that the
unconscious material that emerged could not have
come from the subject’s personal learning or
experience. He postulated that it came from a
collective unconscious derived through aeons of
repetition of human experience.
 Jung wrote: ‘there exists a second psychic system
of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature
which is identical in all individuals. The collective
unconscious does not develop individually but is
inherited.’

11. ARCHETYPES
 In addition, Jung said that the collective
unconscious is not just ‘a dead deposit, a sort of
abandoned rubbish heap, but a living system of
reactions and aptitudes that determine the
individual’s life in invisible ways.’
 It also consists of pre-existent forms that Jung
called archetypes. He first called them primordial
images in that he considered them to be archaic or
primordial types of universal images that date back
to humankind’s remotest beginnings.
 Everyday realities like mother, father, husband and
wife create the mightiest archetypes.

12. THE ANIMA
 The three most important archetypes Jung called
the anima, animus and shadow.
 The anima is the unconscious image of the
feminine that every man has within himself.
 Jung wrote: ‘Every man carries with him the eternal
image of woman. This image is fundamentally
unconscious, an imprint of all the ancestral
experiences of the female, a deposit of all the
impressions ever made by woman.’
 To explain the existence of the anima Jung invoked
the persona by which he means ‘the formation of
the mask behind which most people live.’

13. PERSONA
 Jung maintained that ‘a compensatory relationship
exists between persona and anima.’ He explained:
 ‘The persona is a complicated system of relations
between individual consciousness and society, a
kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a
definite impression upon others, and, on the other,
to conceal the true nature of the individual.’
 ‘Society expects every individual to play the part
assigned to him, so that a man who is a parson
must not only carry out his official functions, but at
all times and in all circumstances play the role of
parson in a flawless manner.’

14. THE COMPENSATORY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
PERSONA AND ANIMA
 Jung explained: ‘The persona, the ideal picture of a
man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by
feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly
plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a
woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that
reacts to the persona.’
 Jung considered the anima to be a personality
which is easily projected upon a woman.
 This projection means that a man can transfer to
his wife the protective role that his mother played in
his early life. This places the marriage ‘permanently
on the brink of explosion’ .

15. ANIMUS
 Similar to a man, every woman carries within her
the eternal image of a man.
 In the same way that man has an unconscious
anima, woman has an unconscious animus which
consists of “masculine” characteristics. The animus
is also an active force on the woman who is
unconscious of its presence.
 The way to remove the negativity of the animus and
to live in harmony with him is for woman to
differentiate between her ego and the animus
instead of assuming them to be one as she
unconsciously does. Similarly, the man has to
differentiate between his ego and the anima. This
is achieved by individuation dealt with later.

16. SHADOW
 The inferior being in ourselves is what Jung calls
the shadow. It consists of all that we are ashamed
of and that we do not want to know about
ourselves.
 It constitutes part of our personal unconscious, but
we also have an archetypal shadow in the realm of
our collective unconscious. It represents an
encounter with evil and facing it can be a shattering
experience.
 The shadow of every person has to be firmly
grasped and acknowledged for a person to achieve
a state of wholeness.

17. INDIVIDUATION AND THE SELF
 The essence of achieving personal wholeness for
Jung lies in the individuation process.
 The end result of the process in which wholeness is
achieved is to bring an undivided Self into
existence. Jung attached a special meaning to Self.
For him the Self is both the centre and the totality of
the psyche. It consists of both the conscious ego
and the unconscious and is only constituted once
there is awareness and acceptance of the
unconscious and its shadowy contents by the ego.

18. THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS
 By individuation Jung means bringing antagonistic
functions of the personality into harmony with each
other.
 Jung wrote: ‘Individuation means becoming a
single, homogeneous being. It also implies
becoming one’s own self. We could therefore
translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or
“self-realization.”’
 Individuation entails a lifelong development of
personality from conception to death. Jung divided
a full lifespan into two stages, a first half of life and
a second half.

19. THREE STAGES OF INDIVIDUATION
 Erich Neumann has refined and expanded lifelong
development into three stages:
containment/nurturance, i.e. the maternal stage;
adapting/adjusting, i.e. the paternal stage;
centring/integrating, i.e. a wholeness stage.
 Neumann expands the concept of individuation to
include the process of becoming the personality
that one innately is potentially from the beginning of
life.
 The containment/nurturance stage lasts a long time
in modern societies, much longer than childhood
because it is preparing the person fully for
adulthood.

20. CONTAINMENT/NURTURANCE (C/N) STAGE
 For the individuation process to develop to the full it
is necessary for the person to go through primary
and secondary school as well as some form of
post-school training or education in order to acquire
a profession. This period of dependence on parents
may last as long as thirty years!
 The C/N stage is symbolically defined as maternal:
Nurturance is delivered in the form of warm support
and encouragement. The harsh realities of life are
screened out.
 Nurturance is provided not only by mothers, but
also by fathers, teachers, or institutions such as
schools and churches.

21. TRANSITION FROM 1ST TO 2ND STAGE
 During the first stage a relative amount of
autonomy, independence and self-control is
introduced along the way so that by the end of this
stage people are able to do for themselves what
others have done for them earlier.
 In the second stage, the adapting/adjusting stage,
the father occupies the symbolic centre in order to
instil the rigour of functioning and performance
demanded for adaptation to the world.

22. 2ND STAGE: ADAPTION/ADJUSTING
 The second stage is governed by the law of
consequences for actions taken (the reality
principle).
 The person is exposed to a world in which
standards of performance are paramount and
consequences for behaviour are forcefully and
implacably drawn.
 Strict conditions are imposed upon the distribution
of all rewards, including love and positive regard.
 This is not the world as ideal but the world as real.

23. 3RD STAGE: CENTRING/INTEGRATING
 The tasks in this stage of life are:
 to embark upon the journey of becoming a centred
and whole individual; and
 to relate to the transcendent as well as the
immediate concrete realities of human existence.
 The ego now begins to answer to an inner call from
the psyche, rather than to an outer demand derived
from society.
 Working to live and survive is no longer sufficient;
one must now find something worth living for.

24. CENTRING/INTEGRATING AND THE SELF
 Jung speaks of the Self integrating the shadow and
relating in a new conscious way to the anima and
animus.
 The aim of the third stage is thus a degree of
integration of the inner opposites inherent in the
Self.
 The Self is the goal towards which the process of
individuation strives. It represents psychic
wholeness and the process by which self-division
may be healed.

25. JUNG ON RELIGION
AND GOD

26. JUNG’S CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE OF GOD
 Jung’s impression of institutional religion as a child
was quite negative. He realised that his father, a
Swiss Reformed Church pastor, had lost his faith.
As a child he wanted to help his father, but did not
know how. Later in his life he did.
 At the age of 11 Jung allowed a visionary revelation
to come over him as an act of obedience to God. It
revealed to him that God shared his view of the
institutional church.
 He found the vision completely emancipatory: he
experienced an ‘unutterable bliss’ he had never
known before.

27. JUNG’S REFLECTION ON HIS EXPERIENCE
 Years later Jung wrote: “That was what my father
had not understood, I thought; he had failed to
experience the will of God. He did not know the
immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and
free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls
upon man to partake of His freedom.”
 “It was obedience which brought me grace, and
after that experience I knew what God’s grace was.
One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing
matters but fulfilling His will.”

28. GOD AS AN ARCHETYPE
 Jung arrived at the view that ‘the soul possesses by
nature a religious function.’
 Because of this natural religious function of the soul
Jung maintained that there is a God archetype in
the collective unconscious of all human beings.
 However, Jung made a distinction between the
God-image archetype and God himself. In the
collective unconscious there is only a God-image.
 Jung’s main concern was with the ways in which
the God-archetype had manifested itself in actual
experiences.

29. GOD ONE OF THE SOUL’S DEEPEST AND
CLOSEST INTIMACIES
 Jung adopted the concept ‘numinous’ from Rudolf
Otto to designate the particular emotional quality of
archetypal experiences of God. Otto describes the
experience as the mysterium tremendum at
fascinens (terrifying and fascinating mystery). It
implies an emotional apprehension of God as
wholly other, awesome, overpowering, urgent and
fascinating.
 For Jung, it is ‘psychologically quite unthinkable’ for
God to be ‘wholly other’. This is because ‘a wholly
other could never be one of the soul’s deepest and
closest intimacies – which is precisely what God is.’

30. JUNG’S TREATMENT OF CHRISTIANITY
 Murray Stein has argued that Jung’s stance
towards Christianity was basically that of therapist.
Frieda Fordham sees this as Jung’s childhood
mission to restore his father’s faith by integrating
his psychological insights into existing Christian
dogma.
 People who found salvation in Christ, said Jung,
had assimilated the historical Jesus into the
archetype of the self. ‘This archetypal idea is a
reflection of the individual’s wholeness, i.e. of the
self, which is present in him as an unconscious
image.’

31. PERFECTION BUT NOT WHOLENESS IN GOD
 But this Christ-figure ‘lacks the darkness of spirit,
and is also without sin. Without the integration of
evil there is not totality.’
 According to Jung, the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, represents perfection, but not wholeness.
This is because Christianity has recognised the
need to face the question of human and cosmic
evil, but has excluded and repressed evil from the
presence of the Trinity.

32. JUNG SUGGESTS A QUATERNITARIAN GOD
 Jung suggested that evil be included within the
doctrine of God: that Satan be the fourth figure in
the Godhead. The Devil, he argued, represents
God the Father’s eternal adversary and should be
placed back in the realm from which it originated.
 In this way, said Jung, ‘the act of love embodied in
the Son is counterbalanced by Lucifer’s denial.’
 The quaternitarian pattern implies completeness in
distinction from perfection which is implied by the
Trinitarian pattern. Evil is the element of reality that
Trinitarian thought excludes.

33. EVALUATION OF JUNG
 Appreciative
 Jung made advances on Freud by broadening the
concept of libido to general psychic energy and
introducing the concept collective unconscious.
 Individuation as a process of ‘the dialectical
discussion between the conscious mind and the
unconscious’ in order to attain wholeness in the Self
is one of Jung’s great contributions to humanity.
Individuation encompasses the integration and
reconciliation of the unconscious dark side of our
human nature into the conscious ego thereby
helping us become whole people.

34. SHORTCOMINGS AND CRITICISMS
 Jung constructed a very complex structure of the
human psyche that is not easy to understand fully
and clearly. He also changed his mind from time to
time which shows how tenuous some of his
concepts and theories were.
 On the other hand, Jung was very dogmatic about
some of his theories. Renos Papadopoulos writes
that Jung stuck to theories he invented and
propagated them ‘with the fervour of a zealot’.
 It was a mistake of Jung to restrict religion to
numinous experiences as many devout believers
pursue their religion without such experiences.

35. MOVING BEYOND JUNG
 Although there is much in Jungian analytical
psychology that is of value, we should not hesitate
to move beyond it to other schools of thought in
psychology and psychotherapy. Not one of them
has a monopoly on truth and insights into the
human psyche. Rather, they each bring different
insights into knowing ourselves better and dealing
with challenges we face.
 We can strive to reach that of God in us by different
means, not only numinous experiences. Praying,
listening and meditating are some of the routes we
can take.