by Phil Goss
b His ideas on archetypes and symbolism were expressed within this school
c His colourful approach to art as reflected in The Red Book impressed them
d His ideas about the transcendent function helped them transcend older art forms
10 How did Jung influence George Lucas’s creation of the Star Wars movies?
a Because Lucas read Jung’s ideas on the Hero, which inspired the series
b Because Lucas based the character of Yoda on Jung
c Because of his ‘archetypal’ influence on Joseph Campbell’s writing on the Hero
d Because Lucas based the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Jung
17
Jung’s legacy in religion and spirituality
Jung’s focus on the place of religion in the human condition, and the importance of meaning in life, has been highlighted more than once in this book. Here, we will consider his psychological exploration of the nature of religion as experiential phenomena. While noting his influential interest in Eastern spirituality, the focus is on his important arguments for a post-Christian approach to Western religion, particularly his ideas on the evolution of relations between the human and the numinous described in Answer to Job. The debate around Jung’s association with the ‘New Age’ movement is explored, and a brief case study illustrates how the numinous can have an impact on the therapeutic process.
Jung’s religious grand project
‘It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason”.’
Jung, 1964, para. 510
It will be clear from previous discussions how important the place of religion in the human psyche was for Jung. The imprint of his father’s influence in this area was described in Chapter 2. Also, we have noted the way in which the young Carl’s awareness of the depths within him – via vivid dreams, the encounters with spiritualism facilitated by his mother and cousin, and the split between his personalities number one and two – led him inexorably towards a fascination with the spiritual/religious dimension of the human condition. It was more than a fascination, though – for Jung there was something about the ‘religious problem’ that needed resolving.
The rigid dogmas and deadened spirituality (as he saw it) of the Christian Church spoke to how out of kilter this institution was with the spirit, the zeitgeist, of the times. Jung perceived a malaise at the heart of Western life – an absence of meaning, a lack of ‘spirit’ in the human ‘soul’. For Jung, the falling away of organized religion had left people without a compass with which to navigate the irrational, profound and traumatic domains of life. Hunger for meaning, he came to think, required engagement with the numinous, and he took the view that for many people a religious faith could act as a conduit and container for this need. So what did Jung mean when he used the term ‘religion’ in relation to the term ‘numinous’? He explains:
‘Religion… is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will… it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator.’
Jung, 1969a, para. 6
As with so many of Jung’s lines of thought, there were paradoxes at work in his perspective on religion. On the one hand, he might recommend to an analysand that they return to the faith they might have left behind in their youth; on the other, he was intensely critical of how versions of such faith were being promulgated by the religious establishment. In this respect, he would also follow the lead of the analysand where they were engaged in a search for meaning that arose from the numinous promptings of the unconscious. This could lead to a fresh engagement with a previously held belief, or a new spiritual or existential framework altogether.
Jolanta, spirituality and therapy
In her previous analysis sessions, Jolanta had been trying to get to grips with addictive tendencies which, with the help of her analyst, she had come to recognize as acting as a kind of substitute for an emptiness in her life around ‘meaning’. She had decided to take a trip back to her homeland in order to get back in touch with what really mattered to her.
When Jolanta took this trip, she had a mixed experience: some contacts with members of her family, and with friends, had been awkward or disappointing, while others had been touching and enjoyable. She had also revisited places of significance – standing outside a church and a school she had attended, and walking down a favourite lane in the town where she had been born. She also went to a secluded valley that she now realized had come to represent something important to her. As she reported the experience of walking down a footpath, she remembered believing (as a 12-year-old) that she had been the only person to walk along it ‘for hundreds of years ‘… maybe ever…’ Her analyst noticed Jolanta’s eyes widen and mist over, seemingly looking past, or through, her.
The analyst noticed how still Jolanta had become, in her chair, and a stillness in the room. After a lengthy silence, Jolanta’s gaze returned to focus on her, and she said: ‘I’ve just been down that path again, as we’ve been sitting here, and I’ve realized that, even if other people have walked down the path in that valley, the real path belongs to me.’ Her analyst noticed how deeply expressed this observation felt to her as she received it from Jolanta. Something had shifted – in Jolanta, and in the therapeutic relationship. Something of a new depth was present in the work, and Jolanta said: ‘I feel I am on the right track now… don’t know what happened there, but it was something which connected the past, present and future for me. It’s gone now, but somehow it feels it is still here too, and available to me…’
Jolanta had been touched by something at depth which had an unknowable but influential quality – a numinous movement of the self which speaks to what Young-Eisendrath (2004, pp. 184–5) terms ‘the unconscious striving for spiritual development’ which can generate such moments in therapy, and also in wider, lived experience.
In Aion (Jung, 1968) he described how limiting the medieval version of the Christian faith of his father had become, in the face of the overpowering presence of scientific empiricism. Jung also observed the ways in which the Church might overlook the darker side of the human condition (and of religion), and the place of the feminine, in favour of an emphasis on the ‘goodness of God.’ Jung regarded this as indicative of the impending end of an era: the Christian age (the age of the ‘fishes’ or Pisces) was coming to a close, and the age of Aquarius, where the feminine would emerge to take its proper place, was on the rise. More than this, the evolution of human spirituality was also intimately linked with the evolution of the archetypally spiritual. Jung argued that the numinous (or ‘God’) evolves, too. Jung explained this in Answer to Job.
Answer to Job and the evolution of the God Image
‘Jung’s understanding of the answer to Job implies that the universal truth of death and resurrection describes the process at work in the healing of the divine split which created human consciousness… As this process repeats in individual and societal life, a consciousness… for Jung, would be forced to evolve by the dynamic itself, in which ever more aspects of the divine antimony would be united in human historical consciousness.’
Dourley, 1992, p. 26
In Answer to Job, Jung utilized the Biblical figure of Job to illustrate what he saw as the evolution of humanity’s relationship with the archetypal divine, or the numinous. In the story, Job is tested in extremis by Yahweh, the father God of the Torah/Old Testament, losing everything he cherishes, with God waiting to see whether he will maintain his faith despite this. For Jung, this story represented how the God archetype is itself wounded and capable of destructiveness, and how God needs humanity to help heal ‘his’ woun
ds.
Jung’s proposal that, like human consciousness, Gods evolve over time reflects the carefully psychological way he went about trying to understand religious experience and imagery as archetypal. This approach has influenced key Jungian ideas such as Erich Neumann’s symbolic evolution of consciousness (1954). Here, Jung came to equate such movement of the numinous/God with a movement of the self. As human is to divine in conventional religious thinking across many faith traditions, so ego is to self. This is because the self holds a deeper wisdom about us and our path through life, which we are called to listen to (as described in Chapter 5) if we want our ego to stay more on less on track and our psyche in balance. In this respect, the implications for our relationship to the numinous are significant. Not only should we see established images of God as representations of the self, but, in the same way, the workings of ego can influence self, so humanity can influence the nature of God.
Spotlight: Can humanity influence the evolution of God?
This is not a wholly original idea of Jung’s. The Kabbalistic tradition (Dan, 2007) speaks of the need to heal the ‘broken vessels’ within which the divine should have been contained. It thus becomes our task to repair these.
Jung wrote Answer to Job in 1951, aged 75, while he was ill, with the narrative for it seeming to come to him from his unconscious, as he reported it. In essence, the central thesis is that God (or the ‘God archetype’), in the form of Yahweh, did not provide an answer to the question posed by the story in the book of Job – why could he be so cruel and destructive towards a character who is clearly a good person? In moral terms, the story places the creator in the position of ethical transgressor, while the person he has created occupies the moral high ground for putting up with this persecution stoically, and apparently without malice. So the question arises, why does God do this? Does this God have some kind of neurosis?
For Jung, the answer was ‘yes’, and the unfolding of the relationship between God and humanity required the latter to play its crucial part in offering the creator healing. Edward Edinger helpfully outlines Jung’s ‘answer’ to this problem by situating it under three headings:
1 The God Image as pictured in the Old Testament – Yahweh
2 The God Image as pictured in Christianity via Christ – the God of Love
3 The God Image as experienced psychologically by modern people (Edinger, 1992, p. 11)
Edinger (1986) also draws on the visionary paintings of William Blake to highlight how the story of Job can be seen as a portrayal of the dynamics of an encounter with the self.
Notice the term ‘God Image’ – Edinger is describing the evolving way God (or Gods) appears to us as humans in our thoughts, dreams and fantasies. We have already discussed the first version of these – Yahweh. Jung’s psychological postulation was that the God archetype’s response to Job’s questioning of the creator’s one-sided oppression of his faithful servant was to take the symbolic shape of Jesus.
Psychologically speaking, the God archetype, as a version of the self, realized that a move was needed towards ego by taking human form to help heal the split between divine and human. Hence the symbolism of the crucifixion and resurrection, where the barrier to conjunction with the divine death is ‘overcome’. It is important, in Jungian terms, to see these processes in a symbolic way. The implication of the presence of a destructive side to God, which needs a redemptive move by the divine, is that the God archetype is split and, like us, has a shadow.
As we move to the third of the headings above, it is the very capacity for self-reflection, and symbolic thinking, which characterizes the approach of contemporary women and men. As Robert Segal (1992) puts it, ‘contemporary’ refers to people whose consciousness has moved beyond an ‘ancient’ tendency to project the image of God outwards (often into the sky for Abrahamic religions), and also beyond a ‘modern’ tendency to be over-rational and discount the relevance or presence of the God Image in the lives we lead. Instead, a ‘contemporary’ is someone who accepts the factual evidence of science but also seeks and senses a deeper layer of meaning to life.
Jung is arguing that, as in all other areas, nothing in the religious/spiritual dimension of life is fixed. He encourages us to play our part in the divine drama – which in other terms can be seen as a process of trying to resolve an unresolved set of dynamics between the archetypal and personal within each of us, as well as across the collective development of human experience. Jung’s prompting for us each to be as awake as we can be to our individual place in this process is summed up well when he writes:
‘Whoever knows God has an effect on him.’
Jung, 1969b, para. 617
This statement and the whole thrust of his argument about ‘the evolution of the God archetype’ reflects Jung’s interest in Gnosticism (Segal, 1992), the movement that arose in the second century after the death of Jesus, and which believed the creator of the world was not God but a ‘demi-urge’ who is a mixture of good and evil, and therefore from a Jungian perspective could be said to have a shadow.
The position Jung took on this led him into controversial waters and some significant debates, especially with Father White (Conrad-Lammers and Cunningham, 2007) who appreciated Jung’s ideas but thought he went too far with Answer to Job. In turn, Jung disagreed with White’s defence of the Church’s doctrine of privatio bono, which does not subscribe to the notion of evil as an entity but rather as being ‘the absence of good’. Jung saw evil as something real (psychologically and spiritually), which led to human suffering. Jung therefore set himself apart from the Christian mainstream, but in doing so he stimulated debates on church doctrine.
Spotlight: UFOs as representations of the self
Edinger (1986, p. 9) has remarked: ‘There is in the unconscious a transpersonal centre of latent consciousness and obscure intentionality. The discovery of this centre, which Jung called the self, is like the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Man is no longer alone in the psyche and the cosmos.’
This links to the commentary Jung (1977) provided on a phenomenon that characterized the Westernized psyche after the Second World War. He argued that the regular sightings of unidentified flying objects were manifestations of the ‘otherness’ of the self that people were unconsciously seeking out (because of its unavailability to the modern mind). Thus, UFOs were projections of unconscious psychic contents and symbols of the psychic wholeness of the self.
East and West
Jung also laid the ground for a reconsideration of the value of Eastern spirituality, such as through his psychological commentary on seminal writings such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1969c). Jung saw Eastern thought as offering a compensatory holism to the patriarchal religion of the West. This is now seen as a precursor of the Western adoption of Eastern traditions such as mindfulness (Germer et al., 2005). The interest in links between psychotherapy and Eastern spiritual traditions, which he initiated, remains strong today (Mathers, Miller and Ando, 2009).
JUNG AND THE ‘NEW AGE’
David Tacey, in his book Jung and the New Age (2001), explores the phenomenon of ‘New Age’ spirituality, which has been particularly popular in the US but which has also influenced developments in Europe and elsewhere in Westernized societies. These have included:
• a flowering of an individualized approach to spirituality
• an appetite for exploring alternative ways of thinking about religion, spirituality and personal growth.
There is considerable evidence for this shift towards an individual emphasis in spiritual quest and practice, with all sorts of meditative, contemplative and more ritualistic frameworks and practices to pursue; sometimes these are characterized by the flavour of consumerism so prevalent in our societies (Heelas, 2008).
Tacey’s analysis of these developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries provides a critique for the way in which the ideas of Jung can be appropriated. His ideas are used to support the notion of there being a
significant underlying shift in Westernized consciousness which is somehow leading us towards a ‘new age’ in which a more holistic spirituality fills the ‘gap’ left by the supposedly ‘fading’ religions of the modern and pre-modern eras.
Tacey argues that, however well-intentioned the New Age movement may be, it can lapse at times into a self-delusion of holistic integration, whereas it really wants to discard the struggle for wholeness via the work which needs to be done to integrate archetypal opposites. In this respect, he sees some contemporary spiritual approaches as adopting a sort of ‘Jungian fundamentalism… (the adherents of which)… only approach Jung at second – or third – hand, that is, after he has been put through a New Age wash that makes him almost unrecognizable to serious readers of Jung’.
Tacey is directing his critique towards writers and those engaged in ‘New Age’ activity who he thinks are idealizing and even concretizing some of Jung’s most prominent concepts, such as the collective unconscious, active imagination and the archetypes. One example he gives in this area concerns the ‘men’s movement’ which has been prominent on both sides of the Atlantic as a manifestation of a perceived need for men to rediscover their authentic masculine identity in the wake of feminism. He quotes Moore and Gillete (1990, p. 7) who describe Jungian psychology as providing ‘good news for men’ in how this supports mythological insights into the presence of a ‘blueprint… for the calm and positive mature masculine’ in all men. For Tacey, this kind of approach oversimplifies the complexities of Jung’s ideas about gender and the archetypal masculine (and feminine), in a way that might encourage the enthusiast for New Age thinking to get a picture of Jung as a kind of ‘guru’ whose influence can lead society towards transformation.