Jungian Interpretation of Religion - Extensions and Criticisms

Extensions and Criticisms

Edward F. Edinger systematized and extended Jung's interpretation of the Hebrew - Christian god image, particularly in his book Ego and Archetype. Noteworthy are sections on "Christ as Paradigm of the Individuating Ego" and "The Trinity Archetype and the Dialectic of Development".

Marie-Louise von Franz' book analyzing the dreams of the dying concludes that "the unconscious ... prepares not for a definite end but for a profound transformation and for a kind of continuation of the life process". She joins with Edinger in suggesting that some dreams cannot be adequately interpreted as symbolic representations of subjective inner processes, but are "metaphysical", hinting at a reality that is deeply mysterious to everyday consciousness.

Fr. John A. Sanford, Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst, interprets Jesus' teachings from a Jungian perspective in his 1970 book The Kingdom Within. In it he associates being a Pharisee with identifying with our mask or persona. He interprets the Devil or temptation to sin as "the inner adversary", the saying "love your enemies" as the dictate to discover and remove our projections from others, and advocates Jesus as the exemplar of human wholeness, uniting body, soul, spirit, sexuality, eros, and meaning through love.

Professor Wallace Clift, also an Episcopal priest, explored similarities between Jung's vision of humanity as "a story of developing consciousness" with Christianity's doctrine of "the Holy Spirit understood as present in each person. ... It is not a matter of making out each person a 'God,' but on the contrary, realizing that within each person lies the potentiality of responding to God by bringing that encounter into consciousness." He further proposed the existence of a new archetype in the Jungian sense, an archetype of pilgrimage.

Robert L. Moore, Jungian analyst and professor of psychology and religion, cites Jesus Christ as expressing four archetypal patterns found in the male psyche: the Warrior (in wrestling with his inner demons in the desert and at Gethsemane); the Lover (in radicalizing the commandment to love our neighbors); the Magician (in changing water to wine, feeding the thousands, and healing the sick); and the King (in generating the Kingdom of God, and in identifying himself with the way to the Father).

James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology, has done much to expose the unacknowledged or shadow "Christianisms" within Jungian depth psychology itself. For example, one barrier to grasping the underworld or domain of Hades as the psychic realm is Christ's victory over death. Similarly, the model for viewing the shadow as a moral problem is the Christian doctrine of sin. Hillman believes that soul or interiority refers not only to humans but to inanimate objects and to the world. Hillman is critical of Jung's convention of equating symbols of roundness (e.g. the rose window of a cathedral) with the Self, and discourages the attempt to achieve undivided wholeness by integrating parts. Jung's Self (representing the inner God) derives from monotheism, and by contrast Hillman encourages a polytheistic perspective.

Fr. Victor White, an English Dominican theologian and priest, and Jung carried on a 15-year correspondence. Through their dialog, White attempted to integrate analytical psychology into Catholic theology while Jung attempted to re-interpret Christian symbols. It was clear to White that "Jung was a psychiatrist and not a professional philosopher and/or theologian -- and that there were important theological issues which Jung seemed, for whatever reason, not to understand or to value". One unresolved point was White's perspective that evil is the absence of good, whereas Jung believed that an adequate god image must include evil to balance the good. In addition, White floundered on Jung's assumption that the Hebrew-Christian god image changes over time, and that it would be replaced by something different in the distant future.

The eminent Jewish theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber, had a lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, and may have attended the same Eranos conference with Jung in 1934. In 1952 Buber and Jung exchanged letters regarding a paper Buber had published entitled "Religion and Modern Thinking". In his rejoinder, Buber claimed that Jung had strayed outside his realm of expertise into theology by asserting that God does not exist independent of the psyches of human beings. He concluded that Jung was "mystically deifying the instincts instead of hallowing them in faith", which he called a "modern manifestation of Gnosis".

Naomi R. Goldenberg, after reviewing Jung's idea of archetypes as disembodied Platonic forms and on the damage done to women by the mind-body dichotomy, suggests that "feminist theory radically depart from the Jungian archetype from all systems of thought that posit transcendent, superhuman deities." While rejecting this part of Jungian theory, she does recommend that women can use Jung's practice of active imagination, or "dreaming the dream onward", to form a satisfying psychospiritual community.

In his 1994 book, Richard Noll makes the case that Jung promoted his psychological theories as a pagan religion, and asserts that one cannot be both a Catholic and a Jungian.

While succeeding in parsing out three different ways in which Jung spoke of theology and psychology, Stein admits that "the critical literature is ... rather unsophisticated and off the mark because the major tenets have not been adequately grasped" While this may be true, as may well be true the apologist's notion that Jung often understood his critics better than the critics understood him, significant knowledgeable disagreement exists over Jung's interpretation of religion.