THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION OF ANALYSIS
“The main interest of my work,” writes Jung, “is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences, you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”1 This citation says everything of essential importance about a Jungian analysis. If it is not possible to establish a relationship with the numinous, no cure is possible; the most one can hope for is an improvement in social adjustment. But then, what is left for the analyst to do? Jung expressed himself on this subject in a letter in the following terms:
Since neurosis is a problem of attitude, and the attitude is dependent on or grounded in certain “dominants,” that is, the ultimate and highest ideas and principles, the problem of attitude can be called a religious one.2 This is supported by the fact that in dreams and fantasies religious motifs appear with the clear purpose of regulating the attitude and restoring the disturbed equilibrium. . . . I have observed, for example, that as a rule when “archetypal” contents arise spontaneously in dreams, etc., numinous and healing effects emanate from them. These are primordial psychic experiences that very often reopen a patient’s access to religious truths that have been blocked. I have also had this experience myself. . . .
Just as through preconceived opinions I can hold back or actually stop the influxus divinus [divine influence], wherever it may come from, it is also possible for me through the suitable behavior to come nearer to it and, when it happens, to accept it. I cannot force anything; I can only make an effort to do everything that favors this and nothing that goes against it. . . . What can, but not necessarily will, then come about is the kind of spontaneous action arising form the unconscious that has been symbolized by the alchemists, Paracelsus, Böhme, and modern students of the unconscious as lightning.3
From this point of view, the work of the therapist can only consist in dismantling preconceptions and blockages to possible numinous experience. (This is connected with the old problem of theology—whether salvation comes from grace or human efforts; obviously both are necessary.)
Ways of avoiding the numinous are quite numerous. I would like here to present a few that I have encountered. One is a certain extraverted superficiality. An older woman, who had never had anything on her mind but love, clothes, travel, and the like, had the following dream: She was standing on a ladder and was about to dust a big crucifix. To her infinite horror, the Crucified One suddenly opened his eyes and said, “You could dust me a little more often!” The dreamer was Catholic and had been content up to this point with superficial fulfillment of the Church’s external precepts. This dream set her thinking for the first time.
For the most part one encounters in modern people a collection of philosophical and rational-pseudoscientific prejudices from the nineteenth century that in fact have already been discredited by the leading scientists of our time. They got these ideas from their school days and from cheap journalistic accounts: dreams are meaningless, or are expressions of sexual desires; there is no such thing as ghosts; the unconscious has been heard of but is not really regarded as real; there is no effect without a rationally graspable cause; a person only has to be reasonable and everything will be fine; if society were straightened out, everything would be straightened out, etc., etc. Next to this assortment of prejudices, the worst and most pervasive one is overt or implicit statistical thinking: “What I do makes no difference; I’m just one grain of sand among millions; my existence is a meaningless accident.” This mindset is direct and deadly poison for the soul.
The analyst has little hope of getting rid of such prejudices through argumentation. This job is taken care of far more effectively—sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually—by the patient’s dreams. But it is essential that the analyst himself have a connection with the numinous and have a belief in it that is based on his own experience; otherwise he overlooks the element in dreams that is directed toward numinous experience and instead projects into them his own ideas of what the patient “should” be or do. He tends automatically to develop convictions such as: this analysand should get away from his parents, that analysand should be less intellectual, another analysand should be more disciplined—and still other convictions based on whatever opinions and preconceptions he has about normalcy. For this reason, the analyst must say to himself again and again, “I do not know what God wants from this person!” All he can do is help the patient hear better what the patient’s own psyche is whispering to him.
When I had my first patient suffering from severe psychosis, she was drifting toward a schizophrenic episode as a result of an outward blow of fate, and I was struggling with her to prevent this. At this point, Jung, who was supervising the case, earnestly said to me, “How do you know so surely that this woman doesn’t have to go through such an episode? Many patients are better off after an episode. You should not be trying to learn the secret of her destiny; that’s just a power play. You don’t know what God wants from her!” Frightened, I just let go and restricted myself to quietly interpreting her dreams as straightforwardly as possible. The analysand unexpectedly improved. When I told Jung about it, he laughed and said, “That was what I was hoping for, but I couldn’t let you know that, otherwise you might have tried to force something again!” That cured me once and for all of excessive juvenile therapeutic enthusiasm.
In addition to intellectual preconceptions, in my experience another problem that can arise is for an analysand to have a highly numinous dream but somehow fail to be appropriately moved by it or even touched at all. Usually in such a case, it is a matter of a certain state of inferiority of the eros. It has often happened that I have been profoundly shaken by a patient’s dream that he himself is recounting in a very cool and matter-of-fact way. I have learned in such cases not to hide my own feelings, not to hide how deeply touched I am emotionally, but to express it. In my experience this has always had a positive effect.
Jung himself always had strong emotional reactions to dreams. He reacted to the dreams people brought to him with laughter, outcries of fear, ill humor, or excitement, and often his reaction would trigger in a patient a realization of what the dream was really about. Behind the absence of reaction in an analysand, besides weakness of emotion, there often lurks the secret prejudice that in fact dreams have nothing real about them.
One of the most difficult situations in my experience is when the unconscious seemingly produces only banal dreams, nothing that is remotely numinous. However, it is very often possible to see behind the personal aspect of a dream the basic archetypal structure. It was a particular gift of Jung’s to be able to recognize the deeper archetypal meaning of a dream that, from a superficial point of view, is banal. On the other hand, we must sometimes be more suspicious of mythical dreams, since they might be based merely on something the patient has read or have some other inauthentic basis.4 Particularly beautiful and mythically structured dreams do not always betoken something of special significance for the dreamer. Instead they may reflect an intention on the part of the unconscious to attract the dreamer; that is, they indicate that for the next period of time, inner development is to take place through an encounter with the unconscious and dreams.5
Banal dreams, by contrast, show that also latent behind one’s often disregarded personal everyday reality a deeper meaning is at work. Again and again people are taken in by the defensive reaction: “This is just an absurd, stupid little dream.” Jung always used to say that there are no stupid dreams, only stupid people who do not understand them! The fact is, the Self seems also to care about the details of our personal lives. God warned Emanuel Swedenborg in a vision not to eat too much. Swedenborg was an intuitive person and therefore in things based on the sensation function—sexuality, eating, and so on—was primitively immoderate. It is thus rather typical for the Self to manifest in just this area.
An analysand of mine dreamed that a voice from above told her she needed a “breakfast girdle.” Detailed questioning brought out that the whole morning she would lounge around sloppily in her bathrobe (she was an alcoholic before analysis) and only put on her girdle and began the day around noon.
We often laughed together about this dream, and I periodically used to ask her, “How is it going with the breakfast girdle?”
It is also especially difficult for the analyst to bring theologians and clergymen closer to the influxus divinus. Sometimes they are just not “called,” and then analysis leads them away into the world. However, far more often, though they did actually originally choose their profession through a kind of constellation of destiny, they have lost their genuine faith along the way and replaced it with rote phrases and formulas.
A monk during his analysis had a formidable experience of God. I asked him whether his colleagues would be more frightened if they were to experience, as he did, the reality of God or if they were to discover that God did not exist. He answered, “They would be more frightened by the reality of God, for that He does not exist is what they almost all secretly believe.” But even to this analysand I later sometimes had to say, “This damned God that you’re always talking about, does He really exist for you, and if so, does He have something to say about your present problem or not?” He kept slipping back into his old intellectual pseudoreligiosity, where “God” was stored away in a drawer for the next sermon and the questions of his life were decided on only by the ego.
To my amazement I met a Japanese Buddhist with the same problem. He had had significant experiences of light from the time of his youth and had become a teacher of Buddhism. He was suffering from a stomach ulcer that seemingly no diet that was prescribed could help. So I said to him, “Ask the dharmakaya [Buddha body] in yourself what you should eat and what else you should do to heal yourself.” He stared at me entirely stupefied; nothing like this had ever occurred to him. Later he wrote me that he had tried it and been healed. He added, “I see that Jungian psychology adds a foundation of reality to religion that we have lost.”
This loss of touch with the empirical basis in matters of religion is often the result of too much traditionalism. Therefore Jung points out that when we emphasize the historical development of Christianity too much, we overlook what is new in it.
What we need is a new point of departure, and this cannot be found without the assignment of new meaning. The message is alive only if it creates new meaning. . . . That Christ is the self of [human beings] is implicit in the gospel, but the conclusion Christ = self has never been explicitly drawn. This is an assignment of new meaning, a further stage in the incarnation or actualization of Christ.6
This is the same thing that happened to the Buddhist mentioned above in the form of a conferral of new meaning to the dharmakaya. The religious dimension in analysis is nothing other than finding new meaning in just this way that sometimes brings already existing religious ideas back to life, and sometimes transforms them.7
This brings me to a further problem that comes up again and again in analysis. The unconscious is “religious”—that is, it is the matrix of all primal religious experience—but it is often not “orthodox.” What many dreams and visions express sometimes contradicts this or that dogma or religious moral precept. For example, I have met a number of priests whose dreams seemed to go against maintaining celibacy. However, when later they left the priesthood, their dreams told them that they were still priests in some kind of invisible way. After all, celibacy is only a regula moralis, not a dogma, and therefore could sometime be changed. A balance should be maintained between innovation and maintenance of tradition. Jung wrote to the Dominican priest Victor White:
If you try to be literal about the doctrine [of the Catholic Church], you are putting yourself aside until there is nobody left that would represent it but corpses. If, on the other hand, you truly assimilate the doctrine, you will alter it creatively by your individual understanding and thus give life to it. The life of most ideas consists in their controversial nature, i.e., you can disagree with them even if you recognize their importance for a majority. If you fully agreed with them you could replace yourself just as well by a gramophone record.8
That means that if the unconscious causes a churchgoing person to favor something that conflicts with the doctrine of his denomination, he should make this into a personal conflict, into a form of cross-bearing. Ultimately then, it will not be he who decides the conflict but the vox dei within him—once his ego, with all its opinions, pro and con, has died upon the cross. And as Jung points out: extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation), but the grace of God reaches even further.9
More difficult still, it seems to me, is to help orient a person toward the religious dimension when he has been so tormented by religious indoctrination that he throws out the baby with the bathwater and wants to have nothing more to do with religion at all and looks at everything purely in secular terms. Without his being aware of it, the numinous catches him from behind and possesses him with sexual fantasies or greed for money, with craving for power or drugs, with political fanaticism—that is, he becomes possessed by substitute gods. Thus Jung writes in Psychology and Religion that ultimately anything dominant and inescapable can be called God,
unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a position that is equally strong and invincible. . . . Man is free to decide whether “God” shall be a “spirit” or a natural phenomenon like the craving of a morphine addict, and hence whether “God” shall act as a beneficent or a destructive force.10
The substitute gods bring an absence of freedom—possession. Thus we must ultimately decide which lord we want to serve, such substitute gods or God as He reveals himself within us if we make an honest effort toward self-knowledge. “God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche, and the psyche understands it and we experience it as something psychic. Anyone who calls that psychologism is denying the eye that beholds the sun.”11
Nowadays from time to time we also have people coming for analysis who have been raised in that other “church,” Marxism as it has been established east of the “Iron Curtain.” Their difficulties are very similar to those of any followers of a religion that claims to represent the only truth. What has struck me most in these cases is the complete suppression of the feminine principle and thus of personal feeling—a nasty intellectual sense of detachment. With this the ability to be moved, to experience meaning or value, falls away. Also for these people all religious words, such as God, soul, and conscience, have been so stigmatized that it is best not to use them with them at all, but rather to try to convey whatever “new meaning” their psyche is trying to reveal through, and in terms of, their dream images. In a certain regard, these people also have an advantage: they can experience the religious dimension of the psyche with spontaneous freshness, unburdened by the past, without having an overweening sense of tradition that immediately relates their discoveries to material from the past.
It is my hope that sometime, in these very countries, a particularly bountiful crop will grow, as happens after a flood.
Just as most curative substances are also poisons, the encounter with the numinous has an extremely dangerous side. Indeed religions are not only something constructive—we have only to think of the burnings of heretics and witches, of the devastating invasion of Europe by the Turks reaching to the very gates of Vienna, of dubious missionary activities that have wiped out the indigenous religious and cultural forms of many peoples, leaving them without roots. Jung writes:
Religions are not necessarily lovely or good. They are powerful manifestations of the spirit and we have no power to check the spirit. Surely great catastrophes such as earthquakes or fires are no longer convincing to the modem mind, but we don’t need them. There are things much more gruesome, namely man’s insanity, the great mental contagions from which we actually suffer most indubitably:12
In individual cases we can see the dangerous side of the numinosum at work in the phenomenon that, when an archetype comes to the threshold of consciousness, it develops a tendency to fascinate the conscious ego and push for its symbolic content to be concretely acted out. If the individual does not succeed in keeping his head and heart, then he becomes possessed and inflated. If a schizophrenic element is present, he might well act out the most dreadful things. Thus, for example, a schizophrenic who was working in the garden of a mental institution suddenly caught hold of the director’s little daughter and cut her head off. He explained that the voice of the Holy Ghost had ordered him to do this. If he had understood this voice symbolically, its meaning would have been to sacrifice his own excessive childishness. The concrete acting out of compelling archetypal contents is the greatest danger accompanying numinous experience. In cases like this one, the demonic aspect of the numinous has triumphed. The chance of finding new meaning and effecting a cure are lost. Possession always also means fanaticism. One has and represents the only truth and feels justified in beating down everything else. Only understanding the psychological meaning can protect us from this danger. Theologians representing a religiously “militant” position regard this as an inappropriate relativization of the truth of their faith. However, this is not the case. When a primal religious experience has taken place, for the one who has had it, it is absolute. However, if at the same time he understands this experience as a personal discovery of meaning, he will admit that God, or the numinosum, might also reveal itself in a thousand other forms, for ultimately it is something unfathomable that only reveals itself through the filter of the human psyche, where it speaks to us in terms of images and mythical forms. What it is “in itself,” however, we cannot know, at least not in this life. Therefore, such a person will never wish to preach his experience as the universally valid truth.
This is indeed the meaning of Jesus’ parable in which a man found a treasure hidden in a field, hid it there again, then sold everything he had to acquire the field (Matt. 13:44). A person who has had a real religious experience keeps it hidden in his heart and does not shout it from the pulpit. Perhaps he might talk about it with other people who have experienced something similar, knowing that what he experienced is something God revealed to him but might have expressed to others as well in a completely different form or with different content. Thus there arises quite naturally a profound awe toward the religio of the other (if it is genuine) and a need not to attack this. Only a person who doubts himself feels compelled to win over as many admirers as possible so as to drown out his own doubt. Therefore Jung points out that religious experience brings its own evidence with it, even if at the same time the ego, despite that experience, never gives up doubting that it understood it correctly. “I for my part,” said Jung, “prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken.”13 Such an attitude remains forever fresh and open to even more comprehensive inner experiences.
When a numinous, healing experience occurs during an analysis, it is the duty of the analyst to help avoid the possible negative consequences, possession and inflation. These usually take place when the ego or the moral capacity (feeling) of the analysand is weak. Dreams provide the needed basis for preventing these effects. Sometimes also the patient fails to understand the experience, but this is easier to remedy.
Because of the many possible concrete forms the deeply touching, numinous (i.e., religious) experience can take, it is difficult to generalize about it. For this reason Jung concentrated in his writings on delineating certain general tendencies that he had observed either in himself or in his many patients. It is mainly these “currents” in the collective unconscious that we are able to observe on the one hand, in the officially still Christian Western world and, on the other, in its areligious, rationalistic scientific theories. The compensatory “current” in the collective unconscious of our culture manifests especially often in mythical contents that resemble the symbolism of alchemy. Alchemical mythology seems to relate particularly to four problems: (1) elevating the status of the individual in relation to the uniformity of the mass; (2) heightening the valuation of the feminine principle or eros (in both women and men); (3) the problem of evil; (4) reconciling the opposites in the fundamental psychic structure of the human being.
The elevation of the status of the individual shows itself in experiences of being called upon directly by God; or in dreams, being in a position to determine the course of the world, or the like. An example is the following dream of a young American.
I am walking along what are called the Palisades, from which one can look out over New York City. I am walking with an anima figure who is unknown to me; we are both being led by a man who is our guide. New York has been reduced to rubble—the whole world as we know it has been destroyed. Fires are burning everywhere; thousands of fleeing people are running aimlessly in all directions. The Hudson River has flooded large parts of the city. It is twilight. Fireballs in the sky whistle earthward. It is the end of the world.
The cause of this was that a race of giants had come from outer space. I saw two of them sitting in the midst of the rubble, nonchalantly scooping up one handful of people after the other, eating them as one would eat grapes. It was a horrible sight. The giants were of different sizes and shapes. Our guide explained to us that these giants came from different planets where they lived in peace together. They had landed in flying saucers (those were the fireballs). The earth we knew had actually been devised by these giants. They had “cultivated” our civilization the way one raises vegetables in a greenhouse. Now they had come for the harvest. There was a special reason for this, which I only learned later.
I had been saved because I had slightly high blood pressure. If it had been normal or too high, I would have been eaten. Thus I was chosen to go through this ordeal by fire and, if I came through it successfully, to be permitted to save other souls as well. Then I saw before me a gigantic golden throne, radiant like the sun. On it sat the king and queen of the giants. They were the perpetrators of the destruction of our planet.
My ordeal, in addition to the torment of having to experience all this, consisted in having to climb the steps of the throne up to the point where I could look the king and queen in the face. This took place in stages. I began the ascent. It was long, but I knew that I had to do it, that the fate of the world and humanity depended on it. Then I woke up soaked in sweat. I realized afterward as I awoke that the destruction of the earth was a wedding feast for the king and queen.
The motif of an invasion of giants that destroy everything reminds us of the biblical Book of Enoch (c. 100 B.C.), where it is told that the angels fell in love with human women and begat on them a race of giants who threatened to destroy everything. At the same time, the angels taught humanity many new arts. As Jung has interpreted this, what we have here is a chaotic invasion of human consciousness by the contents of the collective unconscious.14 The giants are embodiments of the resulting inflation, who raise the import of humanity to the level of the “gigantic” through an overspeedy development of technological knowledge. But this negative development has a secret positive background: it challenges the individual to make the difficult ascent to higher awareness, to individuation.
Such a dream could easily be misunderstood as an expression of delusions of grandeur, but this was not in fact the case with the dreamer. On the contrary, the ultimate function of the dream lies in helping the dreamer to realize that everything depends on him alone, that all outer efforts—for example, political or any other collective efforts—cannot rescue the world from the situation from which he, like all of us, is suffering. Also, the placement of higher value on the feminine principle and the union of opposites is clearly represented.
The union of the opposites of nature and mind, light and dark, is often represented in modern times by a strange alteration of the image of Christ in inner visions and dreams. For example, Christ appears with horns like ancient Pan or made of metal like Mercury, the savior figure of alchemy. Only by adding features like these can Christ function as a complete symbol of the Self for modern people. Such dream motifs also indicate that the unconscious seems to be interested not in destroying our Christian cultural tradition, but rather in creatively developing it further.
Alchemical literature is a chaos in which we find a great deal of nonsense and at the same time the most essential, infinitely individually varied religious symbols. Jung made it his life’s task to pick out from this chaos, through painstaking detail work, the most essential and significant basic motifs and put them together like pieces of a puzzle. The best summary of what this was all about we find in his introduction to Psychology and Alchemy.15 Here it is shown that the production of symbols in alchemy is related compensatorily to the teaching of Christianity with its one-sided patriarchal orientation.
The historical shift in the world’s consciousness towards the masculine is compensated by the chthonic femininity of the unconscious. In certain pre-Christian religions the male principle had already been differentiated in the father-son specification, a change which was to be of the utmost importance for Christianity. Were the unconscious merely complementary, this change of consciousness would have been accompanied by the production of a mother and daughter. . . . But as alchemy shows, the unconscious chose rather the Cybele-Attis type in the form of the prima materia and the filius macrocosmi . . .. This goes to show that the unconscious does not simply act contrary to the conscious mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner. . . . Thus the higher, the spiritual, the masculine inclines to the lower, the earthly, the feminine; and accordingly, the mother, who was anterior to the world of the father, accom-modates herself to the male principle and . . . produces a son—not the antithesis of Christ but rather his chthonic counterpart, not a divine man but a fabulous being conforming to the nature of the primordial mother. . . .
This answer of the mother-world shows that the gulf between it and the father-world is not unbridgeable, seeing that the unconscious holds the seed of the unity of both.16 The essence of the conscious mind is discrimination; it must, if it is to be aware of things, separate the opposites, and it does this contra naturam. In nature the opposites seek one another . . . and so it is in the unconscious, and particularly in the archetype of unity, the self. Here, as in deity, the opposites cancel out.
Alchemy ever and again provided the basis for the projection of archetypes that could not smoothly be made a part of the Christian process.17
Something that emerges as a fundamental trait of alchemical symbolism is a heightened valuation of the feminine principle, and this trait is found also in very many of the numinous experiences of individuals in our modern Western culture. Jung, as we know, was enthusiastic about Pope Pius XII’s “Declaratio Assumptionis Mariae,” which he called the most important event in the spiritual history of our times. Most people cannot see this, despite the fact that the conflict over the celibacy of priests, the feminist movement, and the nature of woman and the feminine have since become themes of the day. They fail to see that the archetype of the goddess has been activated. They shift the discussion to juristic, sociological, and political questions and the like without perceiving the numinosum that is at work. In dreams, by contrast, the numinosum often becomes quite clearly visible as a groundswell beneath the ripples on the surface.
A Protestant woman who had read the newspaper article about the Pope’s Declaratio solemnis but had paid it no heed, had the following dream: She is walking across a bridge in Zurich toward a public square where she sees a huge crowd of people. Someone explains to her that Mary’s Ascension is about to take place here. She sees a wooden platform with a wonderfully beautiful naked black woman standing on it. The black woman raises her hand and floats slowly toward the heavens.
What seems to be unorthodox in this dream is the nakedness. Through this, the unconscious stresses what the Declaratio only hinted at, the importance of the body. The image does not contradict the new dogma but develops its consequences further.
A Catholic woman, who also did not place a great deal of importance on the Declaratio, dreamed that female priests were now allowed in the Church. In this case also, the unconscious “thought out” the further consequences of the Declaratio. According to the Declaratio, Mary enters a heavenly bridal chamber. This points to a further development, a holy wedding in the beyond.
Today we are confronted with a nearly, or perhaps completely, unsolvable problem regarding the question of how to relate with evil. In most non-Christian religions (with the exception of Buddhism), the gods (or the supreme deity) are destructive as well as good. The Greco-Roman world and late Judaism (in the wisdom books of the Old Testament) one-sidedly reinforced the tendency to see God as a summum bonum and to exclude evil from his realm. This culminated in the scholastic teaching that evil has no being of its own, but represents only a privati boni, an attenuation or absence of good. This kind of psychological one-sidedness cries out for a compensatory counterthrust. Christ himself foresaw this when he pointed to the coming of the Antichrist. As Jung describes, mainly in his works Aion and Answer to Job, from about the year 1000, in the period corresponding to the second fish of the Piscean age,18 this countermovement has been in gradual progress, undermining the Christian teaching step by step. Nowadays, he says in his last writing on this subject in the “Late Thoughts” chapter of his memoirs:
The old question posed by the Gnostics, “Whence comes evil?” has been given no answer by the Christian world, and Origen’s cautious suggestion of a possible redemption of the devil was termed a heresy. Today we are compelled to meet that question; but we stand empty-handed, bewildered, and perplexed, and cannot even get it into our heads that no myth will come to our aid although we have such urgent need of one. As the result of the political situation and the frightful, not to say, diabolic, triumphs of science, we are shaken by secret shudders and dark forebodings; but we know no way out, and very few persons indeed draw the conclusion that this time the issue is the long-since-forgotten soul of man.”19
Jung saw this present-day culmination of evil as typical of the historical catastrophes that tend to accompany the great transitions from one age to another, in our case the end of the Piscean age and the beginning of the Aquarian. In fact we are even menaced with a total eradication of life on our earth, either gradually, through the destruction of the environment, or through a global war. The increase in criminality, the occurrence of holocausts, and so on, are a first warning. Everyone is talking about these problems these days, and nobody knows what ought to be done. Appeals to reason seem to echo away unheard. As the above quotation shows, Jung also did not have a simple answer, but he was convinced that every individual who undertook to come to terms with the evil in himself would make a more effective contribution toward the salvation of the world than idealistic external machinations would. Here we are talking about more than just insight into one’s personal shadow; we are speaking also of a struggle with the dark side of God (or the Self), which the human being cannot face but must, as Job did.
The myth must ultimately take monotheism seriously and put aside its dualism, which, however much repudiated officially, has persisted until now and enthroned an eternal dark antagonist alongside the omnipotent Good. . . . Only thus can the One God be granted the wholeness and the synthesis of opposites which should be His. It is a fact that symbols, by their very nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or clash, but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful shape to life. Once that has been experienced, the ambivalence in the image of a nature and creator God ceases to present difficulties. On the contrary, the myth of the necessary incarnation of God can then be understood as man’s creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of the divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself.20
Absolute evil is thus also a divine mystery, also a form of the experience of the numinosum, a mere glimpse of which leaves us speechless. When Jung’s students once asked him if the third (and probably most horrendous) world war could be avoided, he answered that it depended on how many individuals could reconcile the opposites within themselves.
In analysis we frequently encounter dreams of global catastrophe ; thus we should not reject out of hand the possibility that the unconscious, i.e., nature itself, is striving toward the destruction of humanity. Jung took this possibility into account, but his optimism made him hope that we might be able to just scrape by at the critical moment and avoid the total destruction of the earth.
In a letter he went so far as to say, “Deviation from the numen seems to be universally understood as being the worst and the most original sin.”21 However, he points out elsewhere in the same letter that there is nothing that at one time or another could not be called evil, that thus good and evil are only relative human value judgments. The decisive point is always whether or not one is conscious of one’s conflict and endures it consciously; but one should not indulge in the illusion that even in this way the evil is eliminated. Jung points out that
we do not know whether there is more good than evil or whether the good is stronger. We can only hope that the good will predominate. If good is identified with constructiveness, there is some probability that life will go on in a more or less endurable form; but if the destructive were to prevail, the world would surely have done itself to death long ago. . . . Hence the optimistic assumption of psychotherapy that conscious realization accentuates the good more than overshadowing evil. Becoming conscious reconciles the opposites and thus creates a higher third.22
Since evil is for the most part a deviation from the numen, that also means that repeated deviations of this sort are unavoidable, and the conflict between turning away from the numen and turning toward it is a long one, if not a life-long one. The image of the crucifixion is therefore an eternal truth, and therefore also analysis does not promise the patient happiness, but can only liberate him from the neurotic stagnation of his life, not from its authentic suffering.
I myself can say no more about this problem than Jung could, other than that in my work I have seen that at least in individual cases the problem of evil can sometimes (not always!), with God’s help (that is, with God standing against God!), be resolved. When such a success occurs, it is a miracle and one of the most deeply moving experiences of the numinosum. In the religious image of the deity, that is, the Self, the opposites coexist; however, they are not consciously unified. That can only occur in conscious people in whom both sides of the Self, the good and the evil, are working toward incarnation. In the incarnated form both sides are diminished and humanized and thus, through the agency of human consciousness, are able to enter into connection. Self-knowledge, or the development of consciousness, is thus the key factor.
The fourth theme that comes up repeatedly in the dreams of modern people is the coniunctio. As is clear from our discussion up to this point, this is inextricably bound up with the three motifs already mentioned. It appears in the American’s dream of having to bring forth the royal coniunctio, in the Pope’s Declaratio (Mary enters the bridal chamber for the wedding with the Lamb), and as the answer to the problem of evil. The surface ripples over this ground swell in the depths of the unconscious take the form of the omnipresent discussion of sexuality and the relationship between man and woman. However, the productions of the unconscious are related to something that lies much deeper, a unio mystica with the Self, which is experienced as a unification of the cosmic opposites. This is connected with the relationship between man and woman insofar as all serious love relationships of the more profound sort ultimately serve mutual individuation, the process by which each partner becomes whole. That is also clearly the meaning of marriage taken as a sacrament. But this is something that is constellated not only in marriage but in any love relationship that is accepted as a commitment. The experience itself cannot be conveyed in dry words. Jung described the vision of this that he had as he was approaching death in his memoirs.23 But one also finds it hinted at in Meister Eckhart and in the works of many mystics, often in the language of the Song of Solomon. This is an experience that liberates the human being into a cosmic expanse. In the symbolism of alchemy, it is the central motif of the coniunctio soils et lunae and of all other opposites.24 Jung devoted the magnum opus of his old age to this symbo1,25 indicating orally that it had still far greater meaning that he was unable to articulate. Only a few people these days experience this level of individuation, but it is also the driving motive even behind all more short-termed superficial development of consciousness26 and behind all analyses of the profounder sort, in which it first manifests as the problem of transference and countertransference.
Because many contemporary people as yet have no understanding of this experience, Jung has been disparagingly described as a mystic, a prophet, as the founder of a religion, all with the connotation of “unscientific” confusion. If this connotation were not there, I would even partially agree with the first two descriptions, because the great mystics of the Christian tradition (but also many Taoist and Zen masters in the East and saints in Islam) speak as he does of primordial personal experience of the numinous. And the prophets (without the negative connotation) were people who received insight into the archetypal background situation of their time in a primordial experience, which caused them to be able to fore-see future spiritual developments and to warn against the misunderstandings of their time. The third, the founder of a religion, Jung never was and never wanted to be. When his students, under pressure from the outside world (mainly from the laws regulating professions), organized a professional association, Jung consented to it only reluctantly. For him it was an absolute that the mind must be free to follow its inspirations, which cannot be bottled or canned. If we are looking for historical parallels, Jungian psychology could most readily be compared to the original Taoism of China, a wisdom that embraced the whole of human life. The Taoists, too, later came together in organized communities, but in so doing lost to a great extent the meaning of the Way (the Tao) as indicated by Lao-tzu or Chuang-tzu. In the affinity of the Taoists with alchemy, we find another similarity between the two worlds.
Because of their interest in natural science, the Taoists were not rejected by Maoism, and there, too, is a parallel of a sort. The point here is that it is not at all true that Jungian psychology is “not scientific,” as one so often hears said. Many aspects of it, such as the archetypes and their influence, the dream theory, and the understanding of complexes, definitely stand up to an examination by the “hard” methods of natural science. It is only the healing experience of meaning, the encounter with the numinous, that because of its evolving and creative uniqueness cannot be grasped through statistical methods. It can only be proven by exposing oneself directly to it. And, moreover, as Jung points out, even then, although something might happen, it will not happen necessarily. Otherwise the action of the divine principle would not be free; it would be bound by the laws of nature. But, in view of its essentially creative nature, this seems not to be the case. Jung goes so far as to say that the creative imagination is “the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality.”27 It is the divine principle itself. And this symbol of the creative spontaneity of the unconscious ultimately stands behind the creation of any religion.
In the formation of the great religions, first there is a collective disorientation that constellates everywhere an overwhelming ordering principle in the unconscious (a collective longing for salvation). The prophet, out of the critical need of the time, recognizes through inner vision the helpful pattern in the collective unconscious and expresses it in the symbol. . . . When the situation changes, a new “truth” is needed; therefore truth is always relative to a particular situation. . . . As long as a symbol is the true and thus liberating answer to a situation that corresponds to it, it is true and valid, indeed, “absolute.” If the situation changes and the symbol is simply perpetuated, it becomes no more than an idol with an impoverishing and stultifying effect, since it simply makes us unconscious without providing any clarification or enlightenment. . . . Symbol is teaching, idol is delusion. . . .
The symbol needs man for its evolution, but it grows beyond him, therefore it is called “God,” because it expresses a psychic state of affairs or factor that is stronger than the ego.
The Self then takes over the lead and this provides the ego with release from its feeling of impotence. k becomes clear from these factors, only roughly sketched here, that for Jung the numinosum, the symbolic experience, is everything, the only significant dimension of the analytical process.
NOTES
1. C. G. Jung, letter to P. W. Martin, 20 August 1945, Letters, vol. 1, p. 377; cf. also vol. 1, p. 118.
2. See Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, para. 523, p. 341: “Healing may be called a religious problem.”
3. Jung, letter to Vera von Lier-Schmidt Ernsthausen, 25 April 1952, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 56–57.
4. Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 225.
5. Jung, letter to Hermann Keyserling, 21 May 1927, Letters, vol. 1, p. 46.
6. Jung, letter to Dorothee Hoch, 23 September 1952, Letters, vol. 2, p. 84.
7. Cf. Jung, CW 11, para. 148: “To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.”
8. Jung, letter to Father Victor White, 10 April 1954, Letters, vol. 2, p. 169.
9. See also Jung, CW 12, para. 96.
10. Jung, CW 11, paras. 142ff.
11. Cited in Jung, letter to Pastor Damour, 15 August 1932, Letters, vol. 1, p. 98.
12. Jung, letter to Leslie Hollingsworth, 21 April 1934, Letters, vol. 1, p. 159.
13. Jung, CW 12, para. 8.
14. Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 669f.
15. Jung, CW 12, paras. 26–30.
16. Emphasis mine.
17. Jung, CW 12, paras. 26–30.
18. A notion from the astrological tradition to which Jung occasionally alluded is that of a Piscean age comprised of two periods of a thousand years each. The astrological symbol for Pisces is composed of two fish, each of which is said to stand for one of the two millennia.—Translator
19. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 333–34.
20. Ibid., p. 338.
21. Jung, letter to Rev. H. L. Philp, 11 June 1957, Letters, vol. 2, p. 370.
22. Jung, letter to Hélène Kiener, 14 May 1955, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 253–54.
23. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 294f.
24. An excellent example is in the Aurora Consurgens, III, in Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14.
25. Jung, CW 14.
26. Cf. Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” in CW 16.
27. Jung, letter to Kurt Plachte, 10 January 1929, Letters, vol. 1, p. 60.