The Deification of the Psyche: Carl Jung and the Spiritual Crisis of the Modern World

Carl Jung (1875–1961), a pivotal figure in modern Western psychology. He regarded the loss of religion to be a major factor in mental illness and a significant cause of the malaise of modernity. He pursued more holistic treatments, unfashionable in an age more attuned to scientific reductionism. He treated patients as real people rather than as objects of diagnostic interest, and promoted a more expansive understanding of mental illness. However, Jung's efforts to introduce a spiritual dimension into modern psychology have arguably been harmful because he attempted to construct a psychological system without adequately relating the psyche to its metaphysical foundations. Controversially, Jung replaced sacred tradition with a secular psychology that offered a new—yet fundamentally misguided—path of salvation for seekers in a post-Christian world.

Keywords: Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology, Depth Psychology, Psychologism, Metaphysics

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a highly influential 20th–century thinker, and a key figure in the history of modern Western psychology. Jung became known through his association with his one-time mentor Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) through the latter’s seminal contributions to the development of the psychoanalytic movement.Freud considered Jung “a bridge to the Gentile world”[[1]] and identified his protégé as the successor of the psychoanalytic movement, referring to him as the “crown prince.”[[2]] Jung ultimately developed his own school: analytical psychology. His ideas have been widely disseminated down to the present day, and his theories have taken root in the modern understanding of psychology to the same degree as those of Freud.

Although Jung is often viewed more favorably than Freud, he too remains a controversial figure, as he himself acknowledged: “I am certainly a heretic.”[[3]] It is often assumed that Jung was more balanced in his theories than his former master (which is why he parted ways with him) and, although in some ways that was true, this did not completely reflect reality. By tracing the relationship between him and Freud—and the development of his own psychological system—we can better understand, not only how they differ, but how they were both fundamentally aiming to fill the vacuum left by the absence of the sacred in the modern world, with their own ‘counter-religion’ of psychology.

As did his predecessor, Jung also affirmed the Weltanschauung or totalizing worldview with far-ranging cultural implications, beyond what would ordinarily be revealed on a therapist’s couch:

The funneling of the individual conflict into the general moral problem puts psychoanalysis far outside the confines of a merely medical therapy. It gives the patient a working philosophy of life based on empirical insights, which, besides affording him a knowledge of his own nature, also make it possible for him to fit himself into this scheme of things.[[4]]

Through statements like these, we can see how modern psychology—not only for Jung and Freud but as a whole—has inserted itself into every domain of life, thereby giving rise to the ubiquitous culture of therapy that we find today.

To his credit, Jung attributed the malaise of the modern world to its loss of religion, and the mental health crisis to which it gave rise. He also challenged the dominant scientific reductionism pervasive in his time and pursued more holistic forms of treatment when they were not popular. Jung viewed the individuals he treated as real people rather than merely as objects of diagnostic interest,[[5]] and held to a more expansive understanding of mental illness. Recognizing the reality of the human soul and consciousness, he questioned the overriding narratives that regarded them as merely epiphenomena or solely as products of neurochemistry. Though he never developed his ideas about the sacred, at his most lucid, Jung did acknowledge that the sacred is not only transcendent, but also a reality that dwells within all human beings. He traveled widely in order to learn from traditional people and their spiritual cultures, fostering an interest in how their perspectives could be applied to the discipline of psychology.

Yet, in spite of his evident respect for the importance of religion in human life, the shadow of Jung’s influence actually led to the undermining of bona fide religion and to the entrenchment of a rampant psychologism (the reduction of all reality to psychological factors). This brought about a serious confusion between the psychic and spiritual orders of reality, both within the discipline of psychology and beyond. There is a tendency to minimize the importance of Divine transcendence and to focus solely on Divine immanence. This view fails to recognize the traditional understanding that there cannot in fact be any immanence without transcendence as these are complementary notions in the strictest possible sense­—a foundational metaphysical principle that Jung overlooked or did not deem important. For example, Jung remarked that “The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me;”[[6]] and pointed to his “demonstration of the psychic origin of religious phenomena”[[7]] to assert that “‘Spirit’ is a psychic fact.”[[8]] Rather than grounding reality in the Spirit, consistent with the insights of the world’s spiritual traditions, Jung presented “the essence of all things” as being “grounded in the psyche.”[[9]]

The world’s spiritual and wisdom traditions, by contrast, teach a complete “science of the soul,” which is more than just a ‘psychology,’ but a fully integrated worldview able to impart saving truths. The phenomenon of psychologism stems back to the emergence of modern Western psychology and is central to its foundations. Jung summarized Freud’s contribution to the discipline in a revealing way: “[T]he lost god had now to be sought below, not above.”[[10]] However, following in Freud’s footsteps, Jung took psychologism to a new level of confusion. The conflation of the psychic and spiritual realms is reflected in the New Age movement that Jung was instrumental in pioneering.[[11]] He was aware of the ever-growing interest in psychic phenomena and alternative forms of spirituality that were gradually making themselves known in the modern world. Of analytical psychology, it has been said that it “loses itself in a perfect maze of mysticism, occultism, and theosophy ... [and] abandon[s] the methods and canons of science.”[[12]] Jung had a deep interest in the occult, as is reflected in the title of his doctoral dissertation for his medical degree: “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena” (1902).[[13]]

Jung is often perceived as a bridge-maker between modern psychology and the spiritual traditions. He informs us that his aim was “to build a bridge of psychological understanding between East and West”[[14]] and he claimed to have discovered an “agreement between the psychic states and symbolisms of East and West.”[[15]] Furthermore, he states that “through my analytic work ... I arrived at an understanding ... of all religions.”[[16]] However, when we examine this claim more closely, we find that Jung did not understand religion in its proper etymological sense, from the Latin religare, meaning to “re-link” or “bind back” (to the Divine). Jung’s error was missed by many who assessed his legacy, and touted him as a seminal religious thinker. An example of this can be seen in the remark from the British historian of religions R.C. Zaehner (1913–1974), who noted that Jung “has ... done more to interpret Eastern religion to the West than any other man.”[[17]] This is a grandiose assessment, yet Zaehner goes further when he remarks approvingly that “Jung has in fact ... reduced [religion] to purely subjective and psychological terms”[[18]] which the Oxford professor regarded as something to be altogether commended.

If we do not properly distinguish between the psychic and spiritual orders, we will not be able to make sense of Jungian psychology. As Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) noted: “[W]hereas empirical science is only concerned with man himself ‘in search of a soul,’ metaphysical science is concerned with this self’s immortal Self, the Soul of the soul.”[[19]]

Some closest to Jung, even within his inner circle, did not fully understand him.[[20]] This, in large part, stemmed from a certain ambiguity, if not contradiction, in Jung’s theories. There is evidence that he intended to be opaque: “The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings.”[[21]] Nonetheless, it is incumbent on us to evaluate his theories so as to clarify the difficulties in his ideas, with a view to determining how they converge with, or diverge from, a true “science of the soul” as found in humanity’s spiritual traditions.

The Ambiguity of Jungian Psychology

Someone rooted in a sacred tradition, wanting to understand how religions are understood in light of Jung’s psychology, will necessarily encounter a myriad of obstacles. This is because Jung, in a way similar to Freud, defined terms in his own particular way, sometimes ignoring traditional precisions. While these imprecisions may also be found within religions themselves, Jung’s peculiar aberrations include using the same terms differently depending on the context, and often contradicting himself, without providing the reader with any adequate explanation of why he does so.

Terms such as “archetype” or “transcendent,” as used by Jung, do not refer to anything in the spiritual realm; neither does his understanding of “wholeness” relate to a way of being that is rooted in the sacred. His anomalous adoption of traditional terms serves to confound the reader who attempts to render their meaning intelligible.

Jungian psychology claims to offer those in the modern world a new post-Christian path of salvation, but this is a promise on which Jung fails to deliver. To regard Jungian psychology as a substitute for sacred tradition is not only ill-advised but decidedly dangerous. Authentic spiritual traditions invariably teach us how to integrate the human psyche into the Spirit, thereby requiring a clear understanding of both dimensions and of the sacred aspect of integration. Terms such as “archetype” or “transcendent,” as used by Jung, do not refer to anything in the spiritual realm; neither does his understanding of “wholeness” relate to a way of being that is rooted in the sacred. His anomalous adoption of traditional terms serves to confound the reader who attempts to render their meaning intelligible. The traditional use of these terms relies not only on doctrines to support those on a spiritual path, but also on a method for aiding realization. Jung often emphasizes the psychic cul-de-sac found in his work. At one point he asserts: “I am and remain a psychologist. I am not interested in anything that transcends the psychological content of human experience. I do not even ask myself whether such transcendence is possible.”[[22]] Whitall N. Perry (1920–2005) offers the following reflection on the implications of this admission:

[H]is work has opened irreversible access to the subliminal world of influences from the lower and eminently subjective and relativistic prolongations of the psychic domain or inferior reaches of the subtle order, which border on what is truly infernal. The pattern is really an inversion of the way in which primordial man saw the Archetypes through the transparency of things. With Jung in particular we are back to ‘archetypes’ again, but from below rather than from above, from the nether realms rather than the celestial.[[23]]

Jung’s idiosyncratic use of religious concepts is ultimately hostile to the traditional understanding of what a person is. If he ultimately rejects anything outside the human psyche, why does he appropriate the language of religion? It would appear that Jung rejects any conventional understanding of religion so as to be free of its constraints. Yet he also wants to construct his system of psychology on the basis of religion’s inner or mystical dimension, without adopting the traditional structures that are necessary to its integrity.

This is a psychological adaptation of “the religion of no religion”[[24]] popularized by Frederic Spiegelberg (1897–1994). He attended the well-known Eranos conferences led by Jung and was a colleague of his. Spiegelberg was very much a bridge between Eranos of Ascona in Switzerland, and the Esalen Institute of Big Sur in California—two countercultural foundations that have profoundly shaped how comparative spirituality and psychology are understood today.[[25]] What that understanding fails to recognize is that it is not enough to simply acknowledge the esoteric dimension underlying all the world’s religions—what is required is to live their saving truths according to an authentic revealed tradition.

Jung’s attitude to the human psyche is essentially anti-metaphysical and antagonistic to spiritual traditions. This is because it embraces empirical approaches to perceived phenomena as they pertain to our individual and collective experiences, without discerning what transcends the psycho-physical order. The relativism of Jungian epistemology is falsely absolutized by what he calls “psychic facts,”[[26]] which he presents as devoid of any transcendent criteria (which he informs us cannot be empirically verified within the limitations of modern scientific methodologies, as if this were a valid objection to the existence of intuited sacred realities of an ontological order). He says, “I am content with what can be experienced psychically, and reject the metaphysical.”[[27]] Jung declared that “Gnosis is undoubtedly a psychological knowledge whose contents derive from the unconscious.”[[28]] Although true gnosis, like any form of transcendent knowledge, has access to the psychic realm, it is not limited to this lower order of reality, given its transpersonal nature. We must therefore remain vigilant in the face of counterfeit gnosis—“knowledge falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20).

Jung not only borrows heavily from, but has altogether adopted, the modern philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), which questions our ability to directly know the Absolute, in effect ignoring its presence within our innermost being. Indeed, Jung readily admits that his theoretical trajectory is unequivocally a “Kantian epistemology expressed in everyday psychological language”[[29]] and he claims that “I take my stand on Kant.”[[30]] Curiously, while doing so, he appears to have exceeded Kant’s epistemic limits.

Kant differentiates the noumenon (or the “thing in itself”)—which is transcendent and exists independently of the senses and is therefore inaccessible to them—from the phenomenon, the psycho-physical realm which can be apprehended empirically. This anti-metaphysical outlook deliberately ignores the immanent reality of the spiritual presence in being. Jung remarks: “It is unprofitable to speculate about things we cannot know. I therefore refrain from making assertions that go beyond the bounds of science.”[[31]] Contrary to his avowed approach, Jung often privileges his own way of knowing which clearly transgresses the very bounds he mentions:

The existence of a transcendental reality is indeed evident in itself…. That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental background is as certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that the direct perception of the archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully correct as that of the physical world outside us.[[32]]

Jungian epistemology falsely absolutizes the psychic realm, as, for example, when he speaks of “‘unconscious’ knowledge which I would prefer to call ‘absolute knowledge.’”[[33]] He also falsely equates spiritually metaphysical archetypes to images of the unconscious, thereby misconceiving the reality of absolute truth: “The ultimate truth concerning metaphysical things … means nothing more than that archetypal images have taken possession of our powers of thought and feeling, so that these lose their quality as functions at our disposal.”[[34]] Yet each of the spiritual traditions teaches the necessity of liberating knowledge: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

Kant failed to see that human beings (as taught by the great spiritual traditions of the world) participate in a transpersonal dimension able to know the essence of things in themselves. This has led, ever since, to a confusion between the ‘Intellect’ (a term which, in traditional metaphysics, refers to the faculty of spiritual discernment) and conventional reason. This influence on Jung is evident in his references to“mere intellect”[[35]] and in assertions such as “there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it.”[[36]]

Jung’s conflation of the horizontal and vertical dimensions becomes clear in the claim that “the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic.”[[37]]His privileging of the intermediary realm of the soul over the Spirit, to which it is subservient, is evident in his reference to “Man’s greatest instrument, his psyche.”[[38]] To understand why it is so difficult to decipher the terms that Jung uses, one needs to look no further than the following observation by him: “That threshold which separates two epochs [the premodern or traditional from the modern] plays the principal role. I mean by that threshold the theory of knowledge whose starting-point is Kant. On that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him.”[[39]] This shows precisely Jung’s deviation from the epistemological insights of ancient philosophy and the religious traditions of mankind on this crucial point.

The “eye of the heart” or the true Intellect, which Kant denies, is an immanent faculty of direct spiritual perception that can know Reality unmediated. According to the spiritual traditions, “the intellect ... can know all that is knowable.”[[40]] That the “heart-intellect” is the center of the human psyche is taught by Meister Eckhart (1260–1328): “There is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable ... [and] this is the intellect.”[[41]] Maimonides (1138–1204) recognizes the noetic faculty of the Intellect when he states: “God is the intellectus.”[[42]] Rūmī (1207–1273) also affirms that “the Universal Intellect is the founder of every thing.”[[43]] We recall the Prophet Muhammad’s words: “The first thing that God created was the Intellect” or “The first thing God created was the Spirit.” This conveys that the Intellect (‘Aql) and the Spirit (Rūḥ) refer ultimately to the same reality. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the Spirit or Intellect is known by the Sanskrit term Buddhi. With the traditional understanding of Intellect taken into consideration, we find in Jung a confused understanding of this transcendent faculty. He states: “The intellect does indeed do harm to the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit.”[[44]] Jung writes “Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing,”[[45]] yet he failed to see that without an understanding of the “eye of the heart,” our vision is occluded.

It becomes clear why Jung denies the existence of the Intellect as a faculty that apprehends spiritual reality. For him, the world’s religious traditions are “pre-Kantian,” and therefore (according to his logic) naïve and outmoded. He writes:

Let us take as an example the believing person…. He lives in the same world as me and appears to be a human being like me. But when I express doubts about the absolute validity of his statements, he expostulates that he is the happy possessor of a ‘receiver,’ an organ by means of which he can know or tune in the Transcendent. This information obliges me to reflect on myself and ask myself whether I also possess a like receiver which can make the Transcendent, i.e., something that transcends consciousness and is by definition unknowable, knowable. But I find in myself nothing of the sort. I find I am incapable of knowing the infinite and eternal or paradoxical; it is beyond my powers.[[46]]

Jung is quite right in this assessment. If he is relying on the epistemology of modern philosophy, that has divorced itself from first principles, then there is no way to know ultimate reality.

In denying the spiritual reality of the ‘self’, Jung cannot be defended as simply adopting an apophatic perspective of Divine unknowability (a via negativa, as opposed to a more positive “cataphatic” theological understanding), which is a mystical approach that attempts to realize the Divine by distinguishing it from all It is not. For example, the eighth-century sage Shankara points out: “Whenever we deny something unreal, we do so with reference to something real.”[[47]] These are metaphysical affirmations of the Absolute by acknowledging that its reality is not limited to the psychic realm. To the extent that Jung does indeed confine himself to such a limitation, his conclusions are flawed. The Absolute can be apprehended in myriad ways, not limited to the psychic phenomena by which we can know transcendent reality with certitude, and the saints and sages of the past have attested to this.

Another important key to understanding Jung’s epistemology is the role of his psychic intermediary, Philemon. We are told that it was the Biblical Prophet Elijah who transformed into Philemon, an inner guide who would teach Jung about the mysteries of the unconscious. Jung describes Philemon as a “pagan [who] brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.”[[48]] Jung divulges the inspiration underlying his entire psychology as “a movement of the spirit which took possession of me and which I have had the privilege of serving all my life.”[[49]]

The encounter taught him about the psyche’s autonomy for “Philemon and the other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.”[[50]] Jung adds, “It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.”[[51]] Philemon became Jung’s psychagogue as he indicates: “Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight … to me he was ... a guru.”[[52]]

Jung makes a stunning admission about one of the most important currents of modern Western psychology; initially, this was only known to his inner circle and not made public until many years after his death in the Red Book. It is worth mentioning that the actual title of the Red Book is Liber Novus, from the Latin meaning “The New Book” which intentionally aligns with the title of the biblical New Testament. In the same way that this canonical text did for its time, Jung imagined that his Liber Novus would bring a new message—dare we say revelation—to the modern world. This work was written between 1914 and 1930, and only published in 2009 with the permission of his family. Jung here pronounces, for the first time, the source of his analytic psychology:

The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.[[53]]

Jung gives us an important clue about his role in the Red Book: “The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.”[[54]] Jung differentiates what he terms the “spirit of the time” from the “spirit of the depths.” The first is concerned with the world as it appears in the present, and Jung admits to being influenced by this until he realized its inadequacy. Following this, Jung was then drawn to give voice to the “spirit of the depths,” which he describes as possessing “from time immemorial and for all the future ... a greater power than the spirit of this time.”[[55]] Jung tells us that this line of inquiry “took away my belief in science.”[[56]] However, it is only through sacred tradition that we can reconcile the temporal with the Eternal. While we must live through the times in which we find ourselves, it is by means of the timeless wisdom disclosed in humanity’s religious traditions that true wholeness can be realized.

The Rise of Psychology in Times of Spiritual Crisis

At the heart of the modern world’s spiritual crisis are the errors of the Enlightenment project, which brought about the reductionist and desacralized worldview of the present day. The secular Weltanschauung that ensued affected all contemporary life, including the religions themselves. Jung, like many others, could see the spiritual malaise from the vacuum left by modernism and asserted that people today were largely incapable of believing in God (unlike in earlier eras) because they now relied on ways of knowing based, for the most part, on reason and empirical verification. He declared: “Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself”[[57]] as “modern man … turns his attention to the psyche … without reference to any traditional creed.”[[58]] Jung went on to explain why the modern mind has turned its back on the spiritual traditions and their integrative ways of knowing: “Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know—to experience for himself.”[[59]]

Jung declared that “the mass man of today … is … post-Christian,”[[60]] and that, while human beings were unable to maintain belief in a transcendent God, they nevertheless sought a direct experience of spiritual reality. But rather than situating the divine above the flux and impermanence of this world, in the Spirit, Jung placed it within the psyche, the ‘intermediary’ realm of the human soul, with all its chaotic vicissitudes.

The weakening of the faith, especially in the modern West, not only marginalized but obscured a deeper understanding of religion. What Jung appears to have overlooked is that each of the world’s great religions comprises both an outer and inner dimension; this is what ensures their proper health and integrity.

Jung deserves credit for criticizing the scientistic outlook of his time. He courageously declared: “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything that I cannot explain as a fraud.”[[61]] Early in his career, his captivating, yet controversial, lectures called “The Border Zones of Exact Science” (1896) and “Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Speculative Inquiry” (1898), challenged the materialistic assumptions of the discipline at that time.[[62]]He proclaimed that scientistic interpretations were a “bastard of a science.”[[63]]

At the time, this was a difficult position to hold in public, as theories that alluded to a reality that surpassed human reason and the empirical order were vigorously rejected by the developing discipline of psychology, which was struggling to establish itself as a bona fide science. Jung also recognized (as did Freud) the need to present psychology within a scientific framework in order to encourage its wider acceptance: “Today the voice of one crying in the wilderness must necessarily strike a scientific tone if the ear of the multitude is to be reached.”[[64]] We are better able to understand these pressures when Jung adds:

My temperamental empiricism has its reasons.... My audience then was a thoroughly materialistic crowd, and I would have defeated my own ends if I had set out with a definite creed or with definite metaphysical assertions. I was not and I did not want to be anything else but one of them.... [Therefore,] I have tried to accommodate myself to the psychiatric and medical mind.[[65]]

The weakening of the faith, especially in the modern West, not only marginalized but obscured a deeper understanding of religion. What Jung appears to have overlooked is that each of the world’s great religions comprises both an outer and inner dimension; this is what ensures their proper health and integrity. The weakening of religion in the modern world has contributed to the confusion which has brought about the notion, often heard today, of being “spiritual but not religious” (‘SBNR’, according to the new moniker). This, again, is to misunderstand what true religion is and to neglect the esoteric or mystical dimension that can only be fully accessed through the ‘protective’ forms of exoteric religion. Yet, despite certain shortcomings in Jung’s grasp of the religious phenomenon, we need to acknowledge his understanding of our need for the sacred, as for example in the following:

Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness—that is, of the unconscious. Man has always stood in need of the spiritual help which each individual’s own religion held out to him…. Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks for himself, but only by revelations of a wisdom greater than his own.[[66]]

Jung understood the far-reaching psychological consequences of modern man’s loss of faith on the scale that we find in the West today. He was the son of a Protestant minister who, in turn, also came from a family of clergy, which allowed him to perceive the vital role that religion plays in one’s life and the community. Jung’s attitude, in this regard, differed from Freud’s as he speculated that there was a spiritual impulse or what he called a “religious instinct”[[67]] within everyone. Freud’s extreme contempt for religion—which he considered akin to mental illness—can be seen in such remarks as: “Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.”[[68]]

Yet Jung also held some unfavorable views about religion, believing they required a “submission to the irrational facts of experience.”[[69]] Although his assessment was undoubtedly more positive than Freud’s, he himself did not belong to a particular faith. It appears that Jung, being of a largely rationalistic bent, saw himself as being beyond religion. He identified Freud as the dismantler of tradition and asked: “How fares it with men and women who have been uprooted and torn out of their tradition?”[[70]] Yet Jung, too, was very much aware of his own anti-traditional mission in this regard.

Like Freud, Jung asserted that only religion could fulfill the human need for the sacred. In a most revealing letter to Freud from 1910, he writes: “Religion can be replaced only by religion.”[[71]] Although he was ultimately persuaded, Freud initially appeared to be uncomfortable and put off by Jung’s ‘religious’ zealotry: “But you mustn’t regard me as the founder of a religion. My intentions are not so far-reaching.... I am not thinking of a substitute for religion; this need must be sublimated.”[[72]]

Unlike Freud, Jung is often thought to be sympathetic to the religious perspective; yet, no less than Freud, he promoted modern psychology as a secular pseudo-religion. Many commentators have noted this. Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) observed: “[Jungian] psychology is virtually a new religion.”[[73]] Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) reported to the Swiss physician Alphonse Maeder (1882–1971) that, in America, Jung had declared: “ΨA [psychoanalysis] is not a science but a religion.”[[74]] We recall the insightful comment by Martin Buber (1878–1965) that Jung was erecting a new “religion of pure psychic immanence.”[[75]] Jung himself stated: “Man’s relation to God ... has to undergo a certain important change: Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king [a transcendent God] ... the ... fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship.”[[76]] 

While Freud exemplifies anti-tradition, Jung represents counter-religion as a means to supplant all revealed spiritual traditions. Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) noted the following in a trenchant summary:

People generally see in Jungism, as compared with Freudism, a step towards reconciliation with the traditional spiritualities, but this is in no wise the case. From this point of view, the only difference is that, whereas Freud boasted of being an irreconcilable enemy of religion, Jung sympathizes with it while emptying it of its contents, which he replaces by collective psychism, that is to say by something infra-intellectual and therefore anti-spiritual.[[77]]

With the gradual debasement of religion in the post-Enlightenment world, Jung saw that human beings required religion, and that this was the unique predicament of those living in the modern world. But Jung was arguably even more eager than Freud to promote modern psychology to usurp the place of religion:

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for ΨA [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centres to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.[[78]]

If true religion could be replaced with psychology, then psychology could be made to perform what was once the function of religion. Jung saw that “The religious point of view always expresses and formulates the essential psychological attitude and its specific prejudices.”[[79]]

The marginalization of faith in the modern world has given rise to the notion of psychological man (homo psychologicus). Jung explained this development as follows:

The modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his mediæval brother.... Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life.... This “psychological” interest of the present time shows that man expects something from psychic life which he has not received from the outer world: something which our religions, doubtless, ought to contain, but no longer do contain—at least for the modern man. The various forms of religion no longer appear to the modern man to come from within—to be expressions of his own psychic life; for him they are to be classed with the things of the outer world. He is vouchsafed no revelation of a spirit that is not of this world; but he tries on a number of religions and convictions as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes.[[80]] 

The contemporary world relegated myth to the realm of fiction, as only what could be known by reason and empirical investigation was believed to truly exist. In its defense, Jung asserted that “myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again.”[[81]] Yet we need to tread with caution here because, for Jung, what is continually repeated and observable pertains to the psychic realm and not the metaphysical. He even went as far as to equate myth with the spiritual order: “No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God.”[[82]]

Jung confuses matters when referring to “God,” because he evidently does so to indicate a product of the human psyche, rather than to affirm the reality of the Spirit. He therefore called for a new myth (or rather a “counter-myth”) but this, again, is to misunderstand the true meaning of the term “myth” as a metaphysical (rather than psychological) archetype. Coomaraswamy explains: “The Myth [is] the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true now, ever and everywhere.... Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.”[[83]] The limits of modern science and its secular psychology are plain to see in their failure to grasp the full symbolic significance of myths. Frithjof Schuon states:

Modern science … can neither add nor subtract anything in respect of the total truth or of mythological or other symbolism or in respect of the principles and experiences of the spiritual life…. We cannot be too wary of all these attempts to reduce the values vehicled by tradition to the level of phenomena supposed to be scientifically controllable. The spirit escapes the hold of profane science in an absolute fashion.[[84]]

The Jungian approach makes use of diverse symbolism, more so than arguably any other form of modern psychology. Thus Jung observes, “we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul.”[[85]] The problem he fails to focus on is that the human psyche is incapable of independent awareness, though it might delude itself that it is. This is the pathology of the psyche’s occluding tendency to usurp the role of the Spirit which is the true source of its illumination. From a traditional viewpoint of the hierarchy of Spirit-psyche-body, the psyche cannot even discern the intermediary realm of its own being, the soul, on its own, for it requires access to the spiritual realm in order to attain self-knowledge, to be properly guided, and to ultimately heal itself. The higher realm of the Real can only be known symbolically by the intermediary. We recall the discerning words of René Guénon (1886–1951): “symbolism … can only be linked to the ‘superconscious,’”[[86]] meaning that the origin of the symbolic order is to be found in the spiritual realm; the latter is assuredly not the subject of psychopathology. Seyyed Hossein Nasr elaborates on the transpersonal nature of symbolism and its connection to archetypes:

Symbols are ontological aspects of a thing … as real as the thing itself, and in fact that which bestows significance upon a thing within the universal order of existence … symbols reflect in the formal order archetypes belonging to the principial realm … through symbols the symbolized is unified with its archetypal reality.[[87]]

Without the principial order illumining the psyche through the archetypes, the true function of symbolism is misunderstood, and the connection between appearances and their essences is obscured. This is a fundamental problem that analytic psychology ignores. Jung’s error on this point is evidenced in this statement which shows his conflation of the archetypes with simply mental processes: “The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form.”[[88]] It is no surprise then that Jung’s ‘psychotherapy’ ranges no further than addressing those processes.

Jung suggests that “every psychological theory [is] in the first instance ... subjective confession.”[[89]] He also draws on parallels between this and contemporary psychotherapy:

The first beginnings of all analytical treatment are to be found in its prototype, the confessional. Since, however, the two practices have no direct causal connection, but rather grow from a common psychic root, it is difficult for an outsider to see at once the relation between the groundwork of psychoanalysis and the religious institution of the confessional.[[90]]

He continues:

The confession of her sinful thoughts may have given considerable relief to the patient. But it seems unlikely that the cure can be ascribed entirely to their verbal expression or to the “abreaction.” Pathological ideas can be definitely submerged only by a strong effort. People with obsessions and compulsions are weak; they are unable to keep their ideas in check. Treatment to increase their energy is therefore best for them. The best energy-cure, however, is to force the patients, with a certain ruthlessness, to unearth and expose to the light the images that consciousness finds intolerable. Not only is this a severe challenge for the patient’s energy but also his consciousness begins to accept the existence of ideas hitherto repressed.[[91]]

The ‘religious’ (in effect, pseudo-religious) function of Jungian psychology is noted by American clinical psychologist and historian of medicine Richard Noll:

For literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals in our culture, Jung and his ideas are the basis of a personal religion that either supplants their participation in traditional organized Judaeo-Christian religion or accompanies it. For this latter group especially, the Jungian experience, as it is promoted by its specialized caste of analysts, holds out the promise of mystery and the direct experience of the transcendent that they do not experience in any church or synagogue.[[92]]

The emergence of modern psychology was, wittingly or not, a clear attack on the ethical norms of traditional religions. Jung explicitly tells us that “Psychoanalysis stands outside traditional morality.”[[93]] Jung was aware of this dilemma and attributed the decline of morality due to the loss of a sense of the sacred: “Man … feels in his heart the instability of present-day morality, no longer supported by living religious conviction. Here is the source of most of our ethical conflicts. The urge to freedom beats upon the weakening barriers of morality.”[[94]] Ironically, it was Jung’s own inability to link his theory to the traditional foundations of religion that was contributing to this malaise.

Jung’s description of neurosis, in the form of nervous disorders, appears as a psychological reworking of the doctrine of sin, but without explaining the ontological error of sin;[[95]] he writes that neuroses “consist primarily in an alienation from one’s instincts, a splitting off of consciousness from certain basic facts of the psyche.”[[96]] Though Jung can state, “Modern man lives in sin”,[[97]] he fails to attribute sin to the loss of the sense of the sacred. The deviation that is the modern world exists because of the desacralized outlook that dominates our epoch. Jung instead claims that “sin has … become something quite relative: what is evil for the one, is good for the other.”[[98]]

Jung’s thought was itself a deviation from traditional metaphysics. He argued that sacred tradition was just another means to manipulate people, and he denied its connection to transcendent principles: “The hypnotic power of tradition still holds us in thrall, and out of cowardice and thoughtlessness the herd goes trudging along the same old path.”[[99]] It hardly needs to be said that the opposite, in fact, is true. Jung failed to see that the sacred tradition is linked to the metaphysical order, and is not a man-made phenomenon. By absolutizing the human psyche, Jung relativized its subjectivity, thereby undermining the Spirit, the transcendent reality at the heart of all religions. As Sherrard noted, Jung did indeed

...wish to undermine the traditional basis of religious dogma, as well as of all theological thought of the traditional kind…. So long as the great structure of Christian doctrine and dogma, regarded as sacred and inviolate, stood in the way, his own ideas could make little progress. But if he could show that this structure shared in all the necessary limitations of human thought as he conceived them and was in fact essentially subjective and relative and psychic, its authority would be shaken.[[100]]

Jung repeatedly denied charges that he was aiming to set up his own religion (or counter-religion) to replace sacred tradition. Yet, if we read between the lines, we can see that he clearly was. Due to the scientistic outlook of his day, and his need to appear as “a man of science,” he was inclined to downplay a “religious” agenda. He writes:

If you have formed the peculiar notion that I am proclaiming a religion, this is due to your ignorance of psychotherapeutic methods. When for instance the heart no longer functions as it has always functioned, it is sick, and the same goes for the psyche, whose functioning depends on archetypes (instincts, patterns of behaviour, etc.). The doctor sees to it that the heart gets into its old rhythm again, and the psychotherapist must restore the “original pattern,” the original ways in which the psyche reacts. This is done, today as several thousand years ago, through the “anamnesis” of the archetype. I can’t help it that religions also work with archetypes.[[101]]

For Jung, the “original pattern” was not linked to the self-awareness of the transpersonal Intellect (as in the case of Platonic “anamnesis”) but to the psyche. On various occasions, he makes statements such as this: “I make no metaphysical assertions. My standpoint is purely empirical and deals with the psychology of such assertions.”[[102]] At the same time, he asserts the opposite: “There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science.”[[103]]As this essay aims to show, Jung’s claim to be merely a psychologist or empiricist is far from being entirely accurate.

Not only did Jung acknowledge the therapeutic value of religion, he also spoke of “the great psychotherapeutic systems which we know as the religions.”[[104]] He asks, “What are we doing, we psychotherapists?”[[105]] and responds, “We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.”[[106]] He adds, “Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy.”[[107]]

Although psychotherapy has a therapeutic value, its real worth can be seen only when we discern a connection to that which is higher than the discipline itself. Again, it is the spiritual dimension alone that can properly restore the human soul to health. The danger lies in the reduction of religion to the psychic realm; an aberration found not only in Jung, but throughout modern psychology.

Even though Jung rightly criticized Freud for pathologizing the sacred, he is evidently guilty of the same charge. In the following passage, Jung elaborates on his understanding of a “psychological” religion that is specifically addressed to those who have defected from their own faith traditions:

I am not ... addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is always the better way. 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.[[108]]

Regarding Jung’s relationship with the Christian tradition, it may surprise readers to know that, while he might at times appear a defender of religion, he also said to a disciple who had converted to Catholicism: “With me, nobody has his place who is in the Church. I am for those people who are out of the Church.”[[109]] Jung’s attacks on religion, like Freud’s, served to undermine traditional Catholicism during the 20th century. Remarking on Jung’s role in this regard, Charles Upton writes: 

Jung was exerting a powerful and destructive influence upon the Catholic Church which—having been all but abolished in its traditional form by the Second Vatican Council—was groping for some way to relate to its own rich mythopoetic heritage, so much so that Jungian psychology almost replaced the Church Fathers as the golden key to scriptural exegesis for Novus Ordo Catholics.[[110]]

Jung considered psychologically therapeutic “consciousness” as sufficient to replace the morality of the world’s faith traditions. For him, salvation is only possible for those who participate in the secular pseudo-religion of his psychology:

If we are conscious, morality no longer exists. If we are not conscious, we are still slaves, and we are accursed if we obey not the law. He [Jung] said that if we belong to the secret church, then we belong, and we need not worry about it, but can go our own way. If we do not belong, no amount of teaching or organization can bring us there.[[111]]

This may sound perplexing to those outside Jung’s inner circle, but it illustrates how his counter-tradition began to form. Jung saw analytical psychology as “the way to the religious experience that makes us whole. It is not this experience itself, nor does it bring it about.”[[112]] Again, here is Jung acknowledging that psychology can be put in the service of religion, which—while undoubtedly true—is a claim he then undermines when, elsewhere, he marginalizes the spiritual dimension in human life.  

The Sacred and Psychopathology

Jung recognized the destructive impacts of scientism, as in the following statement: “As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized.”[[113]] Jung in fact contributed to that dehumanization. While he distinguished his contribution from that of his predecessor, Freud, by claiming that “the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous”[[114]], in fact he too conflated spiritual and psychopathologies.The following statement by Jung, reminiscent of his one-time master, makes more sense when situated in a traditional context:“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient.”[[115]] Jung correctly recognized that the decline of the sacred had given rise to an increase in mental illness:

[S]ide by side with the decline of religious life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent…. We are living undeniably in a period of the greatest restlessness, nervous tension, confusion and disorientation of outlook…. [M]odern man has an ineradicable aversion for traditional opinions and inherited truths … religious truths have somehow or other grown empty.[[116]]

He adds: “Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person.”[[117]] Jung connects the individual neurosis to collective psychopathology:

We always find in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great problems of society. Hence, when the analysis is pushed to this point, the apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch. Neurosis is thus nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem…[[118]]

Despite making the link between mental illness and the loss of the sense of the sacred in the modern world, Jung simply pursued psychological solutions to those illnesses. Arguably, it is the modern world’s spiritual vacuum that catalyzes mental health problems, as he notes: “A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not discovered what life means for him.”[[119]] But for Jung, his treatment of this spiritual malaise is through addressing the psyche. He makes the following observation about the nature of psychopathology: “The neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems”[[120]]and therefore “the … goal of the analysis … is to reach a state where the unconscious contents no longer remain unconscious.”[[121]]

Jung’s failure to address spiritual needs at their level is a major error.

Jung does not advocate a recovery of the sacred as a response to the rise in mental illness; rather, he promotes “salvation” through his own form of analytical psychology: “The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations.”[[122]]

Jung’s failure to address spiritual needs at their level is a major error. In the case of mental illness, we need to acknowledge its possible origin in the patient’s spiritual pathology, that a profound mystery may be veiling itself in the guise of “madness.” It would be an overstatement to suggest that such malady is always a spiritual problem that can be cured through religion; but, it is important to consider that the loss of the sacred in the modern world (with all its deleterious ramifications) is inseparable from this enigma and that the loss of a spiritual “norm” is an aspect of the individual pathology of mental abnormality.

Prophet of the Underworld

Jung expressly disavowed a prophetic function, stating, “I do not wish to pass myself off as a prophet”[[123]] and he also publicly emphasized that he was against “false hero worship.”[[124]] However, both he and Freud clearly intended to assume such a role. Both considered themselves to be prophets and were certainly viewed as such by their closest disciples. Austrian-born psychiatrist A.A. Brill (1874–1948), who was an early evangelizer of the Freudian gospel of psychoanalysis in America, informs us that Freud and Jung were (sacrilegiously) referred to, respectively, as “Allah and his Prophet.”[[125]] Helen Walker Puner (1915–1989) relates the following:

Freud had persuaded himself that in Jung he had found the ideal temporal head of his new religion. If Jung would run the secular affairs of the church—take over the external organization and the regulation of psychoanalysis—then he, Freud, could concern himself exclusively with that which was nearest to his heart, the formulation of the dogma.[[126]]

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) observed about Jung that “He has supplied a parody of Christianity, stopping short at his own ‘Christification.’”[[127]] In fact, Jung tells us that “prophets, appear ... to give a new revelation, to give birth to a new truth,”[[128]] before finally admitting that “I thus became a prophet, since I had found pleasure in the primordial.”[[129]]

Austrian-born psychiatrist A.A. Brill (1874–1948), who was an early evangelizer of the Freudian gospel of psychoanalysis in America, informs us that Freud and Jung were (sacrilegiously) referred to, respectively, as “Allah and his Prophet.”

Jung was known to say that he was but a mere psychologist, and that he assiduously avoided the direct discussion of metaphysical or religious questions. Yet in a famous interview with English journalist Frederick Sands, Jung unabashedly declared his personal conviction in God: “All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists.”[[130]] In a 1959 BBC TV interview, John Freeman asked Jung (who was eighty-four at the time) if he believed in God. Jung replied: “Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe.”[[131]]

But if he was convinced of God, equally, he saw his own role as His prophet. Jung believed that he had received a gift which confirmed his prophetic calling, when writing of the “immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church.”[[132]] In a private conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, Jung is reported to have admitted that, for years, he kept to himself the “secret knowledge” of his prophetic mission, before making it public:

Before my illness [in 1944] I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect.[[133]]