Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), founder of analytical psychology, wrote voluminously, 18 volumes of Collected Works and secondary commentary. Jung was a highly influential figure. He was a psychiatrist who became a psychotherapist. But he was also a cultural commentator and quasi-mystic. His doctoral research involved investigating a medium, his maternal cousin, Hélène Preiswerk.
Jung was intensely interested in religions, both mainstream and esoteric. He was not interested, however, in their truth claims, but in their psychological value for helping people to live their lives. He especially focused on religious symbolism, as expressed in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Harvard researcher Richard Noll argued that Jung was a pagan who, as an individual, was of similar stature to the fourth century Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, with respect to the way he in which he significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored pagan religious traditions. Vivianne Crowley qualifies Noll’s thesis, reasoning tht because Jung himself drew on earlier esotericism and hermeticism, the foundation stones of contemporary Pagan belief and practice, Noll’s depiction of Jung’s influence is over-stated. However, there remains little doubt that Jung did have immense influence on the development of Wicca, Goddess spirituality and other contemporary Paganisms. Indeed, almost every major book about Wicca or Neo-Paganism cites or quotes Jung’s thought.
The grand-daughter of the famous psychologist, Alfred Adler, wrote:
“Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower, permit us to be more fully human.
At the root of Jung’s thought, as Dr. Peter Jones points out in an interview with Peter Hastie (Australian Presybterian, October 2009, 9), lies his normalization of the subconscious. For Jung it is the subconscious that constitutes the realm in which we are truly ourselves. Indeed, turning reality upside down, Jung maintained that the conscious is just a façade. Jung’s distorted view of reality involves the radical idea that the real “self” is in the subconscious where it is composed of both male and female. That is, as Jones argues, Jung represents the classic pagan worldview which repudiating creation, also repudiates the binary nature of the universe as God created it, including the repudiation of fundamental male-female distinctions. Jones comments:
It is not surprising that we are now discovering that people identify their sexuality on the basis of what they feel themselves to be. They find their identity in their subconscious self or whatever they imagine themselves to be, not in their created biology.
www.facetofaceintercultural.com.au
Posted November 19, 2009
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