In depth psychology, the Self is the regulating center of the psyche as opposed to the ego which is the center of consciousness. The Self is also “the central archetype or archetype of wholeness.” [1] There are many themes and images that refer to the Self: wholeness, union of opposites, the world navel, the transformation of energy, &c. The Self is “the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God. Indeed, the richest sources for the phenomenological study of the Self are in the innumerable representations that man has made of the deity.” [2]
The question is: Is the Self equal to God, thereby placing God inside man’s psyche, or is there a God outside of man’s psyche of which the Self is a symbol or reflection? I shall look at how Jung and several Jungian analysts answer this question.
Jung’s answer is the former but with a qualification. “What one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply the effect of the prejudice that God is outside man. … It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should take my observations as a kind of proof of the existence of God. They probe only the existence of an archetypal God-image, which to my mind is the most we can assert about God psychologically.” [3] In other words: “[T]he [S]elf cannot be distinguished from an archetypal God-image” [4]
Edward F. Edinger agrees but with a slightly different argument: “According to the psychological standpoint man cannot get outside his own psyche. All experience is therefore psychic experience. This means that it is impossible, experientially, to distinguish between God and the God-image in the psyche. My use of the term ‘God’ in this chapter, therefore, always refers to the God-image in the psyche, i.e., the Self.” [5]
Lionel Corbett is also inconclusive: “[N]uminous experience arises from an autonomous level of the psyche that is either the source of, or the medium for, the transmission of religious experience: empirically we cannot say which.” [6]
John Dourely [7], however, taking up Corbett’s argument, does come to a conclusion. In a nutshell, his argument is the following: a) If the psyche is the source of the religious experience then there is no need for a God outside the psyche. b) If the psyche is the medium of the religious experience then the question is, given a God outside the psyche, why would this God resort to “such an ambivalent medium as the unconscious to make his presence and project known to humanity.” [p. 46] If God creates the unconscious as a mediator, Occam’s razor would surely do away with this superfluous entity in favor of the conclusion that the unconscious is the source. “The option for the unconscious as the source of the numinous would lead to the sparse yet organic conception of a wholly intrapsychic transcendence, one that would affirm that the unconscious infinitely transcends ego consciousness but that nothing transcends the total psyche.” [p. 46]
Ann Ulanov [8] urges caution with these lines of arguments but does so presupposing a God that transcends the psyche. “The fear that meets a psychological approach to theological symbols is that we thereby reduce them to psychological factors. God the Father really comes down to our oedipal complex, writ large. … We talk of ego relating to Self instead of soul to God. God, who transcends creatures and all creation, shrinks to a factor in the human consciousness. The Self may transcend the ego, but does it transcend the psyche?” [p. 63] The upshot of Ulanov’s argument seems to be a hesitation in equating the Self with God because the Self may not transcend the psyche but God certainly does. Furthermore, Edinger’s approach, says Ulanov, of removing the religious traditions from the symbols and looking at them psychologically without the need for doctrines and the religious community leads to a “lonely journey and one in danger of intellectualizing.” [p. 63] Ulanov’s answer also seems to be inconclusive in that she suggests we “look into our own God complex and discern its roots in personal biography, in collective containers, and in core archetypal imagery. Then, and only then, do we come face to face with the big questions, such as: Does this power to create and find images for the center of reality exist within us, or outside us, or both?” [p. 64] However, Ulanov seems to answer this question as she describes the Self’s role as imago Dei and collector of all parts of the psyche, the ego included, into dialogue. In this role, images of the Self “carry into consciousness the Deus absconditus, the God hidden in the unconscious.” [p. 66] God is, therefore, within us. But she also says, “God reaches us through the psyche, that it, too, is part of the flesh in which the Holy incarnates, manifests.” [p. 66] The implication here is that God is also outside us and incarnates within our psyche — were God totally within, there would be no need to incarnate in our psyche as he is already there.
Personally, and at the present moment, what makes sense to me is the approach of Jung/Edinger/Dourley in that I am not positing a God outside the psyche.
I am not, however, 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. It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material. [9]
Perhaps I have not yet come to the point of asking the “big questions” Ulanov proposes and at that point I may well find that God is outside the psyche as well as within. But, for now, I am exactly as Jung describes: I am not a “happy possessor of faith” and, to me, the God of my youth is dead. The journey I have embarked upon — albeit of no choice of my own — is, indeed, a lonely one as Ulanov suggests, and there is great danger in intellectualizing. The key, I think, is to retain the “experience of psychological archetypes” as the counterbalance to the intellectualizing and to maintain a grounding with another person who can understand the journey as the counterbalance to the danger of becoming identified with the archetypal energies.
References:
[1] Edinger, E.F., Ego and Archetype, p. 3.
[2] Edinger, E.F., Ego and Archetype, p. 4.
[3] Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 100, 102.
[4] Jung, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, CW 11, par. 238.
[5] Edinger, E.F., The Creation of Consciousness, p. 91.
[6] Corbett, Lionel, The religious function of the psyche, p. 8.
[7] Dourley, John, “Jung and the Recall of the Gods,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, vol. 8 no. 1 (2006) pp. 43-53.
[8] Ulanov, Ann, “Theology after Jung,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, vol. 8 no. 1 (2006) pp. 61-68.
[9] Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 148.
Our Father
I’ve been motivated to look at The Lord’s Prayer in some depth. We never (or rarely) recited this prayer in the church I grew up in and, for the most part, these were just verses that I memorized at one point. There was not a lot of significance attached to them. But, as I approach Christianity anew, after several decades of separation from it, and under the influence of Jungian Depth Psychology, something is drawing me to rethink this model prayer which Jesus has given us.
I want to start with the first two words: “Our Father.”
This signifies a change in the human psyche and how we approach and relate to God. The Old Testament was the story of our infant years where God was a (seemingly) capricious, loving/hating being out there somewhere, up there in the sky somewhere. Starting with Jesus, we now relate to God as child and, sometimes, like a teenager. We have a more conscious relationship with him and he treats us less arbitrarily (at least it seems like that to us).
Consider an infant who is crying because she is hungry and her father is offering a bottle but she really wants her mother’s breast. The infant is confused and hurt that she’s not getting what she wants and her father must seem so cruel. At other times, the father puts her in her mother’s arms and she gets exactly what she wants. There is no rhyme nor reason to this. Why does her father not always give her to her mother when she cries out of hunger? Why does he sometimes (seemingly) punish her by only offering that wretched bottle? The issue is that she has no other way of relating because she does not have enough consciousness.
Now, skip ahead to a 4 or 14 year old. Now, the child can address his father as “Father” and ask for exactly what he wants. The child is capable of understanding, in some cases, why the father gives what he does. With the child’s increased consciousness, the father’s actions seem less arbitrary. And this is where Jesus was taking us. He was showing that we have an increased consciousness and, therefore, can relate to God in a different way.
What this two-word phrase also identifies is our relation to God in an essential way. That is, by calling God “Father” we are acknowledging that we are of the same essence. My daughter has my genes and is made up of the same things that I am. We have matching DNA. Our basic reality or essence is the same. In the Old Testament, or as an infant, we do not recognize this. We cannot grasp the idea that this great, powerful being who gives us what he wants to give and not what we want to receive is of the same stuff as we are. But with increased consciousness comes increased awareness of what we are and what he is. We can recognize the imago Dei, the “in our likeness” that is within us from God. “Our Father” is not only said out of respect or out of love. It is also said out of identification — we are of the same essence as God. We share the same DNA.
A local church has a quote from Hafiz on their sign: “Little by little you will turn into God.” We do turn into our fathers. How many times have I done something or said something or caught a glimpse of myself and thought, “My God! My father does that! I’m turning into my father.” And this is the case with God, our Father. But it’s also the reality that we already are our father. Our DNA tells us that from the moment of conception. What appears to be a “turning into” is really nothing more than a “realizing that we already are.”