C.G. Jung
Introduction:
I. We know that during all his productive years Jung made considerable efforts to interpret correctly and draw the right conclusions from the experience of his patients. We also know that he did the same with his own experiences. We know as well that he tried to integrate the conclusions of these experiences into his psychological theory.
II. We know that his entire life and work with patients was marked by one of the most basic human issues, faith. We also know – as far as it is possible – about his findings dealing with faith in his practical and theoretical work.
III. From his method of forming theory, we suppose that he did not work according to the mainstream division of different branches of human and natural sciences, which were widely accepted in the 20th century. During the last part of his life, he made considerable efforts to bring religion, psychology and physics closer together. He not only tried to bridge these different fields of human knowledge, but actually made himself the bridge.
Jung had the valuable capacity to learn from and internalize his own experiences.
As a child he witnessed the lost of faith of his father, a protestant minister, who kept practicing his religious profession. This resulted in his rejection of institutionalized Christian religious practices, yet he did not suppress his own religious quest, which was prominent from an early age.
Jung and Hinduism:
Jung studied holy Indian scriptures extensively long before he went to India in 1938.
During his private practice Jung realized, that there were certain patients, whose problems - even if manifested on a very personal level – were connected to spiritual needs and shortcomings. He realized that the way to solve these problems was through the development of the “Self” and integrating this “Self” into conscious life.
“In analysis, the supra-personal process can begin only when all the personal life has been assimilated to consciousness.” (Kundalini, p. 66).
About developing the term “Self”, he says:
“I have chosen the term ‘Self’ to designate the totality of man, the sum total of his conscious and unconscious contents. I have chosen this term in accordance with Eastern philosophy, which for centuries has occupied itself with the problems that arise when even the gods cease to incarnate. The philosophy of the Upanishads corresponds to a psychology that long ago recognized the relativity of the gods. This is not to be confused with a stupid error like atheism.” (Psychology and Religion: The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, Vol. 11) For a healthy human existence he found – through the process of individuation – the discovery and the development of Self indispensable.
This “Self” he very clearly distinguished from the Ego, and all of its functions. Within the concept of “Self”, Jung maintains a personal as well as an impersonal aspect of God.
He had already established a personal connection before the Second World War. In private Jung was open about his own religious certainty. In 1937 he confidentially told Brunton that he was a “mystic”, but that he could not acknowledge this because he had to protect his scientific reputation. (Paul Brunton wrote the Search in Secret India, with a foreword by Jung and made “The Way to the Self” by Ramana Maharshi available to the Western public in 1944).
At the very end of his life Jung was no longer concerned with protecting his reputation, and he became clear about his religious identity.
In 1959 he gave a short answer to the question from a BBC interviewer whether he believed in God. “I do not need to believe in God; I know.”
I did not say in the broadcast, “There is a God.” I said “I do not need to believe in God; I know.” Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Yahweh, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather: I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call ‘God’ in consensu omnium [consensus of everyone] “quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur. (What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all.)”
I remember Him, I evoke Him, whenever I use His name overcome by anger or by fear, whenever I involuntarily say: “Oh God!”
That happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself. It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychical system subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. This is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. In accordance with tradition I call the power of fate in this positive as well as negative aspect, and inasmuch as its origin is beyond my control, ‘god’, a ‘personal god’, since my fate means very much myself, particularly when it approaches me in the form of conscience as a vox Dei, with which I can even converse and argue. (We do and, at the same time, we know that we do. One is subject as well as object.)
Yet I should consider it an intellectual immorality to indulge in the belief that my view of a god is the universal, metaphysical Being of the confessions or ‘philosophies’. I do neither commit the impertinence of a hypostasis, nor of an arrogant qualification such as: ‘God can only be good.’
Only my experience can be good or evil, but I know that the superior will is based upon a foundation which transcends human imagination. Since I know of my collision with a superior will in my own psychical system, I know of God, and if I should venture the illegitimate hypostasis of my image, I would say, of a God beyond good and evil, just as much dwelling in myself as everywhere else: Deus est circulus cuius centrum est ubique, cuis circumferentia vero nusquam. [God is a circle whose center is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere] Yours, etc.,Carl Gustav Jung.”
His constant searching, inquiring and working led him to learn from Eastern philosophies as well, and he made these known to the Western world. It was not merely a matter of being influenced and then introducing some classics, but rather, he synthesised Eastern philosophy into Western psychological theory. OIDA-therapy research has led us to see how great thinkers like C.G. Jung opened up to the need of faith. How we all love to believe in that which helps us all. That is the truth. That is love. That is after all the most believable.
The need of spirituality for human health and the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous:
Although Jung only at the very end of his life, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and in the above mentioned article, gave a clear account of his spirituality, in his therapeutical practice he often proposed spirituality as an answer, for otherwise incurable conditions. (In order to propose spiritual enquiry to a patient and to guide this process, - even according to the psychoanalytical methodology – one had to already find a solid place of spirituality in one’s own life as well.)
Such was the case with an American alcoholic, Rowland
H. He went to Jung to be treated for his alcoholism, but after a period of therapy, there was no significant progress. Jung told him that his near hopeless alcoholic condition could only possibly be remedied, if he sought some spiritual experience. Rowland H., desperate enough after his return to North America, joined a Christian community, the so-called Oxford group. The group advocated finding God through spiritual surrender, moral inventory, confession of defects, elimination of sins, restitution, reliance upon God, and helping others.
Being a member of the Oxford group helped him significantly. He told other alcoholics about the importance of spirituality and passed on Jung’s advice.
Among the people with whom he shared Jung’s advice was Bill Wilson, one of two people, who not very much later, founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill understood the message clearly, but admitted that he was struggling with the concept of God. His friend replied to him: “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”
“That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last,” Bill realized.
(According to our view, our own conception of God is basically a surrender to a personal aspect of God. This idea is also found in the second of twelve AA tradititions: “For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God, as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.”)
After his spiritual experience, he never drank again, but at the same time he realized that he could remain sober more easily if he shared his experiences with others. Thus Alcoholics Anonymous was founded.
The complete twelve step program and the „Big Book” was developed in 1938.
(You can find our practical commentary on the 12 Steps in section: 8.1.4.)
Jung gave the advice to find spirituality in one’s life to others as well. As we saw earlier, Jung considered the lack of the development of the Self, manifested at a psychological level. to be one of the major causes of human problems.
“During the last 35 years plenty of people have consulted me from all the civilized countries of the earth. I have treated hundreds of patients, the majority of which are Protestants; a small quantity of Jews, and no more than 5 or 6 believing Catholics. Between all these patients who were in their second part of their lives (they were already 35 years old), there was not one whose problem in the last instance wasn’t to encounter a religious perspective on their lives. You can affirm with certainty that all of them became sick because they had lost what the living religions of any time give to their faithful, and none of them were cured really without recovering the religious perspective.”
(C.G. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 10) “The individual who is not connected with God cannot offer resistance on his own accord to the physical and moral praises of this world. Therefore we need the proof of the transcendental inner experience, the only one which can protect us from being submerged in the mass, which otherwise would be inevitable. The solely intellectual and even moral understanding that tries to keep us foolish, and the irresponsible morals of the masses, are a negative recognition, and it won’t take us farther than to an oscillation on the path to the atomization of the individual. The lack of orienting force over religious conviction is simply rational.” (Collected Works, vol. 10, p. 493.)